I read something onetime from Fermi? I think, when he was asked whether he believed in UFO/ETs/life from outer space visiting us here? His response (IIRC) was to pose the question where do they come from?
This is a really interesting response. If the closest Solar System is 1 MM+ (or 100K) light years away, and assuming one could physically travel at the speed of light (with conventional wisdom saying it can't physically be done) then the organisms from the next closest solar system would have to live over a 100K or 1MM just in travel time (the longest vacation drive ever).
If you next close off that life had to come from within our solar system, we will probably within the next 100 years be able to see live shots of every planet in our solar system. But we know enough right now that none of the planets or satellites contain the environmental conditions to sustain any organic life that we currently conceive.
For me, this argument was dispositive of the issue. Anyone have any comments on this proposition?
As I understand it, thereer are at least 2 and probably or evidently 3-4 ways around the speed of light 'problem'
ET's tend to laugh at folks who ask them about that. As though they were talking to folks not yet in kindergarten.
1) Technological ways to bend space/time evidently exist as a way around the speed of light issue.
2) For lack of a better word--using other dimensions as a short cut between two very distant points in our dimension is another way around the speed of light 'problem.'
I don't recall the others but I didn't understand them well anyway.
You are assuming that what we know right now is the only means of travel.
There may be other means that make it possible to move great distances.
For example, Bob Lazaar says the UFO's he saw at Groom Lake (near Area 51) had 'gravity wave' populsion systems that 'compressed' space between to objects that were light years apart.
They wouldn't have to live that long, even under the currently understood laws of physics. Not from their perspective, at least. The rules of relativity say that as you approach the speed of light, time slows down for you. And as you very closely approach it, it slows way down.
I believe this is called "Fermi's Paradox."
Enrico Fermi postulated that any civilization with a certain level of proficiency in rocket technology and sufficient ambition should be able to colonize the galaxy within something like twenty million years. Now, twenty million years sounds like a lot, but it's peanuts compared with the age of the galaxy which is measured in thousands of millions of years, and not even all that much on the geologic time scale we use to measure the age of the earth. Twenty million years ago was already the time of the Autralopithicines.
Fermi then asked the obvious question: where is everybody? That there are no aliens openly walking around seems to imply that there aren't any. Or, that if life does occur elsewhere in the universe, it is uncommon enough that it is isolated by vast intergalactic distances and the result is much the same.
Most answers to Fermi's paradox seem to revolve around anthropomorphizing the aliens, that they have some cultural reason to remain secret like a Star-Trek prime directive. The alternative is the anti-anthropomorphizing argument that the aliens are so different that we cannot detect, understand, or comprehend their communication. Neither of these answers are particularly satisfying, in my opinion.