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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 7766076" data-attributes="member: 22779">I think there's another issue that people tend to forget.  At least, it hasn't really been brought up.  Ok, let's posit another intelligent race.  Let's also posit that it's close enough to our neck of the galaxy that contact would actually be feasible.  Sorry, even if they have some sort of FTL communication system, we don't, so, we're limited to light speed here.  And, so far, we've been transmitting for less than a hundred years.  The odds that a technological species capable of talking to us, also being near enough to us spatially and ALSO concurrent to our time frame is unbelievably small.  If we're off by even a couple of hundred thousand years, an mere eyeblink of time when we're talking about the millions or billions of years available, we won't ever meet.To me, this is the answer to Fermi's paradox.  It's not so much that we never see aliens, it's that the odds of an intelligent, technologically advanced species being in our neighbourhood, RIGHT NOW, are so vanishingly small that of course we're not seeing anything.  So long as the Speed of Light holds up, there will be no alien visitations.  Million year projects are cool for SF and all, but, again, the odds of a species being able to see that far ahead are virtually impossible.  Heck, we're bad enough at looking ten years down the line.  It's why things like terraforming Mars will continue to be a pipe dream.  There's just no way that our society will ever commit to a project that will take centuries to complete.</blockquote>

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