From: Mitch Howe (mitch@iconfound.com)
Date: Sat Apr 27 2002 - 00:29:27 MDT
> > or some combination
> > of them may be the right answer.
I think it would be more than fair to guess that most or all of these
hypothesis may figure into the answer to the Fermi paradox.
Suppose that civilization formation is not extraordinarily rare, but merely
"quite rare," and that conditions in the universe have been moderately slow
to get things started. Of this relative handful of civilizations that would
remain within our effectively smaller light cone, some don't survive very
long at high tech levels, some don't stay in a form we could observe at any
range, and some don't expand. The remaining few that have survived,
remained in an observable form, and have expanded have not left footprints
heavy enough to detect passively from earth.
The odds of any one restriction hypothesis keeping every civilization in the
universe away from us seems remote, but taken together the fact that we
currently seem to be alone does not seem all that unreasonable.
The old argument that we are in a simulation does fall outside of this
mulit-theory, but remains weak for reasons that have already been discussed
at length on this forum.
--Mitch Howe
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