The Billion Year Technology Gap



While some contend that there could exist extraterrestrial civilizations that have been around for a billion years and therefore a billion years more advanced than us, others stand by the Fermi Paradox which asserts if they were out there we would have heard from them.

If there are old civilizations out there, I wonder what one billion year generation iPhones look like.

Fermi reasoned, if there are other advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, then why is there no evidence of such, like spacecraft or probes floating around the Milky Way. His question became famously known as the Fermi Paradox. The paradox is the contradiction between the high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and yet the lack of evidence for, or contact with, any such civilizations.


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With a billion year gap, I'd say it's the same as asking if bacteria know they're being studied by current day humans.

Not only don't we have the technology the ET's would use, we can't even IMAGINE that technology.
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Who is to say aliens aren't already here? If the reasonable idea of a "prime directive" that exists in Star Trek also exists in some form in the space diaspora then contact will only happen when we have "made the grade".

Hopefully that will happen before nanotech weapons arrive because that really will be the end of the world. Nuclear weapons will be paintball guns in comparison.
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I'm sorry, but I just can't take the Fermi Paradox seriously. I hope most other rational people can't either. We are just beginning to discover planets in solar systems that are "close" to us. How do you expect us to find satellites, spacecraft, and death stars across the known universe? Even a 1950s known universe. Rubbish.

However, I'd like to believe that there are hundreds to thousands of civilizations that have been or still are in our galaxy alone. It's a pretty easy thing to believe.
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I like Michio Kaku's rebuttal to the Fermi Paradox, which is to think about an anthill next to a multi-lane highway: Would the ants be aware of the highway? How could they recognize what it is, how would they be able to tell, at their level, that the highway was different from any other part of their 'univerise'. And even if they could recognize it, how would they communicate with anyone on the highway? As for the users of the highway, we generally wouldn't notice the anthill at all, either ignoring it or accidentally stepping on it.
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Our technology is still in its infancy when it comes to observing the universe around us. Until recently we hadn't even found a planet outside our solar system the chances of us locating evidence of other civilizations are out of this world (pun intended)

To see evidence of another civiliztion that has interstellar travel we would have to be looking in the right direction, with the device properly focused, at the right time. And then you'd have to realize that whatever you are seeing is a snapshot of something that happened long long ago.

And maybe they haven't come here because humankind is still too wrapped up in our own petty differences to be worth the time.

Think of all the craziness that would ensue by all the conspiracy nutballs if aliens actually made themselves known to us.

Sad to say, but as a race, humans aren't ready to be visited by a race that has the ability to travel here. Maybe someday....
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So long as the dream lasts
consciousness is unable to engage in reflection.
It is carried along by its own decline
and it continues to lay hold of images indefinitely.
- Jean-Paul Sartre
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My personal rebuttal is that no intelligent civilization lasts long enough to achieve interstellar travel. While we are one of many, we have a lonely fate.
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I thought interstellar travel was impossible because you need to travel faster then light and traveling faster than light is against the laws of physics.
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hmm..., it was also previously believed the sound barrier couldn't be broken or worked around (by using the vacuum of space). Presupposition is the place of hypothesis, but that in itself isn't the outcome. My point is: we still don't know and the word 'impossible' is silly.
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one possibility, however slim, and if thats true we better clean up our act: One civilization needs the be at the forefront of technology, why not us? it would explain why we haven't seen anyone else, we are the ones the rest is looking for :D

Time travel messes it up, so thats of the table :)

that or the advanced aliens are playing us like a bad game of simworld.
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If the aliens were advanced enough to find us, and supposing they can see us, they'd see that this planet is far from having it's act together. Much of this planet is governed by liars, thieves, rapists and murderers and has been historically.

Technologically speaking, we're not really advanced beyond imaginary friends, better ways to masturbate, and/or faster ways to kill each other. We can't even recreate the great pyramids of Giza which were built long before our "great society."

Why would an advanced civilization want to come here at all?

Land. Resources. Human slaves. Accident...
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Maybe "they" have long grown out of technology; surpassed the need for it, fulfillment was archived on other things, like the Self. So, contact is out of the question. We still walk alone.

My other take on the issue is that we are measuring these things by our own time span, what if the such lifeforms were born, grown and died in days, yet still found a way to conciousness and their evolutionary zenith? Maybe they have come and gone, there are no gaps, because there is no parallel to us.
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If the stars should be teeming with life, but none an be seen implies another option: That it's hiding and trying hard not to be seen.
There is a possibility that the galaxy is the equivalent of a forest at night and we are something small and young squeaking away in the open when we should be hiding under a log until we know what we might find out there.....
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I'm sort of with K!P and thinking someone has to be the vanguard of DNA and it might be us. Didn't Iosif Shklovsky or someone like him propose the same thing?
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