1w ago

Horrifying discovery

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that would certainly explain why we seem to be alone out here
- Our galaxy cluster is in a void. There are still plenty of stars in our own galaxy that should be able to support life.
  Even if we were in a more densely populated area of the universe the next galaxy would still be millions of lightyears away.
  
  ROFL over here - 👏
  
  Technically the nearest galaxy to us doesn't have a name, just a designation, and is only like 10,000 stars, but it's currently about 10,000-15,000 light years away, so we're actually closer to the center of that galaxy than we are to our own, and possibly were closer to everything in that galaxy than we are the center of The Milky Way. The Milky Way is expected to absorb that galaxy into itself in the next few hundred million years though, IIRC.
  Also Andromeda and The Milky Way are already "touching" each other.
  
  You one of them book types? If not, we YouTube the same
  
  Bit o column A, bit o column B
- Isn’t that a slightly circular reasoning?
  
  i haven't had my coffee yet, whys that circular?
  
  Let me put it another way: let’s presume that we haven’t been in contact for the last 1000years, how close by should other stars be to us, so that we were indeed contacted by extraterrestrials in the last 1000 years?
  
  The way I understand it, the whole "paradox" is more: If we aren't the first culture-producing life, and if technological life is not an exceptionally rare occurence, and if technological life is persistent and not (almost) always fleeting - going by the age of other stars and their exoplanets in the galaxy, we would expect there to be signs of life visible in abundance (e.g. electromagnetic waves of clearly artificial origin as "background chatter").
  The fact that this isn't so, indicates that something about that assumption has to be wrong. What exactly, we cannot easily say, and theories go all the way from "Life like humanity really is exceedingly rare and needs very special circumstances and 'luck'" to "technological life quickly evolves to a point, where it doesn't produce any signs like that" to "there is a great filter still ahead of us, which extinguishes life wherever it arises" to "life behaves according to Dark Forest rules and actively tries to stay hidden".
  But all of those are currently just wild speculation. The only thing certain is, that we have found none of the abundance of chatter we would expect from many worlds having had more time than our Earth to theoretically develop life akin to our own. And the most we so far have noticed are some sporadic signs that may hint at basic life, e.g. on K2-18b, but it is all in the "very fuzzy and uncertain" ballpark.
  
  Two things to add
  we are quite early in the age of the universe so intelligent life that wants to communicate probably hasn't formed yet
  we haven't been looking quite that long and the stars are a big place
  
  I wasn’t primarily discussing the paradox as a whole, just the tiny issue presented here.

42 comments