this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2025
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chapotraphouse
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Hot take: There’s no such thing as the Fermi Paradox, the day I learned anything about radio emissions is the day that theory became bunk to me, the radio bubble surrounding earth is only 75-light-years wide, and the furthest signals are weak and undetectable even with sensitive equipment
The theory rests on the assumption that radio is a universal technology and not a short-lived transitional technology, most of this planet already communicates primarily thru microwaves and fiber optics, even if radio is a common “transitional” technology the magnitudes of time implied in trying to find it at the right time in space makes detection nearly impossible
At a certain distance we can’t distinguish between natural and artificial radio signals, the debates over the WOW! Signal and BLC1 show even if you detect “something” it doesn’t mean much to the wider scientific community
We JUST started looking for techno-signatures in an organized fashion during the last four years, and even that method suffers from similar problems to the radio method (debate over Taby’s Star for instance)
We’re a blind, deaf person in the middle of the woods who occasionally whispers Marco Polo every ten years and then wonders where everyone is
Yeah, the whole thing assumes that the aliens would be using a communications technology that:
We've had radio technology for about a century, vs the 10,000 years or so of human societies existing. Even as recently as 200 years ago, we'd probably be expecting the aliens to show up on horseback with a handwritten missive to be read to us. We make a lot of assumptions that they would use radio waves to communicate, and would beam radio waves at us, when we could very well be using technology that these aliens abandoned for more advanced communications technology centuries or even millennia ago.