this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2024
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You kind of answer your own question there, honestly. If you're at the point where you can somehow convince hundreds to thousands of people to get a one way ticket to turning into a space popsicle for the chance of eventually turning into xenomorph chowder, then you can probably also do better than that eventually.
So from that perspective we both hard agree that interstellar travel is probably not practical to any degree of technology below full-on Star Trek. But also, we both hard disagree that "shoot people into space to die as soon as you have the ability" is something that any society is ever going to do. If some modicum of a survival instinct is needed to evolve intelligence, then the answer to the Fermi paradox is that aliens looked at the practicalities of actual interstellar travel and went "Hell, no".
If anybody out there is willing to do interstellar colonization you better believe that it's because their star is about to pop and they'll try that exactly once.
Agreed. I always try to think of these kinds of questions in two ways.
The first way is from a hard sci-fi perspective, like how can this become a believable thing. How can we change as little as possible in the universe to make this a real and normal thing, so we can expect a reader to have enough suspend of disbelief to serve as a good backdrop to a story. This way it's fun to think about these things and see how we can still be living in the real world, but with something cool added. Instead of going full "it's just magic" and thus cutting out any thought proces.
The second way is from a real life standpoint. Like if we extrapolate our technology into the future, but keep in mind real life limitations, laws of physics etc. So no over unity, no FTL, nothing that would require the power of a star to work but also somehow not be an actual star etc.
So that's how you can easily get to two kinds of answers from a singular question. And it's all speculation anyways, just a bit of fun.
First, there have always been people who have thought, "I'm fine with the chance of dying to do this thing." Free climbers, for instance. If the odds of survival are zero, and your personal effort isn't going to change it, that number goes down by a lot.
Second, unless we find a FTL solution, surviving in space indefinitely is the first step in interstellar travel, because 3000 years is functionally equivalent to indefinitely. If you're response to that is sleeper ships, you only survive if the ship survives, and we're back to the same point. The reason this is important is because if the planet at the destination isn't required for your survival, you have a lot more flexibility for how you colonize that planet, which vastly improves the odds of success.
As for the Fermi paradox, it doesn't require that everyone wants to colonize a different star, build a Dyson shell, or whatever, it requires that everyone who doesn't want to do that be willing to do whatever it takes to stop anyone else from doing it (and can make it count). It's a slightly different proposition, and one that I think is less likely than other solutions.