Comments

1

My guess is all intelligent life that may exist in the universe(s) has taken a good like at us and knows to stay the fuck away from us because we are not an intelligent life form, we are a sickness, a fucking plague.

3

Nice article. A lot like the Drake Equation. There could have been an alien civilization that only existed a couple hundred Earth years and their transmissions passed us on by 500, a million, a few hundred million years ago and then went extinct.

4

@1 As the old joke goes; The best evidence for intelligent life in the universe is that it hasn't visited us.

5

Eventually, of course, after their galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years, it was realized that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our galaxy, now positively identified as the source of the offending remark.

For thousands more years, the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space, and finally dived screaming onto the first planet they came across - which happened to be the Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale, the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.

Those who study the complex interplay of cause and effect in the history of the Universe say that this sort of thing is going on all the time, but that we are powerless to prevent it. "It's just life," they say.

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

8

Charles needs to have a references section at the end of each piece so you can keep track of all the name-drops that make him sound well-read and credible, high school AP style.

9

The thing is, you only qualify to be introduced to galactic society after your species has been around for a billion years and is no longer killing everyone.

10

Charles is projecting how humans organize their economy, and have done so for about 300 years of our million year existence, onto every possible intelligent life form out there. I'd expect that if ants or mold developed some kind of communal intelligence, they'd be using something other than capitalism to organize themselves. Maybe people will figure out something better than capitalism. Point is, there was a huge lack of imagination in this piece, and imagination is something that is absolutely necessary in writing an interesting piece about aliens that we can only imagine. There's no point in traveling across the galaxy to meet someone that looks and acts like your neighbor after all.

12

The Fermi paradox is easily explained by the size and age of the universe. It's like standing on a boat in the middle of the Pacific and looking for a single grain of rice that's floating somewhere in the ocean.

That grain of rice is going to dissolve long before you've had the time to scour the entire ocean.

Even if you postulate stable civilizations that last millennia, that's as good as "no aliens" to us if they're on the other side of the universe, or have long since ceased to exist billions of years ago.

13

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhFK5_Nx9xY


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