Comment by antonvs
2 hours ago
> I wonder sometimes if that’s another thing to toss in the Fermi paradox bucket
Here we are, half a century after the first moon landing, doing a flyby of the moon in preparation for landing and supposedly for establishing a base there that makes no sense. We’re not even close to being able to send humans to the nearest planets, and even if we did send people to Mars, in one of the most pointlessly dangerous and expensive missions in history, it’d be extremely unlikely to lead even to a base, let alone a settlement.
Yet with all that, people still talk about the Fermi paradox as though it’s a mystery.
It makes me think we’re really dealing with a kind of religious belief. Religion backfills reality with comforting fantasies, like life after death. In this case, the fantasy that there are much more advanced, interstellar spacefaring civilizations than ours elsewhere in the galaxy. This implies that humans too could one day become an interstellar species (with enough grit and determination and pulling back on the control stick and yelling, I suppose!) But somehow, mysterious effects prevent us from ever observing any evidence of this belief.
It’s a logical extrapolation if you think life is a natural phenomenon. It would be exceedingly weird to see no evidence for it, but of course we have not been looking long or far.
And yes, space flight is brutally hard. Look up the history of sailing. Look up the Polynesian indigenous peoples and how long that took, through multiple waves of exploration, or the people who walked across a land bridge to North America during the ice age. Space flight is easier and safer than some of those feats, given the tech they did it with at the time.
If there is a fantasy it’s the idea that we’d have bases on the Moon and Mars by now. What we are doing today is the equivalent of early Polynesians hollowing out some logs and going fishing.