I’ve thought about and read a lot about the Fermi paradox, and I still find it mind-blowing. One criticism I’ve read about the Drake equation is that in guessing how many Goldilocks planets there are it doesn’t take into account having a gas giant in the same solar system - Jupiter has saved us probably a ton of times from being pulverised by comets by acting as a huge gravity well. If you take that into account you can (conservatively) end up with only 2-3 instances of intelligent life per galaxy, in which case everyone is too far away to notice, unless they start building Dyson spheres or fusing together stars to make some sort of really Trippy architecture. If a much more advanced species ever comes into contact with us we’d better hope they are nothing like us - given the way we are with other species on this planet.
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