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I think the space-junk shielding aspect of Orion is a pretty big question mark though? But even if it worked, what's in Alpha Centauri that will make me rich in 20 years when I get back with it? The motivations that drove the age of sail just don't exist.
Endoliths and sponges are not sentient -- sponges are barely even animals! I find it somewhat plausible that we might find a way to live as long as the sharks, but wouldn't be at all surprised if that were a hard limit. (and even less surprised if there were some even shorter limit for big-brained animals in general)
There's not a lot of space junk in the interstellar medium. You can always get unlucky, but it's not, as I understand it, believed to be a guaranteed hit, or something. I think Whipple shields are supposed to be effective against your average space junk at that speed, just because there's believed to be so little mass in the interstellar void.
Hey, I wasn't the one who specified "every known creature" :)
Literally anything, are you kidding? What would you pay to have a genuine piece of Proxima b you could frame? $1000? So that's a tidy few billion there for recovering anything regardless of what it's made of.
Although I don't think it's right to rule out financial interests, some of the most obvious motivations are (1) scientific curiosity, exploration and adventure, and (2) ideological separatist reasons. (Which in fact also drove the age of sail.) The people who find those interesting are not necessarily interested in the financial return on investment.
I think the question, though, is if they will be able to find anything there that they can't find somewhere closer to home. If the answer is "no" (which seems plausible - the solar system is already pretty big) then I agree with you that interstellar colonization might be unlikely. I don't think interstellar colonization is guaranteed if humans persist for, say, another 1,000 years, but I do think we will send unmanned probes during that period of time barring major catastrophes or technological backsliding. In fact I wouldn't be surprised at all if we send our first probes during my lifetime.
Still, it doesn't quite sound, ah, profitable?
I could see us going to A.C. at some point in the next thousand years too -- moderately low probability but it could happen. But I have a hard time seeing us doing it more than once-ish, and setting up a colony seems right out barring extreme (read: unlikely) circumstances on Earth. If your oppressed minority can build a starship powered by atomic bombs, I'd think you might be more inclined to set yourselves up somewhere on Earth and tell your oppressors to fuck off?
And if there's no colonization, the Fermi Paradox still isn't really a paradox? There could be an awful lot of advanced civilizations in the galaxy without them ever bumping into each other if all they can do is go to the next star system and poke around a bit.
I am not sure atomic bombs will be very effective as weapons with another one hundred years of progress, let alone one thousand. Strategic Defense Initiative was ahead of its time, not a dead end.
There are more than 100 stars within 20 light-years; Alpha Centauri is just the nearest. If we start, I don't think we will stop with Alpha Centauri, and if we do colonize one star, my guess is that we won't stop with just one extrasolar colony, either.
And if we colonize another star is likely to be very affected by whether or not we colonize space at all. It's easy to colonize the Moon, but once you've colonized the Moon it makes colonizing Mars much easier. Colonizing Mars makes occupying the asteroid belt much easier, which in turn puts you much closer to Jupiter, and so on out to the Oort cloud. But the Oorts, if they exist, may stretch out most of the way to Alpha Centauri. Thus in the normal course of human space expansion most of the hard problems of interstellar travel may be solved, and traveling to a neighboring star may involve a much shorter trip.
And the interesting thing is that (assuming the continuation of normal profit dynamics we see here on Earth) there will be normal, fiscally-sound reasons to do at least most of the above. Some of this will be driven by non-remunerative dynamics, but a lot of it will be driven by the fact that mining fuel and building spacecraft in space or on low-G bodies is cheaper than doing it on Earth. So once a space economy gets a toehold (driven by scientific curiosity, tourism, national security concerns, or a desire to profit from asteroid mining) it is likely to quickly take off since once you're in space it's much cheaper to launch your next mission from there. Then, given normal human territorial acquisition dynamics, we can predict a boom of economic activity as resources are exploited, followed by stagnation as the existing resources are increasingly claimed or marked for conservation, followed by a wave of expansion to search for new resources that are not already possessed or regulated. Each wave of expansion would plausibly bring with it a new wave of colonization – gold rush dynamics (where most people in e.g. California or Alaska did not get rich off of gold, but established flourishing communities regardless) are instructive here. Iterate this a few times and you've got a group of people (or machines) that are adapted to deep space travel and can manufacture the necessaries from existing resources. Taking a forty-year voyage in deep space to Alpha Centauri to found a colony is now much less of a big deal when you were going to be taking a voyage in deep space your entire life regardless and building colonies on solar resources is a solved problem.
I have no desire to defend the Fermi Paradox; it's at best very speculative because we don't have any evidentiary basis for how often intelligent life arises. But I think you can criticize it without relying on "space big, life short" when the truth is a bit more complex than that.
In case you’re interested, I’ve written on the same speculation as well. Fermi’s paradox isn’t a paradox IMO.
I'm actually a bit more optimistic about detection than you are, because you can build extremely large detection arrays in space.
Ditto for the problem of interstellar debris: my understanding is that Whipple shielding should handle most circumstances even at pretty high speeds. There's also nothing preventing you from just lasering incoming particles.
But with those quibbles out of the way, I think you're probably correct that (particularly since we don't have large detection arrays in space) it's not surprising we haven't seen anything, even if you model life as fairly common in the universe.
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