Originally posted by Narc
I did it from memory, I can't keep every fucking measurement in the universe in memory correctly, obvs. Still that's just the one first nearest star. Two fucking generations away just to get there. That's not even a millionth of the universe, getting to like the tenth or twentieth nearest stars you're gonna be looking at two or three lifetimes just to get to them. And that's assuming you can reach a tenth of the speed of light, of which the gforce would push your face through the back of your head while travelling to.
.
You obviously didn’t read any of the stuff I’ve been saying if you think I don’t realize that. Yes I understand that everything in space is really, really far away from each other. But there are an estimated 3×10²² stars in the observable universe. It’s hard to grasp how big a number that is, just as it’s hard to grasp how far away even the nearest of those stars are.
But that means if even only %0.00000000000001 of those stars host intelligent life comparable to ourselves, that’s over 3,000,000 civilizations.
So just for argument’s sake let’s make the assumption that the first intelligent life emerged 5 billion years after the Big Bang, and that’s a pretty conservative estimate I think. The universe is now roughly 14 billion years old, so that would mean any civilization that we could ever encounter during that time would have to be within 9 billion light years of us due to the light speed barrier. Well let’s be fair and say they could only send things out at 90% the speed of light, so make that 8 billion light years. And btw it’s very realistic even with today’s technologies & theory to accelerate a small object to 10-20% the speed of light over large distances. It would just be insanely expensive.
So if those 3,000,000 civilizations were roughly equally distributed throughout the observable universe then there could still be potentially hundreds, maybe even thousands of them close enough to us to have been physically able to visit earth in that time.
And if even only 1% of them actually lasted long enough without being destroyed to develop the technological means to explore the universe, at least one of them (or their proxy) should have already been here by now, if not several. And that’s the crux of the Fermi paradox and the whole point I was trying to make.
Let me put it this way: say humanity will live on forever. What do you think our civilization will be like in a billion years from now. Do you honestly think given a BILLION YEARS, we wouldn’t have the ability to go to other stars? You’d have to be stupid to believe that. 50 years ago I doubt anyone could have even conceptualized the possibility that within a few decades everybody would be walking around with a telephone, personal computer, tv, camera, video recorder, calculator, and a fucking repository of all human knowledge in their pocket. That’s how much we’ve changed in 50 years, now imagine a billion years.
So assuming we might ourselves eventually develop the means to visit other parts of the universe....
why wouldn’t we? And if other intelligent life forms were to progress similarly to us, why wouldn’t they? And why haven’t they? We’re talking about civilizations that potentially could have had an 8 billion-year lead on us.
And that brings me back to my original point. If we make all the above assumptions and yet we still have not encountered any evidence of life other than ourselves, I believe one of the more likely explanations is that once a civilization reaches a certain level of advancement they basically become machines and are too busy running simulated realities to bother with this one. And I’m not talking about a matrix-style bullshit fantasy world as Captain Faggot implied earlier, I mean incomprehensibly complex simulations meant to perhaps learn something about other realities, higher dimensions, the ultimate fate of the universe, etc. Maybe even exploring the possibility of one day LEAVING this universe, since, as we all know, one day this universe will end and we will die with it if we don’t think of something.
Call me a moron all you want, but nothing I’ve said is impossible, none of it violates any laws of physics. There are lots of possible explanations for the Fermi paradox that scholars and philosophers have written about endlessly, I’m just saying which one I personally find most convincing. It’s either that or we really are alone
