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this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2026
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I've been wondering this for years now. Sci fi and even actual scientific speculation tends to assume aliens would be way ahead of us in terms of technology because their planets may have been formed earlier. I don't think time alone matters. If they don't have resources, if fhey don't evolve the same way, if they have more difficulties in doing shit due to any number of reasons... They could be far less advanced than us. Maybe nobody in the entire universe has figured out how to realistically travel between stars yet. Maybe we are the only ones who have even managed to get off our rock.
Imagine humanity in 1000 years. We would be among the stars.
Now imagine humanity in 10000 years, 100000 years or even 1000000 years.
A million years is still a fraction in the cosmic timescale.
It would be nearly impossible to have other civilizations be on exactly the same technological level as us. They would indeed be either much less advanced, or much more advanced.
With all the crazy ass things that can kill us off, I don't think we're alone in the universe, but we may very well be alone in time.
The Fermi Paradox might just the the likelyhood to get wiped out from motions to everything and we're too far away to get contact in this gnat's ass of a conscious timeline we're in.
This is mostly uneducated postulation, but I think as we become more technologically advanced, technological advancements (and the knowledge of mechanics necessary to allow for them) become fewer and more far between as advancements occur.
I feel like the industrial revolution was a perfect storm of many advancements all happening in the same blip, and it allowed us to go from Wright to the moon in one lifespan, but 100 years later, we're still not far from that point, technologically.
I mean, look at radiological half life - that's the point at which there's a 50% chance that any one atom will decay, but when that atom decays seems to be mere chance more than anything. It's perplexing and maddening. But the more we stare at that, the more sure we are in the belief that the void, nothingness, is actually rife with energy just flitting in and out of perceivable existence, affecting observable particles, but we just can't see this vacuum energy. Almost like quantum mechanics is used as a workaround to try to make sense of those unseen forces (and when we can observe them, it'd likely be able to be described in a more classical sense).
Maybe the industrial revolution gave us some hopium lol, but we've been butting our heads into a wall for a century pining for a magical microscope. Maybe in 500 years it'll all look mostly the same, who knows
The last 75 years of nothing is because of Neoliberalism. It is not conventially profitable to spend government funds on scientific exploration. Government funds are used to counter tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations. Along with just stealing the money through various means.
I agree with you for the most part. We've seen companies with dominance just sit on innovation and basically slow play it when competition keeps up, or go straight to lawfare or popularity contests (Intel cough cough). Kinda sucks we place more importance on the resources used to arrive at innovation than the practicality of those innovations. But where we're at now, it's like peeling an onion and what everyone wants to find is 3 layers down, so it's not like we can build more LHCs to smash particles, because the things we need to find are a couple skips past that point. We eventually find it, what next?
This is just arrogance.
We have only been announcing our intelligence for 100 years. It takes 100,000 years just to cross our galaxy. No-one knows we are here yet.
There's also the Dark Forest hypothesis - the idea that maybe many alien civilizations exist out there but stay silent because revealing themselves would make them targets/prey to a more high-tech hostile civilization.
3 body problem is a good book for thought experiments, but it didn't really discuss the arguments against the dark forest hypothesis
assumes universal hostility.
Interstellar warfare is protracted and impractical.
Ignores potential cooperation and ethical diversity.
assumes aliens think like humans
Regarding the first point, I think it just assumes the possibility for hostility, not the universality of it. If there's a room with a thousand people and I know one person in the room has a gun and wants to kill me, I'm still going to hesitate to enter regardless of the 999.
Also, any intelligence that arises out of evolution is going to have at least the rough concept of violence.
Counterarguments
The 999 are going too overpower the violent 1.
The concept of peace will be known and experience will have demonstrated that it is more valuable than war.
I'd imagine any intelligent alien life form would be intelligent enough to realize that they've reached a point at which they can simply life in a sustained utopia. Heal the planet, work less, fill time with hobbies and pursuits. Humans have this flaw, and it's that the mentally ill squander the world's wealth and use it for dick-measuring contests. A small minority of us will kill their own mother for a job promotion, and the people at the very top want to squander it all so they see another 0 in their bank account, or outrace the other 7 megabillionaires to the dick-measuring contest on Mars. I could only hope aliens aren't as as stupid. We could just litter the earth with trees, solar panels, 2 br condos, and hammocks, and have AI work for us, but nope. Every single die shrink leads to more transistor density and never any power efficiency because big numbers are better for shareholders. They sold us downstream. If any alien contacts us or leaves a trace they're most likely just as dangerous to our survival as we are. Space conquistadors
Maybe we aren't the first, maybe we aren't the last. What if there is other intelligent life on other planets, but just because of the distance their signals have not managed to come to us and our signals haven't managed to get to them yet. That should be fairly possible simply because of the how big the universe is right?
There still is the „Early Bird Theory“.
When you look at us, the Earth, life has formed almost immediately after the conditions where given. On top of that the universe itself isn’t even that old. There is a good chance, that Fermi was right but we are just the first ones.
… which makes me think that whatever or whoever designed us had some work left to do. You left in some bugs buddy.
Probabilistically, the early bird theory is unlikely. If development of life were to follow a normal distribution, it'd be highly improbable that we'd be in the tails as opposed to the main body.
There's also a theory that we're too late, and that our existence is like the remaining microbes in a puddle of water in a desert.
The universe used to be lukewarm with conditions for life to exist everywhere, until it expanded and started cooling.
On a positive note, this could also mean that life lies dormant everywhere just waiting for the right conditions, so that anywhere that has the right conditions also has life.
IMO it is more likely that we're more early than late (though an argument can be made that there's a sweet spot in between the two).
When the universe was lukewarm, I don't think the conditions existed for life to exist everywhere because there hadn't been enough stellar nucleosynthesis for there to be astrophysical metals (i.e. anything heavier than helium, with the possible exception of lithium at a very low concentration). Not much useful chemistry can be done with just hydrogen and hellium.
Additionally, planetary systems surrounding earlier generation stars are much rarer than those of the same class at the Sun. Planets that formed around earlier generation stars did not have access to a high enough variety of astrophysical metals to create the complex chemistries that chemical life requires and their host stars were likely too short lived to make advanced evolution possible, even if they had planetary systems.
Planets formed around stars younger than/with higher metallicity are much more likely to be gas giants that would have their own set of issues with the evolution of chemical life (e.g. much lower carbon presence).
The "optimal" time frame for the development of complex life on a planet would theoretically vary by its position compared to the galactic bulge its star formed in, i.e. earlier closer to the galactic center and later further out. Being closer to galactic core makes for a higher chance of being blasted by a supernova or other extremely high energy astronomical event, making for a higher chance of mass extinctions.
If most stars/planets formed much before our sun lacked sufficiently complex chemistry, and those formed much after it lack sufficient carbon and provide a host of gravitational/pressure issues that would inhibit technological development even if evolutionary life did arise, it seems likely that most planets potentially with advanced civilizations are of similar ages. With some slightly older examples nearer the galactic core and some slightly younger ones deeper into the spiral arms.
Eh, I don't buy it.
Humans are proof that life is still possible in our universe. How could all life have died out when life is still perfectly possible?
Only way this is possible is if life didn't adapt (which I don't see life doing).
Maybe they just don't want to leave their planet because it's dope af
Some humans want to travel even when they're perfectly happy.
That's ascribing human motivations to non-humans. They could be fundamentally non-curious, only using their relative intelligence to solve actual problems in their environment rather than pushing for "what if?".
Um. The desire to explore is pretty innate to all life. Not just humans.
How much "exploring" do sedentary lifeforms (plants, mussels, etc) really get up to?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorsal_root_ganglion
Bivalves such as mussels are aware of many stimuli but are generally incapable of safely relocating making them one of the incredibly few exceptions to the rule.
I would generally assume any alien lifeform we encounter would be closer to humans than bivalves.
This argument has never really made sense to me. If you picked a random individual lifeform from anywhere in the universe, then yes, there's a good chance it won't have much in common with humans. If you take the totality of all life in the universe however, we should see a smoother distribution of behaviors. Human-like behaviors would be within that spectrum by definition and should not be entirely unique.
Let's say of all the intelligent species in the universe, an average of 1% exhibit whatever motivations are needed to go interstellar, and that 1% of those species got a billion year headstart. Well, due to sampling bias, we should still see that 0.01% represented everywhere.
I was flummoxed for a while because it sounds like this isn't even related to what I was saying. Until it clicked that it wasn't.
I only said to be wary of anthropomorphizing non-human creatures. Saying all life explores is assigning the human definition of "going out and charting the uncharted" to all of the exploration that any creature that actually explores does. Other interstellar species could go into space for perfectly practical reasons, like their planet is dying or it's over capacity and they don't want to cull their population. Assigning "human wanderlust" as a facet of all (intelligent) life isn't correct.
Sorry. I may be reading more into the chain than what's actually here. I'm just saying "aliens can't be expected to behave like humans" isn't really a viable explanation to the Fermi Paradox without some big caveats, because given a large enough sample of intelligent alien species, (1) they won't be monolithic, (2) some will exhibit human-like behavior on the premise that humans aren't special, (3) some will have arrived on the scene millions or billions of years before us, and (4) the "somes" from the last two points is enough that galaxy spanning civilizations should already be everywhere even if FTL is forever impossible.
If intelligent life is rare enough to preclude the "given a large enough sample" (I'm thinking one species per galaxy level rarity), then the solution to the Fermi Paradox is elsewhere.
I wonder what another being would need of us if it was already able to travel through the vacuum of space while self-sustaining. We're basically doing that right now anyway.
They'd want our coconuts, I bet. They're pretty cool, I bet aliens don't have coconuts. They might have some cool alien fruit to trade for coconuts. Or weed.
Coconuts are mammals
alien pointing at a coconut tree
Look, m'lord! Horses!
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