Stephen Wordsworth
Jul 30, 2017 · 2 min read

This is just restating the main point of the “Fermi Paradox” not contradicting it. The entire point Fermi was making was that allot of the popular guesses for the Drake equation predicted a galaxy teeming with life so they were probably over optimistic and life is rarer. Kepler has proven that planets are much more common then estimates at the time BTW.

A sufficiently long lived civilisation should be much easier to detect than its mere radio communications. We could of built an interstellar space craft half a century ago with Orion Drive if we had really wanted to. Lofstrom Loops and Orbital Rings are both more useful than a Space Elevator and do not need novel super materials to be built. This can allow industry to be moved into space and exponential growth to consume most planetary and sub planetary resources. See “Dyson’s Dilemma” originally the Dyson Sphere was just a cloud of space habitats and solar panels not a solid structure but still something easily detected with a telescope.

If the human population was to double at a really slow rate like once a century within a 20,000 years human bodies would weight more than the entire Milkyway Galaxy. Obviously imposible but makes a point about exponential growth. Expanding at an average rate of only 0.1% the speed of light is still only takes a hundred million years to colonise the entire galaxy. Such a civilisation in other galaxies would be detectable with current telescopes even if they only spread with engineering projects possible with current technology such as Orion Drive and Orbital rings.

Fusion bombs prove that inertial confinement fusion works when done with enough scale, building a Daedalus type interstellar fusion drive is a mere engineering challenge. So if technological civilisations like this are long lived we should be able to see them even in other galaxies unless they are incredibly rare.

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