this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2024
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There are habitable planets orbiting about one in five stars. So a few hundred habitable worlds in that range. Why do none of them transmit?
If I'm not mistaken, the habitable means posibility of liquid water. I'm not aware of any of those planets to be truly able to host a life as we know it. It's always either high radiation, toxic atmosphere, tidal lock, or dozens of other things...
And how would they even transmit? We can barely talk to Voyager that's basically on our own front lawn. A planet out-shouting it's own star seems a bit sci-fi.
High radiation, toxic (to us) atmosphere and tidal lock don't preclude life, though. Besides, we can't detect such details at those distances.
If a civilization existed and wanted to be discovered at that range, we could detect their signals. Now I'm not trying to argue that life does exist, I'm arguing that the Fermi paradox still poses an interesting question. So, since we could detect a signal coming from a few hundred to a few thousand nearby planets, why don't we? Is life rare? Is life quiet? Is there no life? Each of the possible reasons we have zero evidence for extraterrestrial life raises incredibly interesting questions that bear thinking about. Why would life be rare? Why would life be quiet? Why would extraterrestrial life have died out, etc.
The argument that the Fermi paradox just isn't interesting is quite frankly bonkers.