this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
384 points (96.8% liked)
Asklemmy
43993 readers
1306 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The speed of advancement from the industrial revolution to present.
The relatively short time humanity has been around
The universe is finite but expanding
The Monty Hall problem
The absolute scale of devastation created by humanity
I may be wrong but I thought it was generally believed that the Universe is infinite (or at least that that was the most common belief among those that are qualified in the field)
Edit: I mean infinite in Space, of course it hasn't existed forever
Edit2: I quickly read this article https://www.swinburne.edu.au/news/2021/08/Is-space-infinite-we-asked-5-experts/ where the 3 astronomers answered maybe, yes, and yes. Whereas the two non-astronomers answered no. Since this seems to agree with me I will believe that this is correct and not investigate further
The funny thing is that sounds exactly like what he would say.
We humans are roughly as big compared to atoms and subatomic particles as we are small compared to the largest structures of the observable universe
The telescoping nature of progress
This one makes Fermi's Paradox far more confusing and terrifying to me. The time it took to go from agriculture to the steam engine is nothing compared to the age of the universe, absolutely nothing, and from the steam engine to modern technology is fuck ton nothing.
An intelligent species could go from stone age technology to nuclear weapons in the blink of an eye.
And that's just life as we understand it. We have no idea if we're the equivalent of Flatland in a higher spatial dimension or something. There could be stars with entire civilizations of plasma-based intelligent life churning inside of them. There could be intelligent civilizations lurking in each and every single subatomic particle.
It's possible no matter how far out or far in we look, we just keep finding more universe, more space for something to inhabit, forever...
As they said on
, if we look everywhere and we're the only intelligent species anywhere in this universe ... well that would be weirder than if life is hiding all over the universe.