Comments by "Lepi Doptera" (@lepidoptera9337) on "The Fermi Paradox Has An Incredibly Simple Solution" video.

There is no evidence of our technological civilization in terms of radio emissions, either. People simply don't understand that a radio station that was meant to broadcast a couple hundred miles, at most, doesn't reach very far against the background noise of the solar system (emissions from the sun and plasma). It doesn't matter how big the antennas are. The signal to noise ratio is just not there. We have gone ever more radio-silent since the invention of the internet, anyway. Almost all of our RF communications are now low power directional links that barely reach beyond ten miles. The only way to communicate to another star system is by actively building the necessary transmitter and receiver infrastructure, which we haven't done, yet.
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@Lia-zw1ls7tz7o Yes, the signals will reach the entire accessible universe, eventually, but they are too weak compared to the radio emissions of the sun and the plasma surrounding us. That's a lot of background noise. Imagine you want to talk from one end of a football stadium to the other with tens of thousands of people shouting. That won't work, either. The only way to achieve communication is by building strongly directional transmitter and receiver antennas.
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They are here, already, and probably have been for many millions of years. Are they flying around in UFOs? Of course not.
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@scottbullock3045 I don't know what you are seeing in your mirror, but I am seeing a native. I am just not seeing a very interesting native, as of now. We won't be of any real interest to "them" until we try to leave whatever space has been assigned to us. If we know one thing, then it's that "property rights" are an extremely sensitive matter. We don't have any reason to believe that this changes at the galactic scale. Right now we are living in the nursery. Eventually we will move into the children's bedroom. We will even leave the house. The neighbor won't make himself known, though, until we try to enter his lot... and that's when "they" will tell us that we are overstepping our boundaries. It will, hopefully, come in form of a diplomatic invitation rather than a warning... but it will come.
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Why in the world would a colonizing AGI destroy a living planet? There is no material gain in that. You are simply desperate to avoid the zoo hypothesis, which is far more likely.
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@barneyhall2753 The same as we do. Nature doesn't change just because somebody else is looking at it. If somebody wants a balmy place in the solar system, Mercury would be it. Plenty of solar energy and heavy elements through the roof. The lower surface gravity makes spaceflight way, way easier. Anybody who wants water will go to the icy moons of Jupiter or Saturn or directly to Pluto. 11km/s escape velocity is a giant pain in the bum, at any level of technological development. Super-earths with two or three times the escape velocity are far worse, still, but are likely to have plenty of water and dense atmospheres for life... while being outright hostile to a space fairing civilization. Earth is close to the limits for spaceflight. Any more mass and getting in and out of the gravity well is getting enormously expensive. So why would AGIs go through all that pain when they can live better almost anywhere else?
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Of course they know how to talk to us. Physics tells you exactly how. They might even be talking to us right now, we just haven't built the correct receiver, yet. But to be honest, I think we are probably surrounded by aliens living in the Oort cloud. They are very comfortable there. Why seek conflict when they don't have to?
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Yes! All opposable thumbs up!
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Why would it be short lived. The coal age was short lived and so will the oil/gas age be. The solar age can go on for as long as the stars shine (which is hundreds of billions of years) and the gravitational energy source age could go on for even longer than that.
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@scottbullock3045 I have heard a lot of bullshit in my life. ;-)
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Stanislav Lem's last book is about just that. What do you do with an intelligence that doesn't want to talk to you?
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@bradtem The book ends on a rather sad note. Lem came to the same conclusion. He had similar story lines in other books, where "first contact" turned into a completely futile exercise in human wishful thinking.
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