Fermi Paradox Resolutions

It may be the Dunning-Kruger effect for civilizations. The ones that didn't reach the stage of interstellar travel think that is trivial to travel and settle in other star systems. But the more advanced ones may have different ideas, or think that it is a waste of time/resources compared with some more interesting alternatives.

The solution to distance isn’t energy; it’s time. Even at speeds much lower than the speed of light, a civilization could have spread across or explored the Milky Way in a few millions of years. These needn’t have been biological creatures. Von Neumann probes, “Genesis” machines, or just flinging rocks with sensors on them to tour the stars would do the trick.

All our current physics says that the speed of light is a real limit to travel, and to get close to that requires far more energy that a society is likely to have. I can well believe that aliens if they exist may conclude leaving their solar system is not worth the cost. Sure they could do it, but many will die when their spaceship on the way. Even robot spaceships are unlikely to make it very far (on the scale of the galaxy) before suffering a critical failure.Thus I can well believe that al

If we're talking about galactic distances and timescales I don't see why we couldn't safely assume enough technological advancement for either aliens or humans to modify their own biology to the point where centuries would be a small fraction of your total lifespan. I think the bigger question is why any significant number of people would travel to more than a few star systems if you had to do it slowly. If the system is uninhabited then you would be isolating yourself from the re

There is so much we don't know. But I would happily engage in speculation:- Without needing to make it to the closest star, we have big problems here. If we solve those problems before we leave our solar system, we may be changed beyond recognition. We may not be biological any longer, for example, or at least not forcibly so, and traveling as solid matter may seem silly to our future descendants.- We don't understand well enough the nature of reality. For all we know, our machin

What kind of argument is this "only if they are in our own solar system"?Even at the speed of Voyager 2, (15km/s), in a billion years it would cover about 4 * 10^17 km or about 40 thousand light years. I am pretty sure people who have been developing for hundreds of millions of years can do better than that, by orders of magnitude.Also you put a totally strange assumption that all civilisations will only restrict themselves to visiting planets. If there is a lot of civilisat

We will, it just might not happen for thousands of years.Once we have the ability to freeze our bodies in stasis to wake at intervals and check progress, time taken to travel huge distances may become meaningless. Set probe for x light years away, program the alarm for arrival. Of course, communication with anyone not travelling with you becomes a bit meaningless.Obviously a huge deal of progress to be made in terms of energy and replication, maintenance, etc.We're a bunch of stupi

I think the reason why it seems improbable is that we conceptualize interstellar travel with a mental model of travel and exploration based on our human history of exploration and travel on Earth. So we think-- if there were a civilization a thousand light years away of course they would come visit and study us.What if the time it takes to travel between stars is longer than most civilizations exist? What if we aren't that interesting to alien species or aren't worth the time and

The future of space colonization is not finding other worlds, unless we get warp drive. The future of space colonization is man made structures orbiting our sun, gathering resources from nearby planets and shuttling them here. The sun is our battery and leaving it for extended periods of time will take mammoth amounts of technology and risk to leave it for thousands of years.A civilization that travels between the stars will have one of two things, either (1) a complete mastery over their o

No need to be from another galaxy. Suppose that Mars had very fast spaceships one billion year ago. A Martian starts a journey at near light speed, even just orbits around the solar system. Comes back 2k years ago and finds a red desert. Visits Earth, finds it underdeveloped, does a short journey, comes back to Earth now and starts making friends.