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[The Heretic of Time]

See my post above. Most "viable" explanations dont really address the issue. The issue is, at slower than light speed velocities, a single species can colonize an entire galaxy very, very fast (cosmically speaking). If a species started doing it at the KT extinction event on Earth 65 million years ago, they would have already colonized every single star in the galaxy by now. If they started at the Cambrian era 500 million years ago, they could have colonized the galaxy ten times over.

Even if intelligent spacefaring civilizations are incredibly rare, it only takes one civilization to decide to colonize the stars to succeed at doing this in a very short period of time.

That's the crux of the paradox. So, any viable solution that attempts to explain why an alien civilization wouldn't do this, is not a viable solution because it strains credulity that every single civilization wouldn't want to colonize the stars. It also strains credulity, in my opinion, to think that intelligent life is really all that rare. And it reeks of anthropocentrism and egotism to think the we are the very first. The only believable and viable solutions are those that explain why a civilization wouldn't even get off their homeworld in the first place.

 

My solution is totally a viable solution to the Femri Paradox and it totally does address the crux of the paradox.

 

You assume that if a space-faring species COULD colonize the galaxy, that they WOULD. I'm saying that's not true. I'm saying that most of the species are hiding and the others that don't will eventually be destroyed.

 

To go back to my New York back alley analogy:

 

Imagine that instead of hiding and trying not to be found by the criminals that roam the alley at night, you decide to take matters into own hands. You have a gun and you're not afraid. So instead of hiding you'll start exploring the alley instead, figuring that if you'll run into a bad guy you'll just shoot him. At some point you probably will run into someone after which you face a new dilemma: do you trust him? Or do you shoot him? You know that he's probably thinking the same and you're afraid that he might decide that you could pose a risk and shoot you, so the best thing to do is shoot him before he can shoot you.
This will continue to go on until you eventually meet someone is faster than you and he'll kill you. But you know that he will eventually meet his fate too if he stays in the alley long enough.


Now imagine this but on a galactic scale. Species will rise, go exploring, until they find out they're not alone, after which they either decide to go in hiding or they'll join the ranks of galactic warfare where species exterminate one another until they get exterminated themselves. The scenario is not a pretty one, but it is a realistic one and it does address Fermi's Paradox.

[Malanek]

See my post above. Most "viable" explanations dont really address the issue.

I saw your post above but disagreed with this bit completely.

 

As time goes on though, the paradox becomes more and more of a certainty. IF we did succeed in expanding beyond the solar system, you can be damn sure that we would expand across the galaxy. It is human nature. And if we would do it, someone else would too.

I want to focus on this because we understand human nature and can discuss it. Human nature to expand is driven by the need for resources, security or curiosity. Assuming Interstellar travel is possible, it is still likely to be extremely difficult and extremely expensive. By the time we are capable of expanding to a few hundred star systems, it is more than likely that resources will not be an issue because recycling is so much easier than interstellar travel.

 

For the same reason security is likely not going to be such a big issue at that stage. Going to a thousand systems is not going to make anyone more secure.

 

Curiosity is different. But I suspect it is far more likely for the genuinely curious to travel rather than colonize, and to observe rather interfere.

 

Against these reasons to colonize the entire galaxy there is the factor of economics. When there is nothing to gain, but it becomes extremely expensive, it's not going to happen.

[dgcatanisiri]

Yeah, mathematically, sure, over 50 million years, you could offer a possibility of colonizing an entire galaxy, but within the framework we have that exists for our species, we can see the rise and fall of civilization and nations and empires. By saying 'in 50 million years, a galaxy would be colonized,' you are leaving out the possibility that the civilizations in question are still subject to the same kind of rise and fall as they have been - disease, war, even politics or economics, all of these factors could hold back a single civilization from taking over an entire galaxy, or even wipe one out.

 

I mean Star Trek, one of the franchises that has had an influence on modern sci-fi as we know it, has emphasized that there have been galaxy spanning organizations and empires that have existed in the distant past and are extinct in their present. Hell, BioWare has precedent - they created the Rakata for Knights of the Old Republic, who ruled the known expanse of that galaxy far, far away millennia before, but when the Rakata were plague-stricken, they retreated to their homeworld and their empire collapsed, with their descendants effectively living on borrowed time by the time we encounter them.

 

Fermi's Paradox does not seem so paradoxical to me, just because there are so many factors that we don't even know about that are clearly in play, even if we don't know the particulars of them. It doesn't seem like it will be a factor, at least from where I stand.

[DaemionMoadrin]

Yeah, mathematically, sure, over 50 million years, you could offer a possibility of colonizing an entire galaxy, but within the framework we have that exists for our species, we can see the rise and fall of civilization and nations and empires. By saying 'in 50 million years, a galaxy would be colonized,' you are leaving out the possibility that the civilizations in question are still subject to the same kind of rise and fall as they have been - disease, war, even politics or economics, all of these factors could hold back a single civilization from taking over an entire galaxy, or even wipe one out.

 

I mean Star Trek, one of the franchises that has had an influence on modern sci-fi as we know it, has emphasized that there have been galaxy spanning organizations and empires that have existed in the distant past and are extinct in their present. Hell, BioWare has precedent - they created the Rakata for Knights of the Old Republic, who ruled the known expanse of that galaxy far, far away millennia before, but when the Rakata were plague-stricken, they retreated to their homeworld and their empire collapsed, with their descendants effectively living on borrowed time by the time we encounter them.

 

Fermi's Paradox does not seem so paradoxical to me, just because there are so many factors that we don't even know about that are clearly in play, even if we don't know the particulars of them. It doesn't seem like it will be a factor, at least from where I stand.

 

Well, the Rakata didn't rule the entire galaxy, their mode of transportation could only connect worlds strong in the Force, so their empire only spanned a couple hundred planets (if even that much), which is an insignificant number compared to the trillions outside their rule.

[BatarianBob]

Andromeda could have its own Great Filter. Hopefully one more interesting than the Reapers.

[AlanC9]

Now imagine this but on a galactic scale. Species will rise, go exploring, until they find out they're not alone, after which they either decide to go in hiding or they'll join the ranks of galactic warfare where species exterminate one another until they get exterminated themselves. The scenario is not a pretty one, but it is a realistic one and it does address Fermi's Paradox.

But the problem is that a successful colonizing species becomes more powerful. If anyone else in the galaxy thinks that they're trapped in a 4x game and they'd better try to win it, hiding will fail.

[Medhia_Nox]

@The Heretic of Time:  And what are you basing your "realism" on?  There's only on sapient species in your reality to base this hypothesis on - and it's not a space colonizing species yet.

[Quarian Master Race]

More than likely, that cyclical AI rebellion nonsense will just get swept under the rug. 

 

 

 

The conclusion of the Morning War goes against this speculation. The geth spared the remaining quarians without any outside influence. Had they never encountered Sovereign, there would be no heretics. Had they not encountered any reapers later, their initial decision to let the remaining quarians live would have been proven fatal, as Rael'Zorah would have gone forward with his research to destroy the geth, and Admiral Xen would have perfected it, implemented it, and the quarians would be dancing on their graves on Rannoch. The only reason they survived was because the reapers assumed control over them. 

What others might or might not develop later is anybody's guess, but the quarians would have eventually won. 

Yep, without Reapers the current cycle would have successfully destroyed their synthetics at least once, despite the fact that the there was only one species in the cycle even fighting against them (and one whose population made up about %.00001 of all organic sapients in the galaxy). Then you have the fact that the Prothean cycle was defeating the zha'til before the Reapers intervened on the latter's behalf, and the "synthetics will always destroy organics" starts to look like a load of irrelevant horseshit on par with "everyone will eventually die from heat death of the universe".

Then again, the Reapers were programmed by the Leviathan, who are a bunch of gigantic, hubristic moron cuttlefish. Hopefully, their idiotic, self-refuting logic will be remembered as such and swept under the rug, but I somehow doubt it considering that this would directly implicate the writers who crafted it.

[Mcfly616]

Andromeda could have its own Great Filter. 

  No thanks.

[MGW7]

Ah, but the Protheans never built the Zha'til, The Zha did, and they were wiped out by them.

 

The Quarian Geth war could have ended either way without outside influence, and multiple wars in the past had resulted in Quarian retreat.

 

The Geth could have never defeated the combined might of the Galaxy however, and would have been beaten as the Zha were before them.

 

What about when the Protheans built an Ai program of their own, one that had their knowledge, knew about their tactics, and could break their security systems. A lethal first strike could easily decapitate their empire as the reapers did. But would the combined might of the other species been so easy stomped out, not so likely.

 

Imagine skynet, a computer made to command and organize military efforts to make the world safer, one so intimately linked to the weapons that they could not be stopped once turned against you. The same thing happens repeatedly on an interplanetary scale repeatedly in mass effect lore, and one could reasonably assume a similar cycle could happen else where.

[Quarian Master Race]

Ah, but the Protheans never built the Zha'til, The Zha did, and they were wiped out by them.

 

The Quarian Geth war could have ended either way without outside influence, and multiple wars in the past had resulted in Quarian retreat.

Not particularly relevant when the Reaper logic was that "without our intervention, synthetics will destroy all organics". Also the zha weren't so much wiped out as enslaved by their AI implants (not that there is much difference).

It couldn't have, as evidenced by the fact that the geth are on death's doorstep within a mere couple of weeks, before allying with Reapers to advance their tech level, and were utterly exterminated with "very few [quarian] losses" without being given Reaper code upgrades. The initial attack on the sphere wiped a large amount of them out, which downgraded their effective intelligence. Every geth destroyed meant less to add to the network, and thus less chance of the geth being able to come up with a solution to the quarian weapon's overwhelming of their processing power. The longer the war goes on, the more the advantage shifts even less in favour of the geth. They were simply not on the same tier of technology as their creators anymore.

Past conflicts are irrelevant anyway because times and technologies change. Britain shitstomped the USA about 200 years ago in the War of 1812, but imagine them trying to do so today. It's actually worse because the geth didn't manage to rebel due to superior intelligence or technology so much as the fact that the tech which ran quarian society and infrastructre at the time was highly dependant on them, not a factor after the exodus or for any other organic species in the cycle. Also, this isn't particularly relevant to the Reaper logic either way if the other organics in the cycle could have destroyed the machines anyway, as you say.
 

 

What about when the Protheans built an Ai program of their own, one that had their knowledge, knew about their tactics, and could break their security systems. A lethal first strike could easily decapitate their empire as the reapers did. But would the combined might of the other species been so easy stomped out, not so likely.

 

Imagine skynet, a computer made to command and organize military efforts to make the world safer, one so intimately linked to the weapons that they could not be stopped once turned against you. The same thing happens repeatedly on an interplanetary scale repeatedly in mass effect lore, and one could reasonably assume a similar cycle could happen else where.

That would be stupid. Fortunately, if we judge their opinions on synthetics based on Javik's assertions, such a boneheaded move would have had virtually no chance of happening without a massive ideological shift. There's a big difference between using AI technologies to make life easier in certain respects, and handing them absolute control of ones entire society. Skynet is a fictional plot device that only happens because writers don't understand the politics of national/ international (or in this case galactic) security and how leaders actually react to such problems.

There's absolutely no logical reason to hand over C2 of military forces to a machine when those decisions require comparatively little information processing ability, and can be made by organics just fine, and fortunately it never even happens in this universe. The quarians simply used the (nonsapient, mind you) geth as disposable military synthetic cannon fodder, and even the hubristic Leviathans were not intentionally trying to let an AI run their military. Perhaps the exception would be the zha, but plugging your own brain into an AI falls under catastrophic, fantastical stupidity if the whole society including the military is doing it. There's literally no advantage to be gained that you couldn't get with well programmed AI's. Interface with Organic brains aren't going to give them more processing power, and I don't know what could ever lead the zha to believe that it was a necessary step to solve resource issues on their planet.

[Medhia_Nox]

Without something like the Reapers - I truly hope the refugees from the Milky Way are quarantined on a few settled colonies on the outskirts and integrated into the Andromeda galaxy on the terms of the species that hold superiority there.

 

Otherwise - another boring "humanity F-yeah" story.

 

Convenient interstellar wars that wipe out the Andromeda species just in time for us to colonize are convenient.

[The Heretic of Time]

@The Heretic of Time:  And what are you basing your "realism" on?  There's only on sapient species in your reality to base this hypothesis on - and it's not a space colonizing species yet.

 

It's just a thought experiment really, and trying to apply today's knowledge to a hypothetical future. I'm not the only one who thinks this is the most realistic scenario. I'd suggest you all to read this:

http://www.projectrh...cket/aliens.php

If you want to go straight to the part where Fermi's Paradox is debunked, skip down to the 'Fermi's Nightmare' paragraph.

 

If you want to read more about the hypothesis that I posted here earlier, check the same page and go to 'The Killing Star' paragraph.

[MGW7]

The whole modern milkyway has been shaped by the reapers intimately. So any outcomes are a rather moot point over all.

 

Without the relay network would the Quarians have been able to escape Rannoch, escape the Geth?

Would species come in contact with each other so thoroughly if they could not move between stars. Getting from one star cluster to the next without the relays would  take months, if not years, and would require constant degaussing to not kill everyone. Andromeda probably has no relay system, if it has no relay system then each species would have a much smaller territory, likely multiple species that only know their neighbors and no body else beyond them.

 

Before the relay network, before the Leviathans ruled, no species rose to power despite sentients arising before them. They never reached that stage of tech. When they started spreading on the backs of their subservient races they saw that when those races themselves stood on subservient machines. Those machines constantly rose up, and destroyed their creators. The Leviathans could have established a network between galaxies, but before they got there build an AI which turned against them. They reached pangalatic level, no species before or since has done so without reaper tech, which makes it very difficult to judge how the galaxy would develop without such a species rising up first.

 

The Closest geographic homeworld to the humans is Sur'Kesh, which is still over 10 thousand lightyears away, would Humans have ever travelled that far without the relay network.

[Medhia_Nox]

@The Heretic of Time:  Let's be careful suggesting science fiction authors are debunking Fermi's Paradox... especially when "Perhaps" is one of his favorite words to use in his little exploration.  There's no "debunking" there - there's just thought experiments that - "Perhaps" - can solve the paradox and explain it.  Or, perhaps not. 

 

To explain your entire philosophy I prefer Warhammer 40K to be honest. 

 

From a storytelling standpoint - if the species aren't either 1) grossly stronger than us or 2) have been affected by the same constant established by the ME universe itself (i.e. Reapers) then I'll go ahead and play - but largely be bored with whatever convenient excuse they come up with.

 

My hope - is that the species of the Milky Way make it to their new home and are processed and marginalized by the existing species and are then used as merc fodder to fight the wars of powerful species in this new place. 

[Franky Figgs]

Yeah it doesn't make sense at all but this is story telling.

 

Premise: The Leviathan isn't even from our galaxy. And they while their rule in our galaxy seemed at one time absolute they are one of many first species that still exist across the universe. The Leviathan AI's experiment in our galaxy is one of many across other galaxies. And the results of which are still yet to be uncovered, but important to the very end, hence how it all ties in.

 

The first one's are ultimately responsible for keeping the galaxies dark because they can kick each others butts better that way as they don't get along. In time we get to meet them all, punch them all in the face, make love across the universe, then wax philosophical about how it all ended. 

 

Fin.

[Tim van Beek]

From a storytelling standpoint - if the species aren't either 1) grossly stronger than us or 2) have been affected by the same constant established by the ME universe itself (i.e. Reapers) then I'll go ahead and play - but largely be bored with whatever convenient excuse they come up with.

In the real world the Fermi "paradox" has a lot of possible explanations all of which are pure speculation, because we are missing knowledge on a lot of factors like "how many planets are habitable?", "how does life come into being?" or "how long does it take for a sapient species to evolve?" etc. etc.

 

I'm not sure if the question of the OP is about the real FP, or the one in the ME universe, because in the ME universe some of the questions seem to be answered, although I did not read the codex to know the answers precisely. But obviously, in ME there are quite a few habitable planets, it takes about 50 000 years for about 10 (or 20 or 30..) of them to evolve sapient space faring species etc. This rules out a lot of speculative explanations of the real FP.

 

However, there are still a few left that make sense in the ME universe. For example:

 

1. Species are very likely to destroy themselves even on a galactic scale. By accident or war (see Leviathans).

2. There is an end to scientifc progress resp. progress slows down logarithmically (i.e. gets really really slow once you reach a certain level).

 

2. does not explain FP, strictly speaking, because we do have space faring species conquering the galaxy, but it would explain why a very very old civilization is not dramatically more advanced than young ones. Like the Reapers. Billions of years old, but far from invincible or advanced to a point where their technology seems to be uncomprehensibe.

 

Obviously humanity is in a phase of dramatic technological improvement, but there is no reason to believe this has to go on and on, until we are able to colonize the Milky way. Might hit a wall made of natural laws on the way.

[FlyingSquirrel]

Is the Fermi Paradox considered relevant to intergalactic travel? (I'm not saying it is or it isn't, I'm asking if anybody knows.)

 

It seems to me that at the very least, the resource and longevity issues with interstellar travel would be many times bigger with intergalactic travel, and that a species that manages to colonize or explore most of its own galaxy might still find it too difficult to colonize and explore other galaxies, given the enormous distance between most galaxies. 

 

Andromeda is 2.5 million light years from the Milky Way, with considerable portions of that space presumably lacking much in the way of observable matter to be used for refueling and restocking along the way, so right off the bat you'd need to invest a lot of resources to keep some sort of cryosleep functional for the entire journey. It may be that only (1) an exceptionally long-lived and/or non-resource- dependent species or (2) an exceptionally desperate civilization (as the Milky Way is when the Reapers start attacking) would actually initiate such a project.

 

The other possibility, I suppose, is that any long-range exploratory missions from Andromeda or any other galaxies had been detected and intercepted by the Reapers. The Catalyst's instructions were presumably to prevent a complete synthetic genocide of the organics in this galaxy, so it wouldn't necessarily dispatch Reapers to other galaxies if it can just keep the MW isolated.

[Tim van Beek]

Is the Fermi Paradox considered relevant to intergalactic travel? (I'm not saying it is or it isn't, I'm asking if anybody knows.)

 

It seems to me that at the very least, the resource and longevity issues with interstellar travel would be many times bigger with intergalactic travel, and that a species that manages to colonize or explore most of its own galaxy might still find it too difficult to colonize and explore other galaxies, given the enormous distance between most galaxies. 

 

Andromeda is 2.5 million light years from the Milky Way...

For the first question I don't know whom to ask: this is such a highly speculative question that most astrophysicists, say, would IMHO simply answer that they don't think seriously about this, so there is nothing like a "scientific consensus". Looking into some papers, authors state the relevant assumption as something like this:

 

"Galactic colonization is a relatively fast undertaking and could be achieved in a relatively small fraction of Galaxy's age (less than a few hundred million years)." (See e.g. http://arxiv.org/ftp.../1301.6411.pdf)

 

And yes, a few hundred million years is kinda fast compared to the Galaxy's age (about 14 billion years?).

 

So, if you mastered interstellar travel, it does not seem to be such a stretch to assume that you may be able to master intergalactic travel as well. It does not matter if it takes 10 million years or 20 million years to get there, there would have been enough time already to do that over and over again.

 

You don't need to send living beings (in ME: organics). Machines can survive without much need of resources, and, after they arrive in Andromeda, find habitable planets and reproduce e.g. humans from their genes. This is the idea behind e.g. von Neumann probes (https://en.wikipedia...ting_spacecraft).  

[The Heretic of Time]

@The Heretic of Time:  Let's be careful suggesting science fiction authors are debunking Fermi's Paradox... especially when "Perhaps" is one of his favorite words to use in his little exploration.  There's no "debunking" there - there's just thought experiments that - "Perhaps" - can solve the paradox and explain it.  Or, perhaps not. 

 

To explain your entire philosophy I prefer Warhammer 40K to be honest. 

 

From a storytelling standpoint - if the species aren't either 1) grossly stronger than us or 2) have been affected by the same constant established by the ME universe itself (i.e. Reapers) then I'll go ahead and play - but largely be bored with whatever convenient excuse they come up with.

 

My hope - is that the species of the Milky Way make it to their new home and are processed and marginalized by the existing species and are then used as merc fodder to fight the wars of powerful species in this new place. 

 

The thing is that a paradox isn't really a paradox if there are so many hypothetical solutions to it. Sure, we have no proof that debunks Fermi's Paradox, but on the other side Fermi's Paradox itself relies on a lot of hypotheticals and unknown variables that aren't proven one way or the other. Fermi's Paradox itself is nothing more than a thought experiment and I just proposed/linked a few counter thought experiments that solve the paradox.

 

I fully agree with your last paragraph though. It would be sweet if we're the underdogs in Andromeda. The whole "humanity is special" trope got kinda boring and out of hand in the current Mass Effect trilogy.