Fermi's Paradox

From: Victor Smith

> Uh...I thought the scenario had the Dysond stars hiding from the new kid on the block (us)

See, I cant think of a reason in the world for that to be the case. If one argues that the Milky Way is overrun with a very advanced and powerful race dedicated to stomping on any other evolving technical race which comes to its attention, then that might constitute a reason to hide your presence. But otherwise?

Consider what an added expense the parabolic reflector Ive tossed out here would represent. To spend that much wealth, thered have to be an exceeding good justification for it.

The Prime Directive? What about people who disagree with the politics? Can we imagine a civilization composed of trillions of beings who are all perfectly united in their political assumptions? Have you ever been in a room with as many as a dozen people who all shared the same political view?

> (though the PRs couldnt possibly shield all th EM emanations from even a system-wide civilization, let alone an interstellar people.

A very good point. One of my short stories involved an ONeill type civilization living in the outer Solar System. In other words, the solution to the riddle of why weve never been colonized is that the assumption is wrong. We had been colonized, we simply failed to realize advanced civilizations would have no use for planets.

In the story I went into some detail about an electromagnetic mass-transit system which enabled speedy transit from habitat to habitat. A reader sent me an E-mail speculating that the coil switching in the transportation system would probably make EM noise which we could probably detect. I agreed, and it prompted me to think about how the old argument Maybe advanced civilizations dont use radio any more to communicate really explains nothing. Even if a civilization uses tachyons or whatever for communications, thats not the same as being completely silent all along the EM spectrum.

Most SETI people dont think about this because they limit their thinking to planetary civilizations whose scope does not much exceed ours. But with the ONeill concepts, we have to explain why a solar-system-spanning civilization made up of billions of habitats and trillions of individual wouldnt be very noisy due just to technical activity, even in the absence of deliberate radio signals.

Regards,

Mike Combs
http://writings.mike-combs.com