From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sun Oct 29 2000 - 03:45:50 MST
At 04:04 PM 28/10/00 -0400, Nick wrote:
>the universe seems to be infinite,
It does? I suppose you mean the alleged uncountable abundance of budded-off
Linde bubble universes, each of which is very finite indeed (in the
relevant sense). Even if open universes like ours continue to expand
literally forever and to [a modest class of] infinite distance, they won't
have any meaningful structure after quite a short time (considerably less
than 10^200 years, say).
>so there are probably infinitely many ETIs.
If that is your intended meaning, I don't think it has much bearing on
detectable ET numbers.
BTW, I propose that we stop using the time-hallowed but universally
execrated (as grievously misleading) term `Fermi Paradox', and adopt `Fermi
Puzzle' instead. As every logician knows, it's not a paradox; but it is
certainly a quite considerable puzzle.
Damien Broderick
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