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In 1950,   Enrico Fermi casually said to a friend "But where is everybody?".  The Fermi Paradox is:   Given the age of the universe, there should be life everywhere.  Life formed on our planet in only 800 million years; the universe is 13,900 million years old.

I put forward the following three solutions, ranked from least to most probable.

1)  Civilizations are so advanced we cannot communicate with them.   Imagine flying from Perth to Sydney.  There are undiscovered tribes there that try to get your attention, but you can't see them waving.    We should still be able to detect their infra-red though.

2)  A great filter, still ahead of us, stops most civilizations.

3)  We are living in a simulation.  This would also explain "spooky action".

Anyone else have any interesting solutions?   (Let me get the god one out of the way now lol)

Perhaps the universe has ripened for life (in terms of the suitability of the planets) just over the last billion years, and life in all its regions has developed at about the same pace as ours, and therefore life in other regions of the universe is now about the same level as ours.

AFAIK, solar system is one of the younger in our Milky way galaxy but still we are the most developed/evolved living organisms as far as we know but we also having proof for UFO's existence in the past so they could be highly evolved compared to humans.

Maybe in next few centuries we could have a spaceship which can travel from galaxies to other galaxies at that time we can find others.

I think we haven't looked and analyzed our data long enough.
Compare time that took humanity to develop space technologies to the time that took us to get to that technological level from stone age.

The universe is huge. Life is everywhere, but it is sparse and isolated, and we don't yet have the ability to find it.

Its a Paradox not a problem, therefore there is no "solution". This doesn't mean the chance is zero to encountering any other sentient race (or vice versa), only that the chance diminishes every day (just like finding Bitcoin blocks :D)

"This" universe is known to be expanding, so yeah. Something "might" be there, but by the time we would reach it, they would be long extinct (or viceversa). We know most of the inner planets of this system will disappear in a few billion years. How long do you think it takes to go from place a to place b in space? A LOT.

Even if FTL travel gets invented, you still have a lot of problems. Simply moving from point A to point B, sets you in a different time flow, how many minutes you spend in point b does not correlate with the time flowing in point a, time dilation will effect greatly the father way you are, because... Everything in the universe is moving, not just generally expanding, but whole bunch of systems and galaxies rotating.

We are living in a outer edge of this known galaxy, which is rather out from the possible center. You do know that the edges rotate faster than the center, do you now? This means, our time is flowing already different. We are traveling "fast" compared to the center, so our minutes may be hours or months elsewhere. See where this is going yet? It gets worse.

This does not mean there could not be 1, 2 or 3; or multiverses or more. What exactly happens when we die, and where exactly do we come from when born? Is this life even life?

The truth is out there, or maybe not.

In the beginning (of the big bang) there was not even time flowing. So what was before it? and when is the expansion ever ending? Evidence suggests its just increasing.

First of all, thx for an intelligent (though off topic) reply!  

A paradox is a problem without an apparent solution, but that doesn't mean one doesn't exist.

There has to be a reason that despite enough time to colonize complete galaxies many times over, we detect no one else.   That is what I want to discuss.  :)

I also disagree with "the chance diminishes every day" since that implies the chances were greater in the past - when we had less technology and less people searching.

I posted my three solutions.   Does anyone else have any?


Interesting.  Where can I repeat the things you do to prove it?

In the Fermi Paradox universe in space-time i am in awe of human loneliness. There is no life in the universe other than the earth if life in the universe is not a rare event then another possibility is that the transformation from unicellular to multicellular organisms is a great filter. If we are alone in our universe or in this observable universe Yes. But we can say that we have come to the edge of the Great Filter by going from inanimate to living because only 2 billion years after the origin of life but complex life has emerged.

I like your idea of the great filter, but I think it lies ahead of us.  Intelligent life is common in stable systems, but we failed to recognize our filter in time and our only proof of existence will be a few decades of radio waves decaying before they reach anyone who can understand them.  Maybe no civilization gets past this filter, and we could not hear the death cries of our closest neighbors because we were only neanderthals? :/

Who needs a filter when you have plenty of distance to make it nearly impossible for sentient races to meet each other in their lifetime?

All we can do is speculate at this point. And hope to find some trace of ancient life somewhere. We are absolutely not in the center of this universe, so there is no reason for us to be "alone".

Have you still not noticed what you see in the night sky is past ancient history?

As for being "found" by others in our lifetime, the same applies to them. The inner planets of this solar system (including Earth) only have a few billion years left before the Sun destroys them. Traveling from point a to point b in the universe might easily take longer than this.

Hey!, I found an interesting planet. Quick send a probe. When probe reaches, the planet is no more, local star engulfed it, or at least destroyed its atmosphere making it barren like Mercury.

So yeah, space is big, bigger than you could possibly imagine. Its so big, than traveling at near the speed ot light you watch to the front of your windows cockpit and those dots remains static as if watching a wallpaper. The "rain inverted" effect of the pop fiction movies doesn't exist in real life. I'm sure i saw a simulation in youtube about how the stars would look like if your were in a ship traveling at near the speed of life. Now if you look at 90° to the sides, you might spot something barely moving. Front and back? wallpaper.

It is THAT big. The only thing that actually move is your local system and that goes when you enter interstellar space. If the Voyager probes could send us what its seeing right now, it would be that: the dot of what the Sol system is next to all the other dots frozen in place.

PS: The chances were greater in the past by the simple fact that the universe has been expanding faster and faster, so, we were closer together. And thus, the opposite is true. This is not related with our own species having the technology, but others who might have done so.

Neanderthals? Maybe some race might have visited when there were only amoeba, or not even life. For most of the existence of this planet, it has been lifeless. Maybe they seeded it for all we know or not, and have long gone extinct.

Have you not heard about spooky action?   Future technologies could make colonizing the galaxy easy. 

The universe is old - older than you can imagine.   Even at relativistic velocities, a race could have colonized the galaxy already.

I just woke up with an erectpiphany.

What if the requirements per life depend on galactic attributes?   Then our dataset drops to mere billions.    There are billions of us, and each one of us is unique.   Maybe billions isn't a large enough dataset - we need billions of billions of billions before we detect life.   If we consider every galaxy is accelerating as it travels away from every other galaxy, I present a fourth solution to the Fermi Paradox:

4)  Any intelligent life is moving away from us faster than the speed of light - making observation impossible.


Time is a human concept - it's the way we observe change.  If we extend this to before the big bang, there would have been nothing changing, so there would be no time. 


When the expansion reaches the point where no particle can ever interact with another, time will cease again.  That's called the Big Freeze.   Or you can go a step further and expand until the atoms rip apart - the Big Rip.  (I didn't name them)

I like to think of an endless pool of flat still water.  Consider our reality right above the surface.  A yet unknown force creates a type of soap bubble, which expands out until it pops.