It seems to me that The Fermi Paradox should not question the possible existence of extraterrestrial life on the basis of WHERE are they, but rather... WHEN are they?
It could just be a matter of timing. Any number of civilizations could have existed millions of years before us, and died out before we came into existence.
Example: Let's say you have a date to meet a friend for lunch, and you are late and your friend has to leave before you can arrive. As a result, the lunch date is broken. Does that mean that since you did not meet with your friend, that he or she doesn't exist? No, of course not. It simply means the timing was off; you were late and your friend had to leave.
Similarly, the fact that we have not seen any physical evidence of the possibility of the existence of extraterrestrial life could possibly be explained by the very good chance that the timing is off.
Does anybody know who I could write to, so I could pose this question to challenge The Fermi Paradox ? Please provide links if possible.
Woah there. There's a section on Wikipedia similar to your theory so it sounds like it's already a consideration. It seems, though, that the paradox is based on the idea that there must be many extraterrestrial life forms considering the size of the universe, and since no evidence of any of them have appeared, there must not be any. So that leaves some questions, how likely is it that aliens missed existing in the same relative time period as us, that evidence of aliens hasn't come to us from older alien civilizations, or is alien life rare enough to not have created enough evidence to have come to us. So it still leaves some things open, I suppose, but still a good point to consider. Never know.
Posts: 6530 | Location: Grayson, Georgia, USA | Registered: 06-03-02
I'm not sure who you would challenge, Fermi has been dead for over 50 years. The question of timing is certainly a good one, but not exactly new.
That timing is an issue requires either that we are the first or that previous intelligent life has ended for some reason.
If you scroll down to "trying to resolve the paradox theoretically: Explaining the silence," you'll note that 3 of them are about timing:
They do not exist... ...because an inhospitable universe destroys complex intelligent life. ...because it is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself. ...because it is the nature of intelligent life to destroy others.
(Each is described in somewhat more detail in the Wikipedia article.)
Further down, there is another reference to the timing problem:
They do exist, but... ...We are too far apart in time to communicate
(Also expanded on in the article)
This is not much different than the idea that they do not exist but once did. The only difference is that they mention the possibilty that they exist now but did not exist X years ago, where X is the number of years it would take a signal to get from them to us.
