42
The answer to the The Fermi Paradox could be that space is full of dead aliens
(www.livescience.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2025
42 points (97.7% liked)
Space
8336 readers
71 users here now
News and findings about our cosmos.
Subcommunity of Science
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
We don't have evidence that civilizations on other worlds exist at all, but you are saying we should be working under the assumption that these things we don't have evidence for can't self-eradicate?
No. I'm saying that you can't use evidence of some particular thing happening to support a theory that requires something completely unrelated to happen. It's simply not a valid argument.
I'm simply saying that if someone wants to propose that the solution to the Fermi Paradox is that interstellar civilizations quickly perish and never rise again, it kind of behooves them to include a mechanism for how those civilizations perish. We've never seen it happen so there's nothing that can be assumed here. Step two needs to be made explicit.
They're essentially making the argument that if you accept that a civilization can eradicate itself (via nuclear war, climate change, plague, a generation of ipad kids, etc etc) even if you calculate that chance of eradication to be infinitesimally small, then given cosmic time scales it becomes a near inevitability.
But if you choose to believe (without evidence) that an interstellar civilization exists that definitionally can't be eradicated by any means then yes, definitionally that civilization will persist.
That's exactly the "step two" that I'm challenging, though. That's my entire point. I don't accept that civilizations like these can eradicate themselves without some further work to establish that.
None of those are plausible ways to reliably wipe out an interstellar-capable civilization. Especially bearing in mind that "wiping out" in the Fermi Paradox context requires that they be wiped out such that they can never recover. Full blown permanent and total extinction. Something that merely knocks them back to the stone age is no biggie on the sort of timescales the Fermi Paradox operates on.
I'm pointing out that the "answer to the Fermi Paradox" that these researchers are presenting is incomplete in a very fundamental way. It's like proposing an explanation for why the Sahara Desert is dry by calculating how frequently you'd need flying saucers to come and steal all the water from it, but not doing any work to establish that there are flying saucers coming to steal all the water. An interesting exercise in playing with probability equations, perhaps, but not a useful one.