The Milky Way has 100 to 400 billion stars. We are not seeing aliens from Milky Way stars. This is the Fermi Paradox that needs explaining.

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I've argued that science and math evolves the same everywhere (with some variance in time and discoveries). This includes social science. I believe in order for us to get to the point of long distance space travel we will have already evolved social science to the point where we embrace determinism. If this happens everywhere then all intelligent enough life would come to this conclusion and eventually be peaceful. Or destroy ourselves, whichever comes first.

Edit: my point being they'd all be peaceful but also recognize we aren't evolved so likely stay away from us.

> 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

I always had wondered if our parameters for “life” have just been too narrow. Yes we need water and oxygen, carbon, etc that’s how life has evolved on our planet. But who is to say there couldn’t be organisms that thrive in different atmospheres, born and evolved with different elements, temperatures, or perhaps even in dimensions of time and space that our brains simply can’t comprehend. Hell there could be life all around us right now, we just don’t have the capability to see it. Kind of like that movie Flatland, where the one dimensional line could only see other lines as “points” and that the two dimensional shapes could only see other shapes as “lines”, and that third dimensional beings could only see others as “shapes” and so on. Makes me wonder if time or space themselves are just other dimensions, that maybe there are beings out there living from that perspective, and that’s why it would be so easy for them to slip in and out of our sights and imagination. That maybe our own environment and the billions of years it took for life to take our shape have effectively sealed us off from being able to see a larger picture when it comes to the universe. Would be really interesting if there were creatures that can look right through us through a different perspective and understanding of time itself, maybe seeing it all at once and having a casual ability to manipulate that.

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No, we are not in a void. The Milky Way is part of the local group of galaxies, which is part of the Virgo supercluster of galaxies.

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

It's not, if you mean an empty space in the universe that is in some way unusual. We sit in a group of Galaxies called the Local Group. Nothing unusual about the intergalactic distance between them.

Based on very conservative numbers, the Fermi paradox should point to hundreds, if not thousands of life forms relatively close to us. My take on why we don't see them is sheer distance between us and them. Just a few LY of distance makes markers instigating possible life very difficult to detect. Now factor in the 105k or so LY diameter of our own galaxy. A sufficiently advanced race that could possibly travel at near light speed could still take tens of thousands of years to find and visit us, provided they didn't see us as the dangerous parasites that we really are.

Could be that we are seen by other advanced races as barely primordial scum and they don't want to get any of that on their cool space shoes.

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.

I believe OP is referring to the Milky Way’s locating in the KBC Void

The Milky Way sits in the KBC Void

Lmfao how do you look for an alien when the nearest star is multiple light years away?

You would have to have a seriously crazy telescope.

There's nothing to say that life might be even rarer than even 1000 billion stars. I believe the fact that we don't see it in even 400 billion stars to points to life being ridiculously rare. Being in any time of void where the galactic density is definitely less than in 'most' areas of space, would mean that we lack the raw number of galaxies to even get 2 civilizations for example.

> 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.

I think you overestimate our technology's ability to detect life.

• We have detected 5000 exoplanets within 5000 light years of Earth.

• Our technology to see these exoplanets is very primitive.

• Our current technology could detect Jupiter and Saturn, but not the terrestrial planets in their locations in our Solar System.

• Since our technology can't even detect Earth, no way could our technology detect life on Earth.

I think you are jumping to conclusions without sufficient evidence.

We could barely detect any sign of life beyond our local neighborhood of stars. Worrying about other galaxies is getting waaaaaay ahead of ourselves.

If there was a civilization just like ours 1000 light years away, we would be incapable of detecting it. A typical terrestrial radio broadcast would be undetectable beyond about 1 light year. Our galaxy is 87,400 light years across.

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If aliens could travel between the voids of galaxies they would likely be so advanced that neither of us would even be a blip on a screen.

Frasier Caine from Universe Today made a great video explaining that there are in fact more stars in the universe than there are single grains of sand on earth.Video

It's far more likely that there is life out there than not.

This and most people don’t fully grasp time and the age of the universe. We are in just a blip of what has happened and will happen.

Does the ant see planes?
Why do you assume that you will be able to "see" anything

Interesting points. I feel we'd almost need a new branch of science, Astrochemistry to get to the bottom of what forms life could take. Non-carbon may still have to be made up of an element in the same group such as Silicon due to its versatility. Huge sentient rocks, maybe even the size of a planet or perhaps sentient asteroids that bypass all our detection of life. I feel advances in chemistry will be the key, we need to know exactly what each element is truly capable of under the different conditions.

The idea of fifth dimensional beings existing outside of time that are almost able to 'look down' at us from above, the same way a 3 dimensional being can physically look down at a 2d being or flatlander, is an amazing thought. The possibility of biological life experiencing time non-linearly is concept I find fascinating, they would be able to know when they die and flit between any point in their lives but their body would still be anchored in one physical point in space. Or that's just one possibility.

Would u say that the possibility of a galactic wide civilization is not fully ruled out in our own milky way then. Their technology would have to be way more advanced then us to be able to cover a good portion of a galaxy so it very well could go undetected by our standards. There's a part of me that feels it's impossible for a civilization to colonize a galaxy, they are just so mindboggingly huge and vast. I just think by the time a race got to that point they were capable of doing it they would probably fit our description of a god like bejng and they wouldn't even be interested in doing something like that anymore.

Why do people instantly rule out the fact that life might be so rare you'd even be lucky to have just one or two in a galaxy. As huge as galaxies are it's pretty unlikely, I agree, but the signs so far do point to it being pretty rare. I feel we can say life as we know it is rare with certainty. We just dont know how rare.

I agree that the vast distances are huge reason as to why we don't see any even if they are here somewhere. Most finite beings would die on the journey to a distance planet or star as it's just that far away. If there's only a couple aliens in our galaxy it's safe to say we'll never meet, you'd need a multi million year life span minimum and tech that can run even longer.

I think there's so many micro factors that go into it like even how our solar system formed is unique as we have more rocky planets than most and small ones at that. Jupiter played a role in that and so already theres such a hugely specific convaluted factor in how a planet like Earth formed, that I'm sure it rules out most solar systems on that fact alone. Of course this is just for life as we know it already that emerged from water and is carbon based, but that is all we can search for as we don't know anything else.

Drake's equation makes it seem likely that life should be abundant in the universe.

The number of observable galaxies times the average number of stars in each galaxy times the number of planets/satellites in what we call the habitable zone of each system equals an astronomical number that I couldn't possibly fathom, even if we kept the numbers that were used very very conservative. If even 1 in 1,000 of those planets harbor life of some sort there would still be millions with life. If only 1 in 1,000 of those had 'advanced' life, there world still be a shit load of them.

The Fermi paradox simply asks the question "where are they?"

One of the widely accepted answers is, "there are none" while another, my favorite, is that there are many many other life forms out there, but there is also one that attacks, kills/harvests other life for food or some type of personal gain and most of the other societies out there know about them and keep their heads down and their mouths shut... But not us. We are here screaming and waving trying to get anyone to notice us while all the others watch and wait for the horror of this planet being ravaged and killed by the murderers.

Another widely accepted answer has to do with The Great Filter, which is some event or obstacle that the life form must overcome to proceed but usually fails, resulting in extinction of said life form.

Or, again, Mayne they see us for the shit-show we are and have no time for our nonsense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3whaviTqqg

It's just possible that we see no aliens because there are no aliens. Simplest explanation.

I don't rule out the possibility of advanced civilization in the galaxy. The idea of a galactic civilization seems silly to me. Vastness of the galaxy you mentioned is one point. My point is why?

The Europeans looked for India and China because that is where the good stuff was and they wanted it. I think we imagine aliens would be explorers like Europeans.

The way more advanced Chinese had an earlier age of exploration in giant ships. They were generally unimpressed with what they found. Everywhere else was poorer and less advanced. They halted further exploration. An advanced alien civilization might be like Chinese and see little point in exploring the entire galaxy. The knee-jerk answers are more resources or curiosity.

• How many planetary systems would an advanced civilization actually need?

• How many planetary systems does an advanced civilization need to explore before it's been there, done that?

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