Gah. There's so much to address here, but let me just take the last bit as a means to getting at the rest:
the galaxy looks oddly empty.
No, it doesn't. It looks predictably void of civilizations that are capable of interstellar travel or communication. It actually looks like simple life may be very common in the universe. We simply don't know if that tends to even reach multicellularity or then "intelligence," as that could be so uncommon as to only happen once or less per galaxy as I said above. It's predictably void of interstellar travelers because that requires a level of complexity that may not even be possible. It could very well could literally be a physical impossibility, but even if it's not, it would require such extreme specialization, knowledge, and complexity, that it makes perfect sense it would be extremely rare if it existed at all.
I think we should take this seriously,
I do and I am.
and not try to project our ideas of stages of history
I feel like if anyone is doing that, you are. No offense, but I really do see your concerns as resting on a capitalist realism kind of mindset. It's not about stages of our history, it's about how complexity works and how you can't just jump from one level of complexity to vastly more complex shit without any transitional stages. You don't get society without cooperation. And you don't get interstellar [IS] travel without an extremely advanced society. While I admit this piece is opinion, I think it's ridiculous to think that a species that has reached a level capable of IS travel would not have necessarily developed to the extent of being post-scarcity and in full recognition of the benefits of complete cooperation. All this scifi we consume likes to assume we're just a hop skip and a jump away from being able to do IS, but we're not. Like not even close. As someone else mentioned in this thread, if you have the capacity for IS, you pretty much have to have FTL. If you have FTL, you not only get IS, you quite literally have time travel too.
on something we know nothing about
There are many assumptions that not only we can make, but that we'd be ridiculous not to. For example, we know you need chemical self-replication for life to exist. We know that life increases in complexity by a very specific mechanism: evolution by natural selection. There are even reasons to think that there are certain traits life on other planets would almost certainly share with us. Like life that makes the leap to eukaryotic multicellularity will also almost for sure at some point evolve eyes because of the sheer usefulness of eyes in this universe and the fact that eyes did evolve independently many times here on this planet. There are absolutely assumptions that should be made, or we may as well be arguing about magic wands and unicorns as being possible.
The thing I see people missing a lot in the discussion of "where the aliens at" is:
you couldn't do complex chemistry until Population I stars formed, so there's a floor on when life appears
the conditions for life might be rare
life might be rare
eukaryotic life might be really rare
multicellular life could be even more rare
complex multicellular life might not appear in the lifetime of the planet (we were mostly soup until the Cambrian explosion)
Life tends to settle in local maxima. If there's no big reset like the mass extinctions of Earth, something in the intelligence local maxima might never appear
speaking of, mass extinctions might be too rare to provide useful shuffles or too frequent to develop something in a similar niche as humans, or they might kill 100% of life instead of 95%
back to local maxima: tool using requires a dummy amount of things to go right. Passing down tool use culturally requires even more things to go right
there's no particular evolutionary guarantee for highly social, highly cooperative, intelligent, tool using, knowledge passing species to evolve
even if there is, there's no drive to industrial revolution. Modern humans existed 250k years before we figured out agriculture
and again, too much instability wipes out whatever progress you make. Humanity bottlenecked to less than 10k people at some point. What if we hadn't recovered?
and once a species is technological, what ensures it won't blow itself up?
ok, it's made it this far, and it turns out space can't be conquered, or the species simply doesn't have a wanderlust drive
And all this is against the fact that, cosmically speaking, the universe is really young and complex chemistry wasn't possible until somewhat recently because there wasn't enough of those elements. Maybe we're the first to get to this point.
There's no real reason for intelligent, technological species to occur.
Well said. This is what always gets me when people talk about the Fermi Paradox and ponder at all the possible answers. Well, the answer seems overwhelmingly clear, and it's exactly what you just laid it out. Well, that and that there's a general misunderstanding of the distances and therefore time involved, even if technological life were common.
Gah. There's so much to address here, but let me just take the last bit as a means to getting at the rest:
No, it doesn't. It looks predictably void of civilizations that are capable of interstellar travel or communication. It actually looks like simple life may be very common in the universe. We simply don't know if that tends to even reach multicellularity or then "intelligence," as that could be so uncommon as to only happen once or less per galaxy as I said above. It's predictably void of interstellar travelers because that requires a level of complexity that may not even be possible. It could very well could literally be a physical impossibility, but even if it's not, it would require such extreme specialization, knowledge, and complexity, that it makes perfect sense it would be extremely rare if it existed at all.
I do and I am.
I feel like if anyone is doing that, you are. No offense, but I really do see your concerns as resting on a capitalist realism kind of mindset. It's not about stages of our history, it's about how complexity works and how you can't just jump from one level of complexity to vastly more complex shit without any transitional stages. You don't get society without cooperation. And you don't get interstellar [IS] travel without an extremely advanced society. While I admit this piece is opinion, I think it's ridiculous to think that a species that has reached a level capable of IS travel would not have necessarily developed to the extent of being post-scarcity and in full recognition of the benefits of complete cooperation. All this scifi we consume likes to assume we're just a hop skip and a jump away from being able to do IS, but we're not. Like not even close. As someone else mentioned in this thread, if you have the capacity for IS, you pretty much have to have FTL. If you have FTL, you not only get IS, you quite literally have time travel too.
There are many assumptions that not only we can make, but that we'd be ridiculous not to. For example, we know you need chemical self-replication for life to exist. We know that life increases in complexity by a very specific mechanism: evolution by natural selection. There are even reasons to think that there are certain traits life on other planets would almost certainly share with us. Like life that makes the leap to eukaryotic multicellularity will also almost for sure at some point evolve eyes because of the sheer usefulness of eyes in this universe and the fact that eyes did evolve independently many times here on this planet. There are absolutely assumptions that should be made, or we may as well be arguing about magic wands and unicorns as being possible.
The thing I see people missing a lot in the discussion of "where the aliens at" is:
And all this is against the fact that, cosmically speaking, the universe is really young and complex chemistry wasn't possible until somewhat recently because there wasn't enough of those elements. Maybe we're the first to get to this point.
There's no real reason for intelligent, technological species to occur.
Well said. This is what always gets me when people talk about the Fermi Paradox and ponder at all the possible answers. Well, the answer seems overwhelmingly clear, and it's exactly what you just laid it out. Well, that and that there's a general misunderstanding of the distances and therefore time involved, even if technological life were common.