65
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2026
65 points (100.0% liked)
Ask Lemmy
39687 readers
571 users here now
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Trigger Warning: Existential Crisis
spoiler
Everything about us is young in the context of the wider universe. Human society, the human species, the planet earth, our solar system, our sun. We live near the dawn of creation, even though our universe feels unimaginably old compared to our brief lives. As the skies darken and all the stars burn out, that will take course over a time period longer than our individual solar system will last. When the last light goes out, time doesn't stop, no the universe goes on and there's an even longer period of endless empty inky blackness, the deep void. In the end, the universe may spend significantly more time as an endless dead void than it ever did as a universe with hope of life and at least one planet with confirmed organic life. There is no escaping it, and there is probably no way for our species to even survive and adapt to that era as it is.One of the possible answers to the Fermi Paradox is simply we're the first.
We could be the great scourge of this part of the universe. Expanding recklessly through galaxies in the local group, leaving only the dead husks of stars that have been stripped of all usable energy. The exponential nature of scientific discovery means that not only do we have a head start, our head start compounds as time progresses. We become a horrific but very efficient war machine for the sole purpose of controlling and exploiting all available forms of energy for profit. We seem like we're on that path.
/c/humansarespaceorcs
To be fair its likely to be the most probable answer.
Whilst intelligent life is probably quite common at specific points in time, it isnt common at the same time, and if it is the distances involved are so vast it means we will never know they exist.
The best we can hope for in all likelihood is that we stumble on the ruins of some other species that died out millions of years ago.
Or we stumble on a bunch of blue monkeys who are as intelligent as dogs, but in 50 million years they will be the ones finding the ruins of our civilisation.
That's not an answer, because if life is common, then the chance of us being the first is minuscule.
Lets say that life can only form around main sequence G type stars (ie, like our sun). There is no reason to believe this is true, but lets say it is for this example. The universe is 14 billion years old, and the sun is 4.5 billion years old. Lets round it to 4 billion years old when life first formed.
Now, the earliest G type stars formed approximately 1 billion years after the universe formed. Lets say that life can only develop when those stars were at least 4 billion years old. That puts the earliest possible scenario where life formed at 5 billion years after the universe formed, and that was 9 billion years ago. Low balling it, there are approximately 7 billion g type main sequence stars current in our galaxy.
All together, that means the chance of us simply being the first is very low, and if we are the first, then life isn't common, and if life isn't common, the underlying reason for that is the answer to the fermi paradox.
The Kurzgesagt video about this is really, definitely worth a watch.