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Comment by mprev | Hacker News Reader

The Fermi Paradox always strikes me as hubris.

As Douglas Adams wrote, “Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”

We've been looking for alien life for, what, 50 years? And we've made various assumptions about what we should be looking for. Oh, and we've been doing so on a very limited budget, with the technology available to us, in a tiny part of the sky .

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Yes, but Fermi's Paradox is based on calculating that it would only take an alien civilization a few million years at the most to colonize our galaxy, which has been around for billions of years. Add to that the likelihood that a slightly more advanced civilization than ours would be able to make self-replicating probes. And it only takes one civilization to do it. So where are they?

Think about it this way. If human civilization persists and continues to advance, what's stopping us from spreading out to nearby stars within the next thousand years? And that's nothing on the cosmic timescale.

Uhhh that assumes alien life has the same intent as current us. Intelligent alien life may just as well have explored a lot, figured "meh..." and build a few Dyson spheres to spend the rest of their existence in a perfectly pleasing simulation.

People already get sucked up by Warcraft and not even 100 years after computers made their breakthrough we fiddle around with haptic dual-4K VR.

It only takes one expansionist species to populate the whole galaxy. Thus, if intelligent life were common, we should detect them. You'd have to argue that no advanced species would ever do this, which is possible, but seems less plausible.

Some people do. Other people climb mountains or work on robotic rovers. There is no evidence that an entire civilization would choose a simulated existence, let alone every civilization. The evidence so far is that there would be ever increasing numbers of things to do, only some of which is simulated. There are plenty of young kids today training to become athletes instead of EA sports champions. Some people prefer to be outside instead in front of a screen.

Maybe they just don't want to.

The Fermi Paradox requires that aliens think and behave like late-20th century humans. But early-21st century humans already exhibit slightly different motivations and behaviours. So it's really hard to imagine that early-201st century humans would be at all familiar, let alone late-736th tier Grabulons.

We have to remember the Fermi Paradox is a Fermi estimation and only that

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