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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

It's not really a paradox, right? It's just a big equation and we're guessing at the variables.

We also have no reason to believe that we'd be able to detect other civilizations, even if there were millions out there. They might well be using other means of communication. Even if they were using the very thing we were looking for, it's still likely we would miss them - even if they were right next door to us. From SETI's FAQ[1]:

> If an extraterrestrial civilization has a SETI project similar to our own, could they detect signals from Earth?

> In general, no. Most earthly transmissions are too weak to be found by equipment similar to ours at the distance of even the nearest star. But there are some important exceptions. High-powered radars and the Arecibo broadcast of 1974 (which lasted for only three minutes) could be detected at distances of tens to hundreds of light-years with a setup similar to our best SETI experiments.

It always seemed odd to me that people call this a paradox.

[1] https://www.seti.org/faq#obs1

From the perspective I gathered through understanding a very beautiful unified theory (not my model) - this is exactly my point. EM waves as we use it are useless for long distance communications. I even doubt that those waves will still be detectable in a different solar system as the general assumptions that our vacuum is a very homogeneous is not true for me (the underlaying dimensions are for me, but not the vaccum as we know it). I have much more effects that cause disturbances of such waves. Inside a solar system, there are also better techniques that are more stable in propagation then our Hertz EM waves. But unfortunately, we adopted a form of Maxwell Equations that are not suitable to describe the phenomena (the original equations in quaternion math can however). Nicolas Tesla did a lot of research in this area, but it is not very well known/understood. (From the model I'm using 3 forms are derived. As far as I dug into Tesla, he worked with 1 form. The 3rd form is the interesting one but very hard to produce /detect.)

That would be the drake equation. The fermi paradox is just a philosophical question.

It is a paradox in the sense that most of the educated guesses result in a universe which is very different from the one we observe. The paradox exists between:

1. the admittedly weak evidence for each of the guesses

2. and the evidence that at least one of the guesses must be wrong.

Calling them "educated guesses" is overstating the evidence. We don't have the datapoints to estimate how common life is or isn't in the galaxy by empiricism, and we don't have the scientific knowledge to derive the numbers from first principles. Divorced from reality, that means that the educated guesses are really "we come up with numbers we want and then bullshit an explanation for those numbers."

Another perspective is that, as we've understood better how our EM radiation percolates for space, radioastronomy basically can't find anyone who isn't in our solar system (except maybe if they directly try to talk to us). That means that even our failure to find life via SETI isn't evidence of anything.

>the educated guesses are really "we come up with numbers we want and then bullshit an explanation for those numbers."

tomayto, tomahto. You won't get a strong defense of most of particular values for the drake equation from me. The question that remains is which of our guesses are wrong and why?

>Another perspective is that, as we've understood better how our EM radiation percolates for space, radioastronomy basically can't find anyone who isn't in our solar system (except maybe if they directly try to talk to us).

There are other aspects of the universe that don't agree with common assumptions about how it should appear if it were swarming with technological civilizations with a billion year head start on us. For instance we have yet to detect any stellar/galactic engineering. Then again I'm not particularly convinced by our assumptions about a billion year old technological civilizations.

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