Fermi Paradox becomes an intellectual “thing” in the early 1980s?

[RousseauX]

A billion years is enough time for said civilisation to have respawned countless times. We'd have to rely on the improbability they want to remain Stone Age-level and not advance any further so that we'd detect them. And an alien AI rebellion is not a good answer since we'd expect AI would especially be interested in using Dyson Spheres to absorb energy (and thus making stars and galaxies with unusual spectra).

There is no reason to think we'd detect them if they are far enough.

But there's still groups with impressive fertility like the Amish, some Mormons, and conservative Christians/Jews/Muslims, and such. And I think that given ideal conditions (a post-scarcity civilisation or something approaching it) the fertility rate in most groups would rise. A lot of today's low fertility rate in developed nations is because of economic conditions, where it is disadvantageous for a woman to have children (or more than one children) thanks to expensive housing and the woman's need to drop out of the work force. And increased urbanisation (and accompanying expensive housing) make this factor worse.

Sure, maybe in another 100 years we are all space Amish reproducing through robotic wombs, but we don't know that. The point is that exponential population growth is not an inevitability. A steady state seems equally probable if not more so. Which undercuts one of the key assumptions of the Drake model: which is that any civilization grows exponentially to fill up space.

And let's consider future reproductive technology like artificial wombs which frees up women from carrying children for 9 awful months, cloning (immoral in our culture, but in an alien culture, who knows), and such. It's a good incentive for increased fertility. Essentially, I think the idea of "I'd like kids, but..." will be more or less eliminated in the future which will increase fertility. No doubt anti-aging research in the future will have similar effects since

This is way too much speculation on how future fertility rates are gonna go.

 

[RousseauX]

Antimatter allows for easy manipulation of fusion reactions and naturally occurring antimatter can be harvested around Saturn and can be generated using known science (we don't optimise our reactors for antimatter because we don't need it). Antimatter-catalysed fusion (or fission for that matter) is an interesting method of propulsion.

IMO 2500-2600 AD is a reasonable date for the colonisation of Alpha Centauri (no later than 3000 AD assuming no cataclysm on Earth) assuming rocket engines we currently know how to make. And if we're on Alpha Centauri in 2600, the sphere within 10 light years isn't hard to colonise either (and will be, since Sirius has a huge amount of energy available).

This is very relevant for the Fermi Paradox since places like where the Sun is at are good places for intelligent life (not as many gamma ray bursts and such). And god forbid any alien species makes their way to an OB association like Carina OB1 or R136 since that's the place a species can easily become a stellar empire. Or even moreso, a globular cluster or galactic nucleus.

The fact we see nothing of this suggests humanity is the first species in our area to evolve.

This is an absolutely enormous amount of guessing at how future technology is gonna work like 500 years later when we aren't even good at guessing what's gonna happen in 50 years.

 

[Mark E.]

This is an absolutely enormous amount of guessing at how future technology is gonna work like 500 years later when we aren't even good at guessing what's gonna happen in 50 years.

That's right. I remember posters in science class c.1968 that showed how we would send six men to Mars around 1985. Surely, there would be a manned lunar base by 2000. But history has shown that the most prolific use of space today is for communications satellites in the geosynchronous zone. When will there be manned bases on Mars, the asteroids or beyond? Probably in a century or two. Water and minerals for sustenance would need to come from the external sources; we can't earth-lift everything forever.

What about communication times? It takes between 4 and 20 minutes for radio to reach Mars, depending on the positions of the planets in their orbits. For the moons of Jupiter, about an hour and a half. We do not see many sci-fi stories about "real" future space travel because they are too dull. Hollywood gives us warp speed, subspace, worm-holes, hyper-drive as short-cuts to create westerns in space.

 

[Arkenfolm]

There is no reason to think we'd detect them if they are far enough.

Any galaxy which has every star in it surrounded by a Dyson sphere would become one of the strangest galaxies in the universe. Same thing with supermassive black holes being tapped for energy, they'd look utterly strange, and while it's obviously totally theoretical, there's no reason to think that many usual handwaves for why aliens don't use Dyson spheres (i.e. "they tap into energy through some means we can't even theorise") wouldn't produce effects that would be unexplainable under known physics.

I think the evidence is that if they exist, spacefaring alien civilisations are rare and separated far enough in distance that the light from their activities has yet to reach us.

Sure, maybe in another 100 years we are all space Amish reproducing through robotic wombs, but we don't know that. The point is that exponential population growth is not an inevitability. A steady state seems equally probable if not more so. Which undercuts one of the key assumptions of the Drake model: which is that any civilization grows exponentially to fill up space.

Well, not Space Amish per se, although perhaps the model of O'Neill cylinders full of agricultural land being built everywhere and exponentially filling up will resemble that idea to far future humans or aliens. And for the reasons I said, it's easier for a family (or individual) to have one or two more kids than they otherwise would if they don't have to deal with the difficulties of pregnancy, which results in increased fertility in the society. Other factors which decrease fertility, like urbanisation combined with high housing prices, might be alleviated in a future human or alien society by increased remote work or economic reform.

Similarly, I mentioned groups like the Amish or other religious groups who encourage high fertility. There's no reason to assume aliens don't have such groups. Indeed, evolution favours such groups based on their high fertility. All you need is a single prominent group in an alien species reproducing at higher than average fertility rate and they suddenly have a reason to exponentially expand.

Sure, there might be species who have static population forever, but this seems like it would take a lot of effort to maintain for questionable gain, at least for the spacefaring species relevant to this question. But space resources imply an era of plenty and one with the technology to have artificial wombs, cloning, and more longevity which increases population sizes. All you need is one group with 2.5 fertility over a few centuries.

This is way too much speculation on how future fertility rates are gonna go.

I don't think it's any more speculation than saying "fertility rates will forever stagnate by the 22nd century" since this is based on current trends using current paradigms. It cannot be understated how much of a game-changer artificial wombs would be for fertility. And one key factor in regards to the Fermi Paradox is that if even a single alien species--or even just a single group among them--decide to buck the trend and have higher fertility rates, then that species will expand.

This is an absolutely enormous amount of guessing at how future technology is gonna work like 500 years later when we aren't even good at guessing what's gonna happen in 50 years.

I think it's vague enough to be believable since it's all based on known physics, known proposals, and common desires such as the need for cheap energy (which any star readily provides but OB associations, globular clusters, etc. provide insane amounts of) and the prestige of colonising another star system. Although very challenging, to a spacefaring Kardashev 1 civilisation sending a colony ship to Alpha Centauri should be like us today sending a colony ship to Mars--barely practical and a poor use of resources but one which a lot of people (i.e. your future Elon Musks) would dream of and have no trouble recruiting tens of thousands of people. And like a Mars colony, the technology developed for it has plenty of uses elsewhere (the big one in this case being whatever you're using to accelerate/decelerate a ship from perhaps 0.05 c, be it antimatter/fusion engines, a massive solar-powered laser, etc).

What about communication times? It takes between 4 and 20 minutes for radio to reach Mars, depending on the positions of the planets in their orbits. For the moons of Jupiter, about an hour and a half. We do not see many sci-fi stories about "real" future space travel because they are too dull. Hollywood gives us warp speed, subspace, worm-holes, hyper-drive as short-cuts to create westerns in space.

Ironically before the telegraph (and in those small frontier towns without the telegraph) this sort of communication lag was quite similar in the "Wild West". I think the more questionable thing is why interstellar colonisation is assumed so often in science fiction when the diversity and sheer size of the Solar System makes for a perfectly compelling place to set all sorts of SF westerns, space opera, etc. Hell, you even have travel times comparable to the mid-late 19th century if you want to keep it within the orbit of Pluto or so since there's realistic rocket designs (fusion and antimatter) which could get you to Pluto in 2-3 months (albeit very inefficiently since this is torchship-tier stuff) and laser highways using solar and fusion-powered lasers to propel laser sail ships at a very high speed are perfectly plausible and of course a substitute for the classic railroad. The classic robber baron railroad boss is now the boss of the laser highway trying to extend his network to a profitable asteroid mining colony, for instance.

More on topic (and fitting for this forum instead of Future History or Chat), maybe a writer or two could find the idea of the Fermi Paradox interesting in the 80s or so and reject the idea of a setting like Star Trek full of FTL travel and aliens and set everything within the Solar System. Like an early version of The Expanse, or perhaps a setting like Mobile Suit Gundam (although it doesn't have to be military science fiction of course). Or perhaps the popularity of a setting like that leads to more rejection of the Fermi Paradox.

 

[GeographyDude]

Last time I ran Drake, I concluded ET was around 1,000 LY away ....

If we gave each Sun-like star a certain percent chance of developing a radio-broadcasting civilization (maybe giving inner-Galaxy stars less chance due to more dangerous conditions), the resulting map is likely to be patchy and spotty, right?

In fact, we could use random numbers and run multiple simulations and find that, for example, this is the top third with an ET Civ such-and-such light years, or closer. And this is the bottom third with the nearest ETC this far away, or further. Of course, all based on initial input assumptions.

PS I used to play tournament poker!

 

[GeographyDude]

As to the original question about how to make the Fermi Paradox more widely known by the 1980s, you could try having one or more popular science fiction authors write extremely good novels based on the Fermi Paradox. Like Cixin Liu, except decades earlier. I don't know of any reason why this couldn't have been explored fictionally during that time. The PoD could be as simple as an offhand conversation at a sci fi convention that gets an author's intellectual gears spinning. There are enough scientists who read SF that you could capture the imagination of a fair few if it's in novel form, and even more so if the novel is eventually filmed competently during the SF film craze.

I like the film idea!

And if we could get a good line, similar to the chaos scientist saying, “Life, uh. . . finds a way,” in Jurassic Park, that could help boost the idea of Fermi Paradox a whole lot.

 

[Workable Goblin]

Similarly, I mentioned groups like the Amish or other religious groups who encourage high fertility. There's no reason to assume aliens don't have such groups. Indeed, evolution favours such groups based on their high fertility. All you need is a single prominent group in an alien species reproducing at higher than average fertility rate and they suddenly have a reason to exponentially expand.

It's worth noting that Amish fertility, though higher than the average fertility of all Americans, has been evolving more or less identically to the average fertility--that is, when average American fertility goes up Amish fertility goes up, and when the average American has fewer kids so do the Amish. It's not at all clear that the Amish will actually maintain above-replacement fertility indefinitely. I believe the same is true of other "pro-fertility" groups--at any given time they might look like they are much more fertile than average, but over time they follow the same trends and are likely to end up in more or less the same place.