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Comment by mclightning | Hacker News Reader

I used to be greatly tempted by the fermi paradox, but upon learning about limitations we have observing the skies.... I believe the entire fermi paradox talk, is just steeming from the fact that we think too highly of ourselves as a civilisation and the efford we put into observing the skies.

Most people, including myself until recently, don't realise that most of our astrophysics/space science is very limited to our immediate close promixity in the cosmological scale.

Correct me if I am wrong but we are only able to do science around the other stars in the Milky way (e.g. exoplanet observations)

Beyond Milky way, all the light from the stars are collapsed into a single blob along with the rests of the stars in their home galaxy.

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> Correct me if I am wrong but we are only able to do science around the other stars in the Milky way (e.g. exoplanet observations)

Oh yeah and on top of that the way we detect planets around stars creates a extreme bias on dwarf stars since a positive detection needs a few transits before confirmation of a planet can be made. And since dwarf planets transit within days/weeks sun like stars take around a year so it would take 3 years of observation to find an Earth around a sun-like star. But I have heard science communicators imply that what we have detected so far is representative of what is out there which is absurd.

If FTL is impossible(which I doubt since it's only "impossible" in some capacity in Special Relativity. But Special Relativity does not describe our universe, General Relativity does and even that has limits),then not seeing Aliens is not a paradox at all considering radio waves only go out a few light years, and the distances are just too great. And if there are any Alien probes in our solar system sitting on IO or some moon we'd have no idea since we have only done flybys and never truly scanned the surfaces.

I thought on this for a few days. The nature of scientific process, forces us to maintain absolute emphasis on our observation, to an extent which we are willfully ignoring the limitations and scope of our observations.

I wonder who is to blame, is this the current state of scientific studies? or they are actually considering these limitations in the papers, but it is ignored by public? then, is it the science communication to the public that's failing?

I feel shy even bringing up such topics among friends, because it is so far out of the common understanding that it will sound like flat-earth conspiracy to most.

People don't like to hear anything that goes like "we don't know some things at all". There is a comfort in knowing somewhere, some scientist are %100 accurate and know it all.

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