"why, in a universe vast and ancient enough to host billions of potentially habitable planets, we have not detected any signs of alien civilizations."

Our solar system is essentially in the boondocks galactically speaking.

It's the equivalent of an Iowa farmer going out on his front porch and going "Well, shit, I can see for MILES and I don't see any evidence of any 'New York City!'"

There are LOTS of reasons we might not be able to detect alien civilizations, #1 being we've spent entirely too much time looking at radio waves.

As of last year, we're on the edge of having a communications system that doesn't use radio waves:

https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/passive-wireless-system-is-powered-by-electronic-noise

My favorite is the potential to send 1s and 0s via quantum entanglement, but that's still sci-fi at this point:

https://thequantuminsider.com/2023/02/20/quantum-entanglement-communication/

So, what? A 100 year window of using radio waves before they become obsolete?

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 5 points 6 months ago

Man, that quantum entanglement article has some glaring mistakes in relatively basic facts, e.g.:

nothing in nature can travel faster than the speed of light except for photons, which possess zero rest mass.

Photons obviously don't travel faster than light, I assume that one was just a brainfart.

But it's also not just photons which go at the speed of light. Anything with no mass, so for example also gravitational waves, travels at the speed of light/causality.

Really annoys me, because my current understanding is that faster-than-light communication with quantum entanglement is just complete horseshit. But various people, who know a lot more about this stuff, seem to have not dismissed it yet, so I always try to find those perspectives. This does not appear to be one of those...

[–] ooli@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago

the Fermi paradox state that given the billion year available, any civilisation should already have conquered all the galaxy by now. Including Iowa. Even with sub light speed, and given the immensity of space, it would take a few hundred thousand year to reach a new planet and from there relaunch to another.. etc