[ExI] Discussion of whether the Fermi Paradox is a fallacy

[Keith Henson]

On Mon, Apr 6, 2026 at 10:23 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:>
> I can summarize the issue as follows:
>
> Either (A) We are alone (there are no other intelligent civilizations),
> or (B) We are not alone (there are other intelligent civilizations).

I think you should modify this statement to include "within our light
cone."  We don't know and can't know what is happening beyond where we
can see.

> John reasons: if (B) and (C) intelligent life would spread rapidly across the cosmos and (D) it would be obvious to us if intelligent life spread as their megastructures would be clearly visible to us then we can conclude not (B) since we do not see obvious megastructures everywhere, thus (A).

There are two paths that civilizations evolved on a planet could take:
fast and large.  As you know, I have considered both.  If there is an
overwhelming advantage to the fast (speedup) route, then there could
be innumerable high-tech civilizations out there, sunk in the local
ocean to support fast thinking and communications.  We would never see
them.

The large branch follows my speculations about Tabby's star.  Slower
communications, uploaded aliens living in objects close to our
perception of time, up to light seconds across.  Those we could see as
the objects cross our line of sight. Other than the questionable case
of Tabby's star and perhaps a couple of dozen stars in a 1000 LY
sphere around Tabby's star, we don't see them.  If this is the route
technical civilizations follow, there are a vanishingly small number
of them, perhaps zero, because we don't see many blinking stars.  Or
they have just started to spread out.  This seems unlikely to me, but
possible.

Or there is some route we have not considered that takes aliens out of
our view, like they all figure out some access to an alternate and
more favorable dimension, like dark matter, and move there.  (This is
really speculative.)

To the extent we can say anything about aliens, the most likely thing
is John's case, we are the first in our light cone.

But I don't say this with much conviction.  It is a big and strange
universe, and there may be a filter that wipes out all tech-capable
races and that's the reason we don't see them.

> The reasoning is sound, but John treats (C) and (D) are necessarily true, rather than assumptions that need to be justified.
>
> For what it's worth, I think (C) is likely true (but not necessarily true, e.g. see trancension hypothesis), but I have significant doubt about whether (D) is true.
>
> As I see it, option (D) is like opting to burn whale oil that harms life, when more productive and less ecologically disastrous energy sources exist. Consider: nuclear fusion liberates only 0.7% of the energy contained in a star's mass, and it necessitates operating at high temperatures where computation is inefficient. So if optimizing the total number of computations to be performed before the end of the universe is the goal, then I doubt Dyson swarms will be high on any intelligent civilization's list. Maximizing useful computations is the ultimate instrumental goal because it is the source of the only thing with intrinsic value: states of consciousness. And it doesn't matter if it takes hundreds of trillions of years to do it. 99.3% of energy will be trapped in stellar remnants for conversion via black hole engines to drive the hole computers, at times when the universe is much colder, and there is no danger of dooming other life to selfishly snipe that 0.7% for yourself at a time when it's so critical to self-originating life.
>
> Until John can justify (C) and (D) his conclusion of (A) is premature.

While I sort of agree as above, the situation is more complex.

Keith
> Jason
>
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