/sci/ - Science & Math

Why is light so slow?

>>10563653
"We don't know" is the only reasonably accurate answer to that question. Fermi's question of "so where are they?" was a slap in the face and a wake up call to a society which was used to thinking of life as this resilient thing that fills in every niche that it can squeeze itself into. What we do know is that if intelligent, spacefaring life was common, we'd have almost certainly seen the signs of it.

The giant honking question at the moment is whether or not the filter lies behind us in history, or ahead of us.

If it's behind us: great! We are a truly special and unique aspect of the universe. Maybe rocky planets like Earth are rare. Maybe the precise alignment of planetary chemistry and magnetics, geologic/tectonic activity, gravitationally stabilizing moon, distance from the sun create conditions which are 1 in a Billion Billion Billion, and Earth is the only planet in the entire freaking local group with life more advanced than primitive archaea. The universe is our pure, virginal waifu, just waiting for us to come out of our basement and seed her with our offspring.

If the filter is in front of us, that's horrifying news. We are not special, we are just another flash in the pan smudge of pink goo that is rapidly growing to consume all its locally available resources before dying out when they run out of resources to blow on frivolities like race wars or the space races. The challenges are simply too great, the costs too high, the pay off just not there to make intelligent life viable in the long term. Or maybe there's something inherent in mastering the forces electromagnetism that kills its users every-time, like nuclear weapons or sex robots. In this scenario, the universe is a used up slut who treats us like just another swaggering cock, to be momentarily enjoyed and then discarded.

Why is light so slow? The fastest speed possible in the universe and this is the best it can do?

Fermi's ""paradox"" is merely the observation that within a very small slice of time (at best a few thousand years out of billions in Earth history), within a very constricted set of parameters (written human history which is spotty, astronomical observations which would only detect truly colossal structures or energy outputs) and observers (those sufficiently trained in the methods of rational empiricism so as to be able to rate likelihoods in a reasonable manner), nothing has been observed which peeks up above the background noise line as evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence.

The argument about time to colonize the galaxy is reasonable, but it also falls out of that - as an inevitability - that any species/group which can or has reached us is advanced beyond us on timescales of millions of years of technological development.

So either (a) there's nobody here, with a really unsatisfactory definition of sample size, or (b) somebody is here and they're beyond us on geological timescales of development.

If the latter, I'd be pretty surprised if they couldn't stay hidden if they wanted to. What the hell would you actually have to say to an Australopithecus? Nice antelope thighbone club, dude?

>>8604372
Because of the Fermi Paradox
>"where the heck is everyone?"

No matter how closely we look, we don't see any other stars which are giving off signals like ours is. Sure it might be because everyone is hiding from each other, but it could also be because the nearest other life-bearing planet is 700 light years away and doesn't have anything more complex than a protozoa. Or maybe it had higher life forms, even intelligent life like 50 million years ago, but they have long since died out.

On a cosmic scale the universe would still be teeming with life, it's just that on our scale they'd be simply too far away for us to have to worry about space-colonialism.

Plus anything with the power to make a RKV would probably be powerful enough to ignore us and the resources sitting at the bottom of our gravity well when there are probably much more cost-effective places in the cosmos for robotic post-life to sustain itself.