In this thread, solve the fermi-paradox through whatever excuses you can think of. Feel free to use realistic or space opera logic reasoning. And feel free to debate anyone's solutions.

Here's my solutions:

-The universe is extremely huge [just play space engine and you'll see], intelligent life is extremely rare [may need to comb a galaxy or two to find ET], not that long lived in cosmic scales and FTL doesn't exist. Probably the best possibility since it means no aliens that will wipe us out, just a bunch of alien wild life to dick around with if we can get interstellar.

-Who says a alien race didn't already take over the galaxy? With dominance of the milky way or at least the part we live in they were able to actually make a uniform system consistent all over that demands that no action towards planet bound civs [be it malicious or benevolent] are taken until they find one of their outposts or sentinels they tend to place in the outer parts of a star system in a obscure place. They may perceive time much different from us.

-There's multiple civs in the galaxy, but they're spread out pretty sporadically [in that only one in like, ten million star systems ever gives birth to a intelligent civilization, and only one in a thousand of those has a currently space faring one] and rarely actually do the "colonize a billion worlds" thing instead preferring to select a some worlds best suited to colonize [kinda like what humans probably will do] or just being nomads or never actually leave their star system. This gets complicated by other life generally having different ideas of habitable. Why would they want earth? That planet has acidic liquids and is too close to the sun! Therefore the only way humans could intersect with them is if a star system had both worlds suited for humans and world suited for planet X folk. And there's not any intelligent life nearby that likes titan-likes or Europa-type worlds.

Even the few that do never take the whole galaxy due to inertia and colonizing ships going in directions where worlds already were colonized causing lots of internal warfare that retards their progress. This gets worse as resources in the inner colonies get used up.

-A giant space monster ate them all.

-Humanity is the first proper civilisation, and therefore, probably will not see other civilisations in a very long time and if we do, they would be primitive, like cave men.
-Humans are an anomaly. No other intelligent life in the universe. Sad face.
-There were always aliens on Earth, but when they found out about whatever destroyed the dinosaurs, they decided to enter cryogenic-sleep or something somewhere to avoid dying. Through a technological mishap, they don't wake up for thousands of millions of years. If humans are still here by then, or if Earth even still exists by then, the aliens come back and want their planet back, war, blah blah blah...

Yay theories...

Derpestein said
-No other intelligent life in the universe. Sad face.

I think that even if intelligent life is a one in [very big number] thing there would have to be somewhere else it occurred if only since the universe is just that vast.

But I can buy the idea humans are the only intelligent life in this galaxy.

Biodiversity in the sense of not putting all your genetic eggs in one pool.

Also, it is sometimes easier not to terraforming the planet to fit life, but to bio-engineer the life-form to fit the planet.

As long as resources are utilized efficiently and not squandered, there's more than enough to make a virtual confederation of galaxies.

-Aliens are really just what we think as ghost.
-Aliens can't be seen by the spectrum that the human eye uses.
-The aliens are really just like the watchmen and are just watching us, but not interfering.

There are several intelligent space-faring species in existence, and our existence has already been documented. We are being observed from afar, but never interfered with due to something similar to The Prime Directive from Star Trek. They may observe us, but they cannot interfere or make their presence known.

We're the result of genetic engineering by Aliens to create a theme park/reality TV show involving what would happen if there was a species that had the capacity to learn from its mistakes... And often didn't feel inclined to do so.

Brovo said
We're the result of genetic engineering by Aliens to create a theme park/reality TV show involving what would happen if there was a species that had the capacity to learn from its mistakes... And often didn't feel inclined to do so.

I think I like this one best.

Relative to the aliens, who live in compeletely different environmental conditions, Earth is deemed uninhabitable and thus crossed out early on from their checklist of places with possible life.

According to what I heard, aliens don't come here because we smell bad...

We don't find an abundance of life because we're only searching through time and space. It's like searching for sharks in a goldfish bowl -- sure, sharks live in water, water exists in goldfish bowls, and with enough bowls, you'd logically encounter a sufficient volume of water that a shark should exist within. But no matter how many bowls you examine -- a hundred, a thousand, an infinite number, holding infinite gallons of water, no goldfish bowl will contain a shark -- because that's not where sharks live.

We cling to the fallacy that because our society exists in space and time, among matter and energy, that these are the dimensions in which another intelligence must exist. We're wrong. We're the fish in the bowl, not the sharks in the ocean. Alien life is beyond us.

Space opera wise I found something that may be interesting.

Doing a brief calculation I say there is every 100000 years about 25 civilizations with spaceships, plasma guns, energy shields and warp drive based FTL, and each of these civilizations on average takes 1000 star systems.

Only around 1,250,000,000 star systems would be colonized assuming a 5 billion year span for intelligent space faring societies and total uniformity to base64 math. That's not much given the galaxy has 300 billion stars.

So maybe it really may just be that the universe, let alone the milky way galaxy is just really, really big.

Although there lies a new issue; What about self replicating probes? A civilization that used such probes would be able to easily comb the galaxy in a mere 10 million years.

AlienBastard said
Although there lies a new issue; What about self replicating probes? A civilization that used such probes would be able to easily comb the galaxy in a mere 10 million years.

Freaky but I believe it has been done before in fiction.

A Solution of Mines:
- We are the aliens... we originated from aliens and their attempt to colonized earth was bombarding it with their species genetic materials which were modified with an evolution code i.e. our consciences is not random. Our home planet is patiently waiting for us to evolved sufficiently to establish contact. Ever wondered why christian bible say "God created us in his own image"? And other tens of thousands of references either referring to a God/Gods or being Gods ourselves?

P.S. These aliens are not capable of interstellar flight but they are able to anchor and catapult asteroids (which contains the genetic materials) to a selected destination.

AlienBastard said Although there lies a new issue; What about self replicating probes? A civilization that used such probes would be able to easily comb the galaxy in a mere 10 million years.

**IGNORING BALKANIZATION EFFECT OR NATURAL DISASTERS**

1 Cycle = 1,000 years. (Travel + colonization.) Each cycle, the number of colonies doubles, assuming that each colony sends out one ship per thousand years.



40 Cycles = 1,000 Years (per cycle) = 40,000 Years.

Milky Way Age: 13.2 billion years.
Time to complete colonization of the entire galaxy: 40,000 years, given no natural disasters and assuming they found a way around the Balkanization effect.

Forget self replicating probes. Even assuming the slowest possible speeds (sub-light) a civilization could colonize every single planet in the entire galaxy in less than 40,000 years.

If there are aliens out there, colonizing shit, in my humble opinion, the most likely solutions to the Fermi Paradox are...
#1: The aliens (regardless of the numbers) have a Star Trek like no interference policy on developing civilization.
#2: There are no aliens capable of spaceflight. We were the first to win the genetic lotto race in terms of intelligence.
#3: They colonize planets which are utterly inhospitable to us, therefore why we simply don't encounter them.
#4: They don't use our ancient methods of communication, so our every attempt to contact them has of course failed as a result.
#5: Balkanization took them down: Every civilization manages to get a few dozen colonies out and then fails to upkeep any sort of coherent empire due to the inability to send communication faster than the speed of light. Resulting in fighting amongst the colonies at worst, or a genuine feeling of not needing to proceed further out into the galaxy at best.
#6: The chance for intelligent life to crop up is simply so insanely low that if there are other alien civilizations, they're simply off in other galaxies and haven't figured out how to traverse the abyss between galaxies in any remotely safe or viable manner.
#7: The chance for a hospitable planet is simply so low that the odds of mass colonization are very low.
#8: The odds of a successful colonization might actually be very crapshoot at best. (IRL, colonizing North America from Europe had a lot of failed colonies. Imagine that, but worse, out in space.)