LogFAQs > #888815715

Questionmarktarius posted...

Stars are very far apart, and it takes a rather long time for light to travel between them.

For any two intelligent species to even be aware the other exists, there needs to be some pretty fantastically unlikely coincidences, the biggest being that at least one be able to understand the other's signals. This requires at that civilization to be at a sufficiently advanced level the exact moment the relevant photons arrive, and recognize what its seeing, while the other civilization has to have been at a sufficiently advanced level to send those photons long enough ago to have sent those signals. Also those photons have to have not degraded into noise along the way.

If there's life around the closest other star, and it starts transmitting "hello universe!" right now, we won't see it for four years, and that assumes we know what to even look for.

That's where the furmi paradox comes in...assuming we don't go extinct...it will be just a few hundred years (maybe a thousand or so at most) until we launch intelligent self-replicated robots into space which can explore and colonize the galaxy with exponential expansion (in just a few million years actually which is amazing).

On the scale of time that exists in our galaxy, that is basically no time at all between us coming into existence and having signs of us all of the galaxy...yet there are no signs of anyone else doing this and no reason why anyone capable of doing it would not do it...therefore...nobody else exists or we are one of the first/most advanced.

To me, this is kind of depressing. The idea that we may the only ones in teh galaxy, or the most advanced ones in the galaxy, kind of kills the sense of wonder when looking out at stars.