[ExI] Silence in the sky—but why?

[Mirco Romanato]

Il 26/08/2013 14:46, BillK ha scritto:
> Anders tackles the Fermi paradox.

> <http://phys.org/news/2013-08-silence-skybut.html>

> Quote:
> Dr Sandberg concludes: 'Our key point is that if any civilisation
> anywhere in the past had wanted to expand, they would have been able
> to reach an enormous portion of the universe. That makes the Fermi
> question tougher – by a factor of billions. If intelligent life is
> rare, it needs to be much rarer than just one civilisation per galaxy.
> If advanced civilisations all refrain from colonising, this trend must
> be so strong that not a single one across billions of galaxies and
> billions of years chose to do it. And so on.

> 'We still don't know what the answer is, but we know it's more radical
> than previously expected.'

Maybe, just maybe, civilizations reach a point where they "transcend"
what we are able to detect and move to another level altogether.

If we were cavemen, we would look for advanced civilizations in caves.
But if the advanced civilization moved to seasteading or cloud cities,
they would have problems to detect them.

The same is probably true with advanced space civilizations:
if they are able to manipulate gravity, build mega scale habitats, move
faster than light, etc. they could have hardly any interest in coming
down to a gravity pit like a Earth-like planet.

If intelligent life move to artificial support, they would have no need
to live on a habitable planet. We evolved out in the savanna of East
Africa, but expanded out at every chance available and even today the
savanna of East Africa is very scarcely populated.

Mirco