Our best sensors can detect terrestrial radio chatter from something like 0.5 light years, tops. The nearest star is 4 light years away. The galaxy is tens of thousands of light years across.
Alpha Centauri could be the seat of a post-warp interstellar empire, and we'd never know unless they pointed a directional transmitter straight at us and said hi.
Every time I see a small child, I'm increasingly convinced that the solution to the #FermiParadox is that all civilizations wipe themselves out after developing contraceptives.
Someone on Twitter/X asked a very interesting question: “Why do you think we haven’t been visited by aliens yet?”
There are many possible answers to the Fermi paradox, which is the contradiction between the high probability of extraterrestrial intelligence and the lack of evidence for it.
We considered the question of how our artificial constructions are visible to advanced extraterrestrial civilizations. Taking the universality of the laws of physics, we found that the maximum distance where the detection is possible is of the order of 3000 ly and under certain conditions Type-II advanced alien societies might be able to resolve this problem
@nyrath smart enough to measure the rising level of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere and know what's causing it.
That'll be a depressing topic of conversation in that system; "we found out were not alone but we were also too late." #FermiParadox
Controversial take: The #FermiParadox describes an expected result, not a paradox. That people take it for a paradox is simply an illustration of how poorly equipped humans are - even smart ones - to comprehend the spatial, temporal, & aleatory scale of our universe.
📆 1950 the question "Where is everybody ?" occurred to #Fermi at lunch 🍽️ one day.
• The #MilkyWay 🌌 contains hundreds of billions of stars 🎇, and billions of them are similar to the #sun ☀️.
• It is highly likely that some of these stars will have planets 🪐 that are similar to #Earth 🌏.
• If we assume – via the #Copernican principle – that Earth is not particularly special, then #intelligent life should also exist on some fraction of these Earth-like #planets.
• Some of these intelligent life-forms might develop advanced technology, and even #InterstellarTravel.
• #Interstellar travel would take a long time, but as there are many sun-like #stars that are billions of years older, there has been plenty of time ⌛ for such #travel to have occurred.
• Given all this, why haven’t we met or seen 🔭 any trace of #aliens 👽 ? https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/exploration/what-is-the-fermi-paradox/