Why do we find the universe so miserably desolate? by Andrew Powell

  

Why do we find the universe so miserably desolate? Life has had billions of years to evolve, advance, and spread, but we can seem to find it. The Fermi Paradox questions as to why that is. Some of the potential 100 billion billion earth like planets in our universe should have billions of years more than us to advance to a technological level unimaginable to us. At our current rate of advancement some civilization out there should have a virtual mastery or the universe by now. There’s something called The Kardashev Scale, which helps us group intelligent civilizations into three broad categories by the amount of energy they use:

A Type I Civilization has the ability to use all of the energy on their planet.

A Type II Civilization can harness all of the energy of their host star.

A Type III Civilization blows the other two away, accessing power comparable to that of the entire Milky Way galaxy.

With a generation spaceship that could travel for about 1000 years a civilization could colonize the Milky Way galaxy in a mere 3.75 million years, a virtual blink of the eye in the cosmic timeline. But still we can find anyone who is attempting that, or evidence of a failed attempt. The Fermi Paradox is obviously unsolved but the scientific community has some thought provoking possible solutions.

1. There simply is no one else out there. Saying that humanity is some sort of glitch in an empty universe. This idea is backed by the conceptual Great Filter or the thought that there is some sort of boundary between the pre-life and stage III that life cannot overcome. Depending on where in the timeline the filter lies we are either rare, first, or doomed to extinction.
2. Super-intelligent life could very well have already visited Earth, but before we were here.
3. The galaxy has been colonized, but we just live in some desolate rural area of the galaxy.
4. The entire concept of physical colonization is a hilariously backward concept to a more advanced species.
5. There’s plenty of activity and noise out there, but our technology is too primitive and we’re listening for the wrong things.
6. We are receiving contact from other intelligent life, but the government is hiding it.
7. We’re completely wrong about our reality. There are a lot of ways we could just be totally off with everything we think. The universe might appear one way and be something else entirely, like a hologram. Or maybe we’re the aliens and we were planted here as an experiment or as a form of fertilizer. There’s even a chance that we’re all part of a computer simulation by some researcher from another world, and other forms of life simply weren’t programmed into the simulation.

What would be your solution to the paradox?

Now knowing about this, does it change your perception of the universe?

http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html