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When you look up into the night sky, many emotions, questions can hit you and it can give you a sense of perspective. But have you ever considered answering those questions. Many people will know the gist of what Fermi’s Paradox is but have they put time and effort into thinking about it?
The observable universe is about 90 billion light years in diameter. There are at least one hundred billion galaxies, each with one hundred to one thousand billion stars. Recently, we've learned that planets are very common too. And that there are probably trillions and trillions of habitable planets in the universe. This leads …show more content…
Even if there are alien civilizations in other galaxies, there's no way we'll ever gain knowledge of their existence. This is because, everything outside the Local Group is pretty much out of our reach forever, due to the expansion of the universe. So even if we developped incredibly fast spaceships, it would literally take billions of years to reach these places. So, let's focus on the Milky Way. The Milky Way is our home galaxy. It consists of up the four hundred billion stars. That's a lot of stars, roughly ten thousand for every grain of sand on earth. We know that there are about twenty billion sunlike stars in the Milky Way, and estimates suggest that a fifth of them, have an earth sized planet in its habitable zone, the area with conditions that allow liquid water to flow freely. If only zero point one percent of those planets harbor life, this would mean that there are one million planets with life just in the milky …show more content…
A filter in this context represents a barrier that is really hard for life to overcome.
They come in various degrees of scary.
One: There are Great Filters and we've passed them.
Maybe it is way harder for complex life to develop then we think.
The process, allowing life to begin, hasn't yet been completely figured out, and the conditions required may be really complicated.
Maybe in the past, the Universe was way more hostile, and only recently things have cooled down to make complex life possible.
This would also mean that we may be unique, or at least one of the first, if not the first civilization in the entire Universe.
Two: There are Great Filters and they are ahead of us.
This one, would be really really bad.
Maybe life on our level exists everywhere in the Universe but it gets destroyed when it reaches a certain point, a point that lies ahead of us.
For example, awesome future technology exists, but when activated, it destroys the planet.
The last words of every advanced civilization would be:
"This new device will solve all of our problems, once I push this button!"
If this is true, then we are closer to the end then the beginning of human existence.
Or, maybe there is an ancient type three civilization, that monitors the