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Thomas
@aviationdoctor.eth
Two studies have independently estimated that the portion of the sky that the SETI program has searched for extraterrestrial life to date is analogous to having searched for fish in all of the Earth's oceans by sampling no more than a drinking glass (Tarter et al., 2010) or a large hot tub (Wright et al., 2020). Which means that the Fermi paradox (the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence) isn't a paradox at all.
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Nico
@nicom
Maybe we should look at the bacteria instead of the fishes... There's plenty in a glass.
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Thomas
@aviationdoctor.eth
To your point, there's certainly a case to be made as to whether we're making unnecessary assumptions when searching for extraterrestrial life (incl. whether we're looking at the right scale). Europa is a good candidate for hosting life in our solar system given the amount of liquid water on it, but the ocean is stuck beneath a very thick layer of ice, so we can't know by just pointing a radiotelescope at it. When it comes to intelligent life, we're assuming that they will emit some radiowaves that we can hear. But even in the history of Homo sapiens, we've only emitted radiowaves for about 100 out of 200,000 years, and we're arguably already starting to cut down on emissions into space thanks to fiber optics and satellites pointing down. It's easy to imagine that truly advanced civilizations may have ditched EM communications long ago
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Nico
@nicom
I also read about looking at stars light variations. Some civilisation may be advanced enough to use most of it and not emit electromagnetic stuff but have devices around the star (Dyson's, the sphere, not the vacuum cleaner) that harvests the energy and may hide light from us in a recognisable pattern. Like a morse star blink.
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