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triffid_hunter t1_iudvpfi wrote

> If the Milky Way is located in the middle of a void

Nope

The issue is that the Fermi paradox has far too many unbounded variables (due to a sample size of one)

We could barely detect ourselves from the nearest star to the sun, let alone across the Milky way or other nearby galaxies - in fact, the entire history of human civilization is too short to have reached the far side of our Milky way galaxy yet.

If there was an alien civilisation a mere dozen or two light years away with a similar level of technological progression, we wouldn't know - and our own galaxy has a diameter of some 105kLy

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Lucky_Air_8650 t1_iue0w7e wrote

Spot on. I'm sure our own broadcasts fizzle out into noise before they even reach the Proxima system. I wonder how far we could "signal" if we wanted to be found.

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triffid_hunter t1_iue3rxs wrote

> I'm sure our own broadcasts fizzle out into noise before they even reach the Proxima system.

Consider that we've only had a few decades of analog transmissions that are receivable from space, and we've rapidly transitioned to small-range high density terrestrial infrastructure with not just QAM but encryption on top of QAM, in addition to very narrow-beam communications with our local(ish) space vehicles out of necessity to make our range reach our heliopause let alone the nearest stars…

The vastness of space and the speed of light teaches us that distances in time are supremely relevant to the Fermi paradox - if a nearby alien civilisation was merely a century or two behind us (basically nothing in the scale of the universe), they'd never know that they missed our golden years of blasting everything into the sky.

I've been to the Honeysuckle creek radio telescope before, and I asked them if any foreign object ever went through their telescopes' aperture - and (with some reluctance) they told me they'd vaporized a bird once, and even that sort of transmission power would be abysmally difficult to detect at stellar distances even if that sort of transmission had another star perfectly behind the spacecraft they were communicating with at the time.

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