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Comment by orourke | Hacker News Reader

What’s most fascinating to me is the certainly with which they believed that other worlds were inhabited. Horace Walpole, for example, even abandoning his faith over the theological difficulties it presented. Hundreds of years later, however, we’re left with the Fermi Paradox.

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>Hundreds of years later, however, we’re left with the Fermi Paradox.

The only paradox about the Fermi Paradox is why so many people who claim to be educated take it seriously.

Faster-than-light travel is impossible.

There aren't galaxy-spanning civilizations because creating a galaxy-spanning civilization is impossible. You cannot have a civilization where it takes 106,000 years for a message to traverse it.

If there are multi-stellar civilizations it is impossible to detect them at present. If humans lived on an earth-like planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, we would not be able to detect them at all, even with every single radio telescope on earth acting as a giant interferometer.

I assert that any intelligence that has mastered the mass-energy equivalence skills needed for interstellar travel (again, at slow-ass speeds) no longer cares about planets or biological life anyways. They would park off the ends of masses that are radiating energy and harvest it to turn into endless expanses of fantastical constructions that make planets look like jokes.

The Fermi Paradox doesn't demonstrate that other worlds aren't inhabited, just that our assumptions about infinite exponential growth and resource consumption and the inevitability of interstellar civilizations emerging as a function of intelligent life may not apply.

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