Hacker News Reader

Comment by dash2 | Hacker News Reader

Here's an alternative resolution to the Fermi paradox: we haven't heard from aliens, because they are communicating in ways that we are insufficiently advanced to listen for.

Analogy: in 1500, even if we'd thought to listen for aliens, we would not have been able to build radio telescopes.

Perhaps any sensible alien civilization communicates using, say, quantum entanglement. The moment we develop this technology and start listening, a cheery message will come from Alpha Centauri: "what took you guys so long?"

View on HN

Not much of a resolution. If our progress continues to accelerate with same rate as of the last 10K years, in 100K years we'll have the capability to change completely the structure of our galaxy. Why can't we see any such grand-scale projects from other civs?

One explanation is that the extrapolation of 'progress' to 'change completely the structure of our galaxy' is false. Just because we've gone from point A to point B in 10k years doesn't mean we'll ever get to point C, no matter however many years. Ie either altering the structure of the galaxy is impossible (as lack of evidence would suggest) or progressing to that level would take even longer, such that no civilization has reached it yet.

Just playing devils advocate here.

The impossibility of changing the structure of the galaxy implies some exciting new physics that would explain why.

Who says we're not that?

Or means of communication that are more energy efficient than radio, which dramatically limits the range from which something can be distinguished from background noise. No-one finds anyone because they all moved to Netflix.

I like this argument. We only had the ability to communicate at range slowly in the visible light spectrum until a few hundred years ago. Would we consider that a worthwhile contact today? An alien race might not consider it worth communicating with someone who can't control gravitational waves.

In theory an alien race would probably have gone through similar stages, though. If they really wanted to communicate with other races at any stage, they would hopefully understand that your best bet is to use repeating bursts in a multitude of frequencies, likely using fundamental constants as a starting point -- Carl-Sagan style.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com