> So we're obviously missing something but we don't know what.
Isnt the answer dead simple though? Space is mostly empty. Everything is very far away and getting even further as the universe expands. If there were bits of life scattered around the universe I wouldnt expect contact between them.
The paradox seems to rely on the assumption that if aliens existed they would have colonized the entire universe by now but that seems like a huge leap when we look at ourselves.
Universe is almost 14B years old. Life on earth is almost 4b years old. There have been several mass extinction events which almost completely whiped out life. There are planets in our system that may have had life but would have died off a very long time ago. Its kind of remarkable that we are here and how much progress we’ve made. We are certainly fitter than average (survivorship bias proves that). Yet we are nowhere even remotely close of expanding out into the solar system and beyond. And how could we, if virtually all of that space is void of resources we need to survive? Why is it inevitable that some alien would have solved that?
Exactly. One of the base assumptions of the Fermi paradox is that travel between solar systems is practical, which is far from proven at this point. If we are bound by the rocket equation, that is to say if Newton's First Law holds, then the answer to the Fermi paradox is simple. Travel between solar systems is less practical than just colonizing your own solar system, even through extreme measures like swarms of orbital colonies.
When you think about it, an interstellar starship that must expend mass to change velocity is going to have to make a severe tradeoff between mass and travel time. In practical terms you have to first build a colony that can sustain itself indefinitely in your own solar system before you build one that can also accelerate/decelerate to a million kph and doesn't have the advantage of being near a free source of energy or any sources of new materials.
Isnt the answer dead simple though? Space is mostly empty. Everything is very far away and getting even further as the universe expands. If there were bits of life scattered around the universe I wouldnt expect contact between them.
The paradox seems to rely on the assumption that if aliens existed they would have colonized the entire universe by now but that seems like a huge leap when we look at ourselves.
Universe is almost 14B years old. Life on earth is almost 4b years old. There have been several mass extinction events which almost completely whiped out life. There are planets in our system that may have had life but would have died off a very long time ago. Its kind of remarkable that we are here and how much progress we’ve made. We are certainly fitter than average (survivorship bias proves that). Yet we are nowhere even remotely close of expanding out into the solar system and beyond. And how could we, if virtually all of that space is void of resources we need to survive? Why is it inevitable that some alien would have solved that?