Quote:
Originally Posted by BrianD
Isn't the great filter just physics? If we really can't travel faster than light, then we just can't get to each other.
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The light speed limitation would certainly make it harder to develop a galaxy-spanning civilization, but not impossible. I've seen
estimates using worldships traveling at about .1c that would have us colonizing the entire galaxy in about a million years. There are quite a few assumptions that go into estimates like those, but even if those assumptions are flawed and it might take four times as long to colonize the galaxy, then that should have happened thousands of times over by now if intelligent life had arisen in the distant (or even not-so-distant) past. So, the question remains: why hasn't that happened?
I suspect that SI and DT are right - such colonization
has happened, to a degree at least, but we're just not seeing it. Perhaps we're looking for the wrong signs, or simply don't yet have the proper tools to see what we know will be the right signs. Perhaps we got lucky and the intelligence that evolved out there has adopted a kind of Prime Directive to avoid interfering in the natural development of sentient species, and they're doing their best to be nondescript in our neighborhood. Or perhaps they have a worldship of their own headed our way right now and we'll soon have all the evidence we need of galactic colonization in the form of multi-tentacled overlords (which raises a question: will they be viewed as tyrannical overlords by the hentai community, or as sexual liberators/validation? We'll need to keep an eye on those folks - they seem like potential collaborators).