Ah, now I get it. I totally didn't catch it, though. Haven't watched that in like 15 years...lol.

The problem with this solution to the paradox, and there is more than one..but I will address one..is that it requires massive uniformity of motive and approach. Optimists believe the galaxy may be the home of a million civilizations (a number that will surely increase with the new Red Dwarf idea). Perhaps SOME of them would "shield" themselves from us, put us under a kind of Star Trek-ian quarantine. But the explanation requires all civilizations to behave the same way. It also requires, if youre saying they shield themselves from us, more advanced civilizations. What about the onces that arent? The galaxy "should" have thousands and thousands of civilizations that have billions of years of head starts on us..

Actually, the problem may be even worse. It may not just require uniformity among all cultures, but among individuals. In hyper advanced (K3) level of civiliazations presumably individuals would have the capability to communicate with the stars.

As far as the objection that we see UFOs.. well.. the extraordinary claims about UFOs are never provided hand in hand with extraordinary evidence. Certainly there are some things we cant explain.. of course. Not all murders are are solved either. But its a big jump from "lights in the sky" to "oh, must be aliens".

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“If somebody thinks they're a hedgehog, presumably you just give them a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves.”

If there are indeed super advanced civilizations out there they very likely find us inconsequential. If there is a sort of "galactic police" so to speak it's also possible that they keep the lesser species from messing with each other.

A new design of the alcubierre drive has apparently been worked out at least mathematically and could launch mankind into the stars. Maybe that would get the attention of the big kids on the block and maybe then they'd let us know what the ground rules were for peaceful coexistence.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/ ... plausible/

But we won't know until/unless we go.

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Legal Notice: Any references made by the online entity know as SacHawk2.0 or "Sac" in regards to "RolandDeschain" or "iRo" being a pre-op tranny with an anal bead/club and nubbins fetish are entirely accurate.

Veta, we are still using our theories and limitations on this though. The thing is we don't know either way, but to use our limited understanding of the universe as the guide to the conclusion of the lack of intelligent life out there is absurd. Fermi only hypothesized this problem around 1950, in the big scheme of things that isn't so long ago. Hell, people used to believe that if you traveled faster than a horse via car your lungs would explode. What will we realize in another hundred years or so that we were wrong about?

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So in the meantime... Just ignore the observed facts we have?
Yes, I could be wrong. I've me mentioned many times in different threads this is the thing I most want to be wrong about. But that doesn't mean I am just going to blindly ignore the situation as is.
And people are very fond of saying we know nothing, etc.. That everything will change, etc. I disagree. Science in 2013 is far more mature and refined than in its infancy. Whole fields etc are no longer struck down, rather things become more and more refined.
In any case, the theory that is most supported at the moment is that we are alone. If evidence comes along that contradicts this my opinion will change on a dime. If aliens land on the White House lawn tomorrow, if Pulsars end up bring Dyson Spheres.. No one will be as excited as me. Except Todd maybe.
But science isn't about mixing what we want to be true with observation.

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“If somebody thinks they're a hedgehog, presumably you just give them a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves.”

Typing on my phone, sorry.. It should have read pulsars end up being Dyson Spheres.

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“If somebody thinks they're a hedgehog, presumably you just give them a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves.”

Yeah, this is theoretically possible, but practically not a possibility for us right now. We have no way to produce the amount of exotic matter it would take to create the 'warp bubble' where one doesn't already exist, and there's still no theory as to how to a) get a vessel inside the 'bubble' without destroying it or b) interact with the space outside the bubble once the vessel has been placed inside the bubble and the bubble is set in motion. In other words, how to we make is go and how do we make it stop? The Alcubierre drive is intriguing, but still an absolute pipe dream.

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Rzzzzz...

I agree. But then I'm like, "wait, then where did the aliens come from? Damnit!"

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Tanzania¹²

Or perhaps:

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Tanzania¹²

This is true for our STP, other planets might have perfect conditions for other chemistries to work, chemistry is wacky like that!

-SH