The Fermi Paradox, Percolation, and Inbreeding

> Cheetahs experienced diverse catastrophes (see what I did there?)

Almost stopped reading after that one (I groaned, it's still to early!) but feel that's when the article kind of lost its plot. Worth reading though some good nuggets here.

I am firmly convinced the observable universe is just too exceedingly vast for intelligent life to sustain contact. Maybe i'm wrong!

I wish there was more background on Percolation Theory because that's not something I'd been exposed to before. But after looking into it more it am happy I did: [0]

As a kid sitting in the backseat of the car (or adult driving looking through a windshield) I always noticed how raindrops would hit the glass, then continue to coalesce with other drops and form larger drops before flying off the pane. Is it the same thing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percolation_theory

> Back of the envelope calculations suggest that even modest propulsion technology should be sufficient for a single technological species to spread throughout the galaxy in a geological instant

I think this is where it all went wrong. Overly optimistic assumptions from atomic age thinkers about how technology was going to overcome all obstacles in the near future based on their recent life experience. The thinkers seriously underestimated the amount of technological progress needed to produce an extremely complex machine that operates indefinitely with no outside support whatsoever in an environment where any error can be fatal and there is a constant stream of hazards to contend with.

You might be thinking: "So what, it just means it takes a few centuries longer to get started, in Geological terms that is nothing.", but the problem isn't that it is hard, it is that it makes the trip significantly harder than simply building orbital habitats in your home solar system. Once you have that, what is the point of spending vast amounts of resources in trying to colonize a mostly unknown star system tens or hundreds of light years away?

Sure there are always people who will want to climb Everest, but this problem is so big that it's unlikely that one person or even a small group will be able to undertake it. The resource investment is simply too colossal. It would be much harder to climb Everest if you had to convince the entire population of London to come with you.

Maybe expanding beyond your home planet never gets as easy as we think it will be in the future.

That seems unlikely. Just imagine humanity 100, 1000, and 1,000,000 years from now. Humans will have solved every physical problem that is solvable.

Humans will have also evolved into new kinds of immortal/superintelligent beings that would be totally unrecognizable to us.

It may be the case once a civilization reaches "max level" they universally decide to "reset the game" because there's nothing left to do. Maybe self-destruction or maybe they "spawn" a new universe. The possibilities are wild.

The discussions around that 1140b Super-Earth made me realize if most of life is on 10G planets, they aren't making it out of orbit, maybe not even into orbit

Even just 2G would require much more advanced technology than we have now to escape the planet