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The answer to the The Fermi Paradox could be that space is full of dead aliens
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this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2025
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No. I'm saying that you can't use evidence of some particular thing happening to support a theory that requires something completely unrelated to happen. It's simply not a valid argument.
I'm simply saying that if someone wants to propose that the solution to the Fermi Paradox is that interstellar civilizations quickly perish and never rise again, it kind of behooves them to include a mechanism for how those civilizations perish. We've never seen it happen so there's nothing that can be assumed here. Step two needs to be made explicit.
Boiled down, they're essentially making the argument that if you accept that a civilization can eradicate itself (via nuclear war, climate change, plague, a generation of ipad kids, etc etc) even if you calculate that chance of eradication to be infinitesimally small, then given cosmic time scales it becomes a near inevitability.
But if you believe without evidence that an interstellar civilization exists that definitionally can't be eradicated then of course definitionally that civilization will persist.
That's exactly the "step two" that I'm challenging, though. That's my entire point. I don't accept that civilizations like these can eradicate themselves without some further work to establish that.
None of those are plausible ways to reliably wipe out an interstellar-capable civilization. Especially bearing in mind that "wiping out" in the Fermi Paradox context requires that they be wiped out such that they can never recover. Full blown permanent and total extinction. Something that merely knocks them back to the stone age is no biggie on the sort of timescales the Fermi Paradox operates on.
I'm pointing out that the "answer to the Fermi Paradox" that these researchers are presenting is incomplete in a very fundamental way. It's like proposing an explanation for why the Sahara Desert is dry by calculating how frequently you'd need flying saucers to come and steal all the water from it, but not doing any work to establish that there are flying saucers coming to steal all the water. An interesting exercise in playing with probability equations, perhaps, but not a useful one.
The main argument is that mostly civilizations don't become space faring or rather perhaps becoming space faring may be close to impossible.
Being able to leave your home planet in a functional, safe & unimaginably fast aircraft is one thing, but pockets of civilizations surviving on other planets is another. No one has a clue how terraforming a planet would look like on a much more developed level, but it's possible it's basically impossible to do without waiting thousands of years for your compatible life to establish a proper ecological cycle.
Basically no one has proven yet that it's possible to build a small self sustaining habitat on any planet. Elon talks about going to Mars, or used to anyway, but this is an important problem. Can you imagine humans for real building a megastructure on Mars that can sustain a settlement? It feels way too problematic tbh, even if you had 10% of the World's GDP to give it a good go.