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this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Asklemmy
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The speed of advancement from the industrial revolution to present.
The relatively short time humanity has been around
The universe is finite but expanding
The Monty Hall problem
The absolute scale of devastation created by humanity
I may be wrong but I thought it was generally believed that the Universe is infinite (or at least that that was the most common belief among those that are qualified in the field)
Edit: I mean infinite in Space, of course it hasn't existed forever
Edit2: I quickly read this article https://www.swinburne.edu.au/news/2021/08/Is-space-infinite-we-asked-5-experts/ where the 3 astronomers answered maybe, yes, and yes. Whereas the two non-astronomers answered no. Since this seems to agree with me I will believe that this is correct and not investigate further
We humans are roughly as big compared to atoms and subatomic particles as we are small compared to the largest structures of the observable universe
The funny thing is that sounds exactly like what he would say.
The telescoping nature of progress
This one makes Fermi's Paradox far more confusing and terrifying to me. The time it took to go from agriculture to the steam engine is nothing compared to the age of the universe, absolutely nothing, and from the steam engine to modern technology is fuck ton nothing.
An intelligent species could go from stone age technology to nuclear weapons in the blink of an eye.
And that's just life as we understand it. We have no idea if we're the equivalent of Flatland in a higher spatial dimension or something. There could be stars with entire civilizations of plasma-based intelligent life churning inside of them. There could be intelligent civilizations lurking in each and every single subatomic particle.
It's possible no matter how far out or far in we look, we just keep finding more universe, more space for something to inhabit, forever...
As they said on
, if we look everywhere and we're the only intelligent species anywhere in this universe ... well that would be weirder than if life is hiding all over the universe.