Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

jafinn t1_jcvjh21 wrote

Reply to comment by Icy_Blackberry_3759 in The Fermi Paradox and the Possibility of Intelligent Extraterrestrial Life by Beginning-Court1946

There's this and also time. Advanced civilisations could have risen and perished in billions of years. It only took us something like a billion years from simple multi-celled organisms to space flight. And it's really a tiny speck of time we've been sending out radio waves or anything that might be picked up by someone.

There could have been inhabitants a couple of solar systems over and we'd probably never know (at least not yet).

9

Valuable-Extreme t1_jcw2ibn wrote

Don’t forget the radius… It is roughly 50 or 60 ly as early radio transmissions were to weak to get far enough without being weaker than background noise… Therefore we can only assume there is no intelligent life in a radius of 25 to 30 ly as they could have answered by now. That is just a super small area of space… We can only listen to them at this point…

5