543
The Great Filter
(lemmy.world)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2024
543 points (97.9% liked)
Comic Strips
12663 readers
3553 users here now
Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.
The rules are simple:
- The post can be a single image, an image gallery, or a link to a specific comic hosted on another site (the author's website, for instance).
- The comic must be a complete story.
- If it is an external link, it must be to a specific story, not to the root of the site.
- You may post comics from others or your own.
- If you are posting a comic of your own, a maximum of one per week is allowed (I know, your comics are great, but this rule helps avoid spam).
- The comic can be in any language, but if it's not in English, OP must include an English translation in the post's 'body' field (note: you don't need to select a specific language when posting a comic).
- Politeness.
- Adult content is not allowed. This community aims to be fun for people of all ages.
Web of links
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world: "I use Arch btw"
- !memes@lemmy.world: memes (you don't say!)
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
The more I think about the Fermi paradox, the less interesting it gets. The great filter isn't necessary. It's just the distances.
The distances don't account for the complete, total lack of evidence, though. Our civilization is detectable to dozens of light years at least, if you're looking. And we are looking. So, the others.... Where are they?
Well, presumably more than a few dozen light years away. A few dozen lightyears is nothing on a cosmic scale.
Right, a few dozen light-years is like... Less than a rounding error lol. The Milky Way galaxy alone is like 100,000 light years across, and around 1000 light years thick. If we treat the Milky Way as a cylinder, that's a volume of roughly 8 trillion cubic light years to sift through.
Granted, a cylinder is a massively naive simplification for calculating the volume of the galaxy and probably way overestimates things. But even dropping that estimate down several orders of magnitude, billions, or even millions of cubic light years is still an unimaginably large region to search for life. And that's just one galaxy. There's billions of galaxies (that we know of), and some are even bigger than the Milky Way. Searching through all of that for life, especially when we don't really know exactly what to look for, is a hilariously huge task.
I doubt any civilisation has made intergalactic travel. There are enough worlds in any galaxy that there is very little purpose in venturing to another galaxy. The distance between galaxies is also insane. Even with faster than light warp speeds it would take thousand of years to reach a different galaxy.
I definitely agree. I'm more just talking about the search for life though, not necessarily going for a visit lol. If we somehow search our entire galaxy for life and don't find any, naturally the next step would be to start looking through another galaxy - I'm just trying to illustrate just how massive a search that would be.