religion.

Friday 22 October 2010

fermi's Paradox

This is perhaps one of my favourite so i thought i would start with it :) as well as making a poll to see what you all think of it!

Right so in case you aren’t familiar with the paradox, here it is.

Fermi was sitting around with a bunch of his mates having a bit of a philosophical talk, as you do. Some were in this conversation Fermi asked "so, were are they"? by "they" he means aliens, yes aliens, the little green men in flying saucers. by asking this simple but rather profound question, he kind of hit the nail on the head.

Were indeed are they? The amount of stars in the sky, the pure number of planets out there, surly one must harbour intelligent life? there areeee loooads of different theories each with their own quirks and such, some with a lot more merit that others, for example its easy to believe that they simply don’t want to talk to us, but its a lot harder to believe (in my own view) that we are entirely alone, but who knows, each to their own.

here a few of the other reasons why old ET hasn’t visited earth for a spot of tea..

We are the first in the galaxy
Life is new to the galaxy and evolution takes time. We are the first intelligent civilization. Problem: the Sun being an average star, if other stars formed a million years ahead of us, then they would be a million years ahead of us technologically speaking. This would be pretty insane if you put into consideration how fast we as a species has advanced since we started out.
God has no room for ET in his plans, and created only humans to eventually rule the stars.
Life is difficult to start and to evolve to an intelligent and technologically advanced stage and we're the only one in the galaxy.
Advanced civilizations destroy themselves on short timescales. (Let’s hope not...)
They are here unobserved
They were here and they left material evidence:
UFO's, alien artefacts, ancient astronauts. Problem: evidence for aliens is non-existent. This kinda dashes that whole theory in my mind.
Zoo scenario
The aliens are here and they are keeping us in a well designed zoo (cut off from all contact) or there is an treaty preventing contact with young races. Problem: this scenario can't be tested. Only one ET could break the embargo.
They are us
Humans are the descendents of previous alien civilizations. Problem: where are the original aliens? where are all the other alien civilizations?
and the last on my list, maybe they are all just to busy fighting each other. for all we know there could be a vast multitude of civilisations out there all fighting it out for stakes on colonisable planets, and simple don’t want to invest in communicating with fledgling species. Porblem: wouldn't we notice this big intersteller war going on?

that’s a few of them there are others, if you want to find out more about it just Google it :)
if you have your own idea please tell me by commenting :)

2 comments:

  1. This is impossible to determine really until we get into space or we get contacted. But I suppose the most believable one will be the idea that our minds can rationalize the most, but there will always be doubt lingering for some idea's until we know. I don't think you can rule out any of the idea's for all we know the entire universe was set up for us alone to explore, an experiment to see if we can survive.

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  2. From what we have observed I believe that they only reason we haven't seen/heard from aliens is simply because of the vastness of space.
    Needle in a haystack, whatnot.

    Indeed if we found a primitive alien species it is likely that we would leave alone and observe them ourselves. We'd do this to determine what happened in our own evolution and to see what happens without effecting them.

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