Why Haven't Aliens Settled Every Star In The Milky Way? With Adam Frank
At the American Astronomical Society's meeting Honolulu I got a chance to talk with Adam Frank about new research he's worked with Caleb Scharf, Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback and Jason Wright about the Fermi Paradox. They calculated how difficult it would be for aliens traveling at 10% the speed of light to settle the entire Milky Way, and it turns out, it's not as simple as you might think.
Watch the video here:
Comments (3)
Cool analysis, but it makes way too many assumptions about the nature of more mature civilizations. With AI, the blending of technology and biology, solutions to energy problems, and vogon poetry our capabilities will likely seem god-like in as little as a millenia. The life that (presumably) got started on Terra is quickly turning into a seriously bad-ass expansionistic hungry monster that will do everything it can to consume the whole galaxy and light it on fire. (in a good way) "Life finds a way" and the spark of life is here. ...like space-rabbits...very invasive :-)
Reduce the universe to just this galaxy and you're looking af quite manageable time scales.
Very interesting conversation and I agree with most of it. But think about this: if the universe is billions of light years across and you have a spaceship that can travel at 10% the speed of light, how long would it take to visit all of the star systems? My answer, near infinite. Therefore, the question that we should be asking is: what kind of technology can we develop that will allow us to bypass space? How about the use of quantum entanglement? We are living in the golden age of technology and if we can survive, then we shall discover physics that we don't know about yet.