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posted by janrinok on Wednesday June 06 2018, @10:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the own-worst-enemy dept.

"Alexander Berezin, a theoretical physicist at the National Research University of Electronic Technology in Russia, has proposed a new answer to Fermi's paradox — but he doesn't think you're going to like it. Because, if Berezin's hypothesis is correct, it could mean a future for humanity that's 'even worse than extinction.'

'What if,' Berezin wrote in a new paper posted March 27 to the preprint journal arxiv.org, 'the first life that reaches interstellar travel capability necessarily eradicates all competition to fuel its own expansion?'" foxnews.com/science/2018/06/04/aliens-are-real-but-humans-will-probably-kill-them-all-new-paper-says.html

In other words, could humanity's quest to discover intelligent life be directly responsible for obliterating that life outright? What if we are, unwittingly, the universe's bad guys?

And if you are not sure what the Fermi paradox is then the link should help, and there is a long explanation of that one in the article.


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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday June 06 2018, @06:54PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday June 06 2018, @06:54PM (#689479) Journal

    The answer to the Fermi Paradox is not guaranteed to be useful. Most of the answers aren't. Resolving the paradox merely requires explaining why we haven't seen evidence of anyone else. That "they kill anyone who sees them" is a valid answer. The problem is that there are lots of valid answers, and no evidential reason to choose between most of them. This is one of the earlier answers. A more recent answer is that members of technically advanced civilizations aren't willing to put up with the lag time that results from getting far from home. (I don't find that one convincing either, but it's a valid answer. And possibly true for some civilizations.)

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