The glaring flaw in the Fermi Paradox is the time factor. Sure, you could 'traverse' the Milky Way galaxy in roughly a million years (I'm taking Fermi's word for it. I haven't done the maths, but that number seems pretty low), but that's not the same as exploring the galaxy.
Suppose you build a box, say, 1 meter on a side (giving you a cubic meter, duh) and fill it with sand. 100 of the grains of sand are diamonds, the rest are common silica. You could traverse the box in under a second, but to explore the box, looking for the diamonds, is going to take a bit of time. Wikipedia informs me that, on average, a cubic meter of sand is 8 billion individual sand particles. To check each one, assuming you spend about a half second each, is going to take you right 'round 125 years. And that's just sand - there are a lot more stars in our galaxy than there are bits of sand in our box.
If there are ETs whizzing about the cosmos looking for other life forms (I don't think there are - I picked Option 2):
1. It's going to take them a while to get to us.
2. They likely don't know we're even here (sorry, Carl, but that was the grand flaw in Contact).
Boru
Suppose you build a box, say, 1 meter on a side (giving you a cubic meter, duh) and fill it with sand. 100 of the grains of sand are diamonds, the rest are common silica. You could traverse the box in under a second, but to explore the box, looking for the diamonds, is going to take a bit of time. Wikipedia informs me that, on average, a cubic meter of sand is 8 billion individual sand particles. To check each one, assuming you spend about a half second each, is going to take you right 'round 125 years. And that's just sand - there are a lot more stars in our galaxy than there are bits of sand in our box.
If there are ETs whizzing about the cosmos looking for other life forms (I don't think there are - I picked Option 2):
1. It's going to take them a while to get to us.
2. They likely don't know we're even here (sorry, Carl, but that was the grand flaw in Contact).
Boru
‘I can’t be having with this.’ - Esmeralda Weatherwax
