Billy Brown wrote:
> Eugene Leitl wrote:
> > Not only galaxy, but our galactic neighbourhood (and beyond?). The
> > only good explanation for the Fermi paradoxon is imo still very thin
> > life nucleation density, and more or less simultaneous hatching
> > (heavier elements needing nucleosynthesis). Meaning, we're outside of
> > expansive aliens' light cone.
>
> Agreed, but note that this also requires that FTL travel be impossible even
> to determined SIs. If you think SIs might be capable of FTL travel you need
> an even more extreme sparsity of civilizations - really fast FTL would imply
> that ours is the first civilization to achieve the capacity for expansion
> into space.
And this would be impossible because...? Last I heard, the universe
itself (15 billion years old) was only about 3x older than Earth itself
(5 billion years). If we're on the fast side of planet formation->
technical civilization, and planets capable of sustaining life (and
which would hang around long enough for technical civilization to come
around) did not start to form until the universe was about 10 billion
years old...
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:12:47 MDT