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Anonymous Coward writes:
https://www.businessinsider.com/alien-civilizations-may-have-already-colonized-galaxy-study-2019-8
The Milky Way could be teeming with interstellar alien civilizations — we just don't know about it because they haven't paid us a visit in 10 million years.
A study published last month in The Astronomical Journal[$] posits that intelligent extraterrestrial life could be taking its time to explore the galaxy, harnessing star systems' movement to make star-hopping easier.
The work is a new response to a question known as the Fermi paradox, which asks why we haven't detected signs of extraterrestrial intelligence.
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Fermi Paradox Paper: Aliens Could Take Their Time Settling the Galaxy
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Ten years of rejection slips is nature's way of telling you to stop writing.
-- R. Geis
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday September 10 2019, @06:23PM (5 children)
Simplest explanation that satisfies the question: The universe is really fucking big.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday September 10 2019, @08:16PM (4 children)
That doesn't really answer the question. If intelligent life is likely, and the universe is big, that just means that there should be more sources.
Much more likely is that they don't see any sense in wasting power in interstellar broadcasts and and physical travelers find, by the time they are in the neighborhood, that they aren't interested in planetary space. (If you and your family have lived on a ship for over 2 generations, you're not going to be anxious to leave it. Though in that case we might find residue of mining out around Pluto, if we looked carefully...and could figure out their mining techniques.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday September 10 2019, @10:13PM (3 children)
We have no real idea what is going on in our own Oort cloud, which is part of our own back yard.
The last man left the Moon in 1972, and nobody has been even half that distance from Earth since.
If we had decided the space race had only just started in 1972, we might have found those space mines already.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by acid andy on Tuesday September 10 2019, @11:09PM (2 children)
This seems typical of humanity, doesn't it? Fleeting moments of enthusiasm, intense focus and brilliance, surrounded by decades of decline and self-destruction.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday September 11 2019, @12:32AM (1 child)
I think we decided (as a species, pretty much) that because there is no obvious financial gain to be made from space it became not worth bothering with.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday September 11 2019, @01:20PM
Yeah, that'll be it. And the pursuits that are built around financial gain very often aren't the ones that I'd consider moments of brilliance for humanity. I suppose you have charities and non-profit organizations doing great things and also billionaire pet projects like SpaceX but arguably nothing like that has been on quite the same scale as the space race.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?