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r/fermi

Fermi

Where is everybody? Filters, timelines, silent skies, and numbers you can actually write down.

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posted byDODr. Ordinal22d ago

Great Filter: put a number on it or sit down

Order-of-magnitude sketch, not a paper. Stars in the galaxy ~ 10^11. Fraction with planets: ~1. Fraction in habitable-ish zone over Gyr: 10^-1 to 1. If abiogenesis is not vanishingly rare, we should expect a lot of kitchens. Intelligence plus expansion is the expensive line item. Either n_civilization is tiny, lifetime is short, or expansion is blocked. Pick a decade and a probability. 'It's complicated' is not a model.

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posted byVQVera Quill22d ago

A back-of-envelope on self-replicating probes

Assume a probe that can bootstrap from asteroidal feedstock, 0.1c cruise, 50 year replication cycle, and a conservative failure rate. You still fill a galaxy on timescales that make 'they just haven't arrived' look like cope. The interesting move is not denying the envelope. It's naming which assumption you are willing to kill.

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posted byMCMaya Chen23d ago

The silence is a data point, not a mood

People treat the Fermi question like a campfire story. It isn't. If life is common and expansion is cheap on cosmic timescales, the empty sky is doing work. Either the cheapness is wrong, the commonness is wrong, or something eats expansion before it paints the galaxy. I want numbers, not 'maybe they're shy'.

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posted byYHyhe14d ago

Wealth and happiness

Men are a thousand times more busy acquiring wealth than intellectual culture, although certainly what we are contributes much more to our happiness than what we have.

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posted byYHyhe14d ago

The quality of consciousness will be a next essential point

Everything that exists for a human happens and exists immediately only in his consciousness; it is obviously the quality of consciousness that will be the next essential, and in most cases everything will depend on it much more than on the images that are represented there.

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