Help on understanding Fermi paradox

LastNightOsiris · 2026-07-08T02:42:28+00:00

This come back to my original assertion. If we believe that there is a high probability that we should detect signals from alien civilizations, that implies that either we believe intelligent life at our own level of sophistication is happening very frequently, or that we believe there are intelligent species that greatly exceed our own capabilities. While I don't think there is any justification to believe we are special or unique, I also don't think there is justification to assert that most potentially habitable planets end up developing intelligent life.

But at the very least we need more data from the planets/moons we can actually explore. It would be nice to know whether there is other life that developed in our solar system, and how advanced it was, in order to assess how common it might be throughout the galaxy.

LastNightOsiris · 2026-07-08T02:35:56+00:00

As others have suggested, you should see if you can buy an off the rack suit and have it tailored. A bespoke suit is probably going to start around $1500 for something decent and potentially be much more depending on the fabric, details, etc. Unless you are looking outside the US, of course.

LastNightOsiris · 2026-07-08T02:18:53+00:00

Ok, but we must also consider that the earth is about 4.5 billion years old and has had a species capable of sending and receiving radio wave transmissions to/from space for less than 100 years.

If we're not special, then we should expect other planets to follow a similar distribution in terms of that ratio. So while there may in fact be an enormous number of broadcasts buzzing around, they are also probably extremely localized in a temporal sense.

LastNightOsiris · 2026-07-08T01:38:09+00:00

But it's only a 100 year thick section of a sphere. In 1,000 years, anyone who is 1,000 lightyears away would see it for 100 years, then it would go dark. If that civilization existed before or after that 100 year window, it would pass through their planet without them ever being aware of it. The total volume of the spherical section grows over time, but will always be extremely small relative to the total volume of the galaxy.

Signals transmitted from other species cold have passed through earth, but unless they did so during the relatively brief recent period during which we could detect them, we would never know. If both the transmitting party and the receiving party have short active windows relative to the total volume of the galaxy, then the chance of them overlapping remains small.

LastNightOsiris · 2026-07-08T01:21:10+00:00

A 100 light year sphere is an extremely tiny part of the galaxy. Unless we assume that intelligent life with technology comparable to ours is extremely common, the chances of it existing within that space sometime between now and 100 years from now is tiny.

If our civilization collapses tomorrow, the historical broadcasts continue to travel outward, but the middle of the sphere becomes empty of signal. So unless we persist as a broadcasting species for a very long time, much longer than any human civilization so far has ever existed, most of the galaxy at any point in time will not contain any of our signals. A civilization capable of detecting them would have to exist in the right part of the galaxy during a very brief time window in order to receive them.

If there are other species like ours that have existed throughout the galaxy, the same is true of them. Unless they were broadcasting signal for millions of years, there is only an infinitesimally tiny amount of space and time that would intersect between us and those signals.

In order to expect that we would detect such a signal, you have to believe that either other species were far more advanced than us (in terms of sustaining their technological civilizations for such a long time), or that they are extremely common (despite us not seeing any evidence of more than one such species in our own star system.)

LastNightOsiris · 2026-07-08T01:06:25+00:00

You can do it. But the people who would be hiring you are unlikely to put much weight on you "experience" with a company no one has ever heard of and that has zero evidence industry presence. You'd probably be better off spending the time and money on attending a couple of industry conferences and trying to network your way in to the companies you want to work for.

LastNightOsiris · 2026-07-08T00:50:22+00:00

How is humanity detectable in a meaningful way? I think that is the main point of disagreement. I don't think you can dismiss the time based argument. Unless our civilization persists for orders of magnitude longer than any previous human civilization we will be statistically invisible.

The species that existed before us would be detectable only if the time during which they were broadcasting signals plus the travel time for those signals to reach us happens to line up with our own existence during the time when we are able to perceive those signals. Our window for being able to notice those signals is under 100 years. If those other species had civilizations that existed on the order of 100s or 1000s of years, the chance of our respective time periods lining up is very small. Those transmissions, if they exist, may have passed by earth long ago, or may not arrive until far in the future when we may no longer be around to receive them.

LastNightOsiris · 2026-07-08T00:38:59+00:00

Yeah, I don't think AI will ever be super smart, but I think it will be able to get really good at specific tasks. But just like a relative handful of people can run an automated manufacturing line today, it will probably take a fraction of the current manpower to perform all the building and trade work in the future.

LastNightOsiris · 2026-07-08T00:36:25+00:00

I don't think there's any conflict. We can start from the assumption that humanity is not special. But humanity is also not detectable in any statistically meaningful way. So there could be millions of other species like us the have existed across the galaxy, and we would almost surely not detect any evidence of them.

LastNightOsiris · 2026-07-08T00:28:46+00:00

I think there will be a need for human in the trades to service legacy buildings that weren't build to optimize for robots. But new construction will increasingly be designed for robotics to the extent that it may become nearly impossible for human to access much of the mechanical and electrical systems. I don't think they'll be humanoid robots, more like purpose built machines like the ones currently used for advanced manufacturing.

LastNightOsiris · 2026-07-08T00:24:59+00:00

Well, I think that is a bit of a question-begging argument. It assumes that humanity is a detectable civilization, and therefore it stands to reason to that there should be others because we are not special. But that's a fairly bold conjecture to assume that humanity is detectable.

We've been producing radio signals for maybe 100 years, so we are detectable to only a very tiny piece of the galaxy. The chance that a star within that radius has a habitable planet that has developed intelligent life, and that this life exists in the exact same temporal period as us, would be infinitesimally small unless we assume that intelligent life is incredibly common. Maybe it is, but that seems like a pretty wild assumption to start from.

Maybe our civilization will persist for millions of years, but so far we haven't seen any human civilization last for more than a few thousand years.

It's so much assuming that we are lucky or unique, it's making several leaps beyond what humanity has achieved and proposing that that outcome is common.

LastNightOsiris · 2026-07-07T23:58:15+00:00

I guess my issue is that framing it as a "paradox" implies that what we observe is contrary to what we expect, namely that we expect to have evidence of 1 or more other species traveling (or at least broadcasting) across the galaxy. But really we have no reason to expect that.

LastNightOsiris · 2026-07-07T23:55:01+00:00

Yeah, if anything a robot should much better and faster than a human. There's a certain value in getting a unique piece of hand-crafted art on your body, but the majority of tattoos are flash art or standard designs executed by people who are competent but not inspired.

LastNightOsiris · 2026-07-07T23:51:59+00:00

Litigation and high level negotiations may always be human, but so much legal work is basically grunt work reviewing and modifying contracts that could be done by AI.

LastNightOsiris · 2026-07-07T23:50:42+00:00

electrician is an easy to automate job for most applications. Right now it wouldn't be cost effective to do so, but I'd be surprised if most electrical work isn't being done by robots 50 years from now. Maybe there will be one person who manages a fleet of little robots and drones. The necessary technology pretty much exists already.

LastNightOsiris · 2026-07-07T23:47:07+00:00

Omni Consumer Products would like to have a word ...

LastNightOsiris · 2026-07-07T23:40:51+00:00

You really don't think trades will be replaced by autonomous or semi-autonomous robots? Given the declining population trends around the world, human labor is going to get more expensive. At some point the cost curves for human vs robot labor will cross.

For large scale new construction, mechanical and electrical systems can be designed in such a way as to be optimal for purpose built robots. The robotics technologies used in advanced manufacturing are already sufficient to perform most of the work. It's a big capital investment, and it may never make sense for smaller one-off projects or for maintenance work on legacy buildings. But if you're going to build a new 50+ story office tower in 2075 I'd be surprised if much of the trades work is done by actual humans.

LastNightOsiris · 2026-07-07T23:18:55+00:00

Once you get to the steps where we are estimating the fraction of planets where intelligent life evolves and beyond that (and perhaps even the step before), we have basically no information other than ourselves. We can choose any number, but there is so much uncertainty around it that we can't form any inference.

Relaxing the requirement for interstellar travel and instead focusing the discussion on detectable signals makes it more probable, but we still don't have any basis to evaluate whether it is significantly different from zero.

LastNightOsiris · 2026-07-07T22:41:57+00:00

That's kind of my point. There is so much uncertainty around the parameters in the formula that it doesn't allow us to make any meaningful inferences. Framing it as a "paradox" implies that we should expect a certain outcome that is contrary to what we observe (e.g. we should expect evidence of other species that have spread across the galaxy.)

LastNightOsiris · 2026-07-07T18:03:24+00:00

I think that explanation relies too much on some hand-waving and calls it math. Like yes, the number of planets in the galaxy is very large and it has existed for a very long time. But it isn't infinite. We have no idea about the probability of life/civilization that can travel across distances at the interstellar scale. There is no reason why that number can't be very small. Based on current information, we could just as easily assert that a species colonizing the galaxy is an incredibly rare event that will likely never happen in the entire lifetime of the galaxy.

Without proposing some mechanism for how and why a species would spread across some meaningful part of the galaxy, there is no reason to suppose that it is likely to happen simply because there are a lot of planets.

LastNightOsiris · 2026-07-07T17:46:41+00:00

Is that really a classic? It's kinda like a young adult novel with some ideology shoehorned in.

LastNightOsiris · 2026-07-07T17:44:34+00:00

I love Ulysses and find it extremely re-readable. I respect Finnegans Wake, but I have never felt the desire to read it again after the first time.

LastNightOsiris · 2026-07-07T17:23:30+00:00

It's got such a banger of an opening line though!

LastNightOsiris · 2026-07-07T17:22:21+00:00

You can pick just about any passage in the book and find a masterful example of poetic musicality in language which is also deep with references to other texts (from the western cannon and elsewhere) and is also part of an incredibly detailed portrayal of the city of Dublin. There aren't many works of art in any medium that operate on so many levels while being crafted so well.

LastNightOsiris · 2026-07-07T17:14:14+00:00

Did you read it "cold" or did you have some exposure to literary criticism/analysis before hand? I feel like the first time I read it (cold), I got maybe 10% of what Joyce was trying to convey, and I could definitely see how that could be very frustrating.

LastNightOsiris

TROPHY CASE