Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

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The distances are so great and the duration + resources that it takes to cover that distance with high function and accuracy is so ridiculous, that it ends up being pointless to attempt it. Intelligent life expires long before it spreads widely.

The answer to Fermi is that there's no point to expanse, which culls the effort given enough time (the exploration effort is very expensive in exchange for rapidly diminishing returns for most civilizations). Intelligent life that makes it to our stage and beyond chooses to go inward long before it spreads super wide outward. There is vast, unlimited, easy, lower cost satisfaction inward (virtual space), there is nothing of great value outward at any reasonable cost of resources and time (humanity doesn't grasp this widely yet, it's still in the naive, neighborhood exploration stages). The only thing out there is disappointment, once you discover it's almost all low value repetition (extraordinarily vast repetition of very low value entities).

This entire theory seems to be based on only current technology.

Tell someone in the 1600s about the concept of cellphones and they would say it’s impossible to ever instantaneously communicate with someone around the world.

It’s so energy intensive with our current technology, which isn’t really an answer to fermi.

> Tell someone in the 1600s about the concept of cellphones and they would say it’s impossible to ever instantaneously communicate with someone around the world.

I don't know that they would.

In the 1600s, they'd just invented the printing press, so communication was already undergoing a fairly massive change. A book that once took a lifetime to copy could now be printed in three days.

From there, it's a short walk to "this book that used to take a lifetime to copy can now be printed more or less instantly." And from there, we can start laying the groundwork for what we would eventually call telecommunications.

Cell phones rely on technology that people in the 1600s hadn't discovered yet. Interstellar travel would require us to not only discover new technologies, but technologies that actively violate what seem to be pretty hard physical laws.

If the speed of light really is a universal maximum, and something like an Alcubierre warp drive isn't possible, leaving this solar system is vanishingly unlikely.

Aren’t you sort of proving the opposite?

You say that they saw books get printed faster, so they could conceive communication getting so fast it’s instant, despite their knowledge being limited to physical material.

By the same logic, couldn’t I say we have theorized wormholes and have already seen objects (like black holes) warp time and space? Therefore maybe we can warp space to travel, rather than literally needing to go faster than light?

I think it’s easier for us now to conceive the idea that one day we could make a wormhole than it is for people with no concept of radio waves to conceive the idea of a cellphone.

>Tell someone in the 1600s about the concept of cellphones and they would say it’s impossible to ever instantaneously communicate with someone around the world.

Plenty of empires (e.g. the Byzantines) had chains of fire signal towers (IIRC some had mirror signal towers). That's not instant, but it shrinks weeks of delay down to an hour, albeit with just half a bit of information. And the concept of going up a sufficiently tall mountain and being able to see a signal on the other side of the world is comprehensible to basically anyone (it's not physically possible, but they didn't necessarily know that).

I hadn't thought of it that way. My personal explanation for the Fermi Paradox is that it's darn-tootin' hard overcoming our economic and political systems' unsustainability: once a certain amount of hurt and/or distrust is exchanged, people are almost irreversibly coaxed on hate spirals.

We're not smart enough — collectively — to recognize we need to work on our feelings... even if our collective existence depended on it.

Source: Points at the geopolitical theater. (What a shame that our dumb systems and shallow leaders allow for so much hurting over petty squabbles. It's deplorable.)

I wonder if there are any solar systems with multiple habitable planets where an intelligence is more likely to colonize and tackle space travel.

Imagine if Mars and Venus were just habitable from the start, with plants, animals, and resources. We would probably have colonies there. Some intelligence somewhere probably had such a predicament.

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