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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4079 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 9, 2026

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Why should we agree on the exact opposite of what I just said?

Well, I'm not sure what you meant by "full to the gills" There are about 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. If approximately 1 in 100 galaxies have intelligent life, that's 20 billion different species. I had assumed that by "full to the gills," you meant something like that -- lots and lots of species but very few in the same galaxy. My mistake, sorry.

We may have 1000 human level civilization in 10k ly radius and not many ways to detect them.

I would have to disagree with this based on the basic Fermi argument. If intelligent life is sufficiently likely that there are 1000 human level civilizations within 10,000 light years, it's reasonable to be pretty confident that it happened many many times in the past 200 million years that civilizations emerged within 10,000 light years which were capable of sending out Von Neuman probes and/or a colonization wave at speed of c/1000 or more. Which means they had plenty of time to reach our solar system. Thus the question: Where are they?

You are making couple of assumptions here. That Von Neumann probes are possible and easy. That may not be the case. A higher concentration of dust and rocks in the interstellar medium may turn the shielding requirements totally impractical. And that generational ships at c/1000 just accumulate too much damage during the journey.

You are making couple of assumptions here. That Von Neumann probes are possible and easy. That may not be the case.

Of course I agree -- it's possible that there are unanticipated hurdles which are extremely hard to overcome. Still, the current Voyager probes from the 70s are chugging along at c/20,000; AI is improving at an astonishing rate; and with that in mind, Von Neuman probes which can travel at c/1000 seem pretty likely to me.

Even if the maximum speed for an expansion wave is c/10,000 (double the speed of a Voyager probe), if intelligent life were as dense as your scenario assumes, I would be pretty astonished if none of it had made it here.

In any event, you don't really know whether dust and rocks are part of the distance filter you described so it kind of undercuts your argument.

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