It could also be that the technology to achieve FTL is just over a threshold where the civilization would be unrecognizable to us as humans.
We aren't far from such technology already. For instance imagine just a few generations of biotech and computational technology - it may already be enough for us to transform and evolve into some biomechanical hive that bears little resemblance to our current selves.
It could also be that once you are advanced enough, you transcend this physical universe. For example, the entire universe to a deep sea squid is cold dark water without much other life. They have no way to comprehend that there is so much more to reality. They just aren't capable of it. We are not special and also likely not able to detect or comprehend other levels of reality that would be more vast and interesting to advanced beings than simple FTL leaps around the galaxy. Perhaps they just aren't interested in our little ant hill the milky way.
The lack of imagination around what is possible and the supposed paradox posited by Fermi is disheartening.
The squid can see if not comprehend the fact that water continues or if it gets high enough that there is a boundary between water and air. If indeed it isn't able to see that there is more it would not merely be because of lack of specific knowledge but because of a lack of even basic analytical tools to reason abstractly, communicate between individuals, and pass down analysis between generations over time.
I think there is a reason to believe that this represents a unique threshold rather than one of many and that even highly advanced beings would be fundamentally comprehensible and describable even if their technology is not in a way that probably isn't true of the squid because our abstract reasoning can represent the basic facts needed to describe what they are doing even if it misses the why or how.
Even a biomechanical hive would have greater longevity and resources by expanding even if we don't much recognize what they are doing with said resources.
> The lack of imagination around what is possible and the supposed paradox posited by Fermi is disheartening.
I think similar reasoning could apply though. If advanced civilizations escape into a different dimension or state of being where they are undetectable, we’d need all of them to do that to explain the Fermi paradox.
It doesn't seem unfathomable that it could be the case that most advanced civs escape the confines of our limited universe or even evolved outside of it. Considering how many species there are, millions, it seems unlikely that we are at the "top" of the tree of life, but rather that we are unable to detect more advanced "animals" that are part of it.
Exactly. Life being rare and spread out, space requiring enormous resources to move between stars, most species never outgrowing their backyards seems like it could credibly explain the paradox without FTL.
We aren't far from such technology already. For instance imagine just a few generations of biotech and computational technology - it may already be enough for us to transform and evolve into some biomechanical hive that bears little resemblance to our current selves.
It could also be that once you are advanced enough, you transcend this physical universe. For example, the entire universe to a deep sea squid is cold dark water without much other life. They have no way to comprehend that there is so much more to reality. They just aren't capable of it. We are not special and also likely not able to detect or comprehend other levels of reality that would be more vast and interesting to advanced beings than simple FTL leaps around the galaxy. Perhaps they just aren't interested in our little ant hill the milky way.
The lack of imagination around what is possible and the supposed paradox posited by Fermi is disheartening.