Re: Fermi paradox

VoiceOfReason wrote:
spintronic wrote:
VoiceOfReason wrote:
spintronic wrote:
Where are they?

Not here, it would seem. Do you think they should be? If so, why?

Yes they should be, they've had 9 billion+ "extra" years of evolution
to get their act together.

Depending on what one might expect to see, that's making lots of
assumptions. If it's "Why they haven't visited us," I think it
seriously underestimates the difficulties of travel between stars, not
the least of which is supplying power to a spacecraft for the years the
trip would take.


Nuclear power is plenty sufficient. The difficulty is in avoiding or
recovering from accidents with limited crew and supplies. But
technology improvements should reduce these incrimentally over time. It
is hard to think that we wouldn't overcome them in a mere 1,000 years,
barring some nasty war.


It could be that inter-stellar travel will always be
impractical, regardless of the level of technology (which would be a
pity).

Aliens could very well be in the same position we are, listening for
telltale signals from distant planets. Maybe it took hundreds of years
before they finally found anybody. Maybe they never did.

Maybe life on other planets doesn't exist long enough between massive
extinctions to get to an advanced technological stage. There are
volcanic events, comets & meteors, etc., that have killed off entire
ecosystems here. It could be that we're some of the lucky few
intelligent species that have survived to wonder who else is out there.

A special I saw the other night said that Earth's protective magnetic
field is weakening, and that it may be gone within a thousand years.

I thought it was merely flipping poles, not going out. It tends to dip
in power when it flips, creating a short-term problem for us.

They said that Mars used to have a similar magnetic field that
disappeared a couple billion years ago. Is that a common event? Do
most life-capable planets have only a limited "life span" before their
magnetic field dissipates, their atmosphere is stripped away and high
levels of radiation make life impossible?

I don't know about magnetic fields, but smaller stars can live much
longer than the sun. The problem is that the planet has to be closer to
the star, creating tidal locks. But a tidally locked planet can still
support complex life, just in less places.



There are many unanswered questions, and we have few examples to go by.
We may never find signs of technological species on other planets - or
we may find it next week.

Indeed.

Some speculate "they" already know about us, but protect us as kind of
an ant-farmish/zoo sort of way. Men-in-black.

-T-

.

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