No, it really isn't. Taking life on Earth as an example, almost all of our technological signatures are effectively undetectable as little as 5 light years away. See e.g. the paper "Earth Detecting Earth" (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.02614). The maximum detectable distance for unintentional signal leakage is 4 light years - about the distance to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star. So if we're looking for that kind of signal, we have a population of exactly one star system that we might be able to detect something from, at the maximum end of the detectable range.

The paper also lists a couple of exceptions, which are the highly directional Deep Space Network and planetary radar, theoretically detectable at 65 ly and 12,000 ly respectively. But these only cover small parts of the sky for short periods, making interception of such signals extremely unlikely. Also, signals like that have only been transmitted for decades at most, so there are at most a few thousand star systems that could conceivably have intercepted one of these signals.

All in all, while the probabilities involved can't be calculated with certainty, they do certainly lean towards it being very unlikely for us to have detected another technological civilization. Which is consistent with what we actually observe.

Detecting non-technological signs, like atmospheric gases, is more feasible but also not necessarily definitive. E.g., the recent evidence for dimethyl sulfide in the atmosphere of K2-18b is considered a tentative candidate for a biosignature, but is in no way definitive.

In short, the Fermi "Paradox" mainly confirms what we now know about the difficulty of detecting life beyond our solar system.

As for spaceflight vs. sailing, at some point extrapolation from analogies just breaks down, and interstellar travel is certainly one of those cases. The energy demands, distances, timescales, technological limitations, radiation issues, economic and political issues, etc. all combine to make it an effectively impossible project.

Try disabling battery saving measures as much as possible and see if it helps.

> ghastly incantations of the epistemology of middle management

I mean, LLM writing has been like that from the early on. Its most perfect niche for writing is the LinkedIn blog post.

I noticed on Altman’s recent announcement about someone being mean to him, he said that OpenAI had “changed the world” - conspicuously lacking any mention of “better”.

With the help of “remote assistance”, that is. Which is probably one of the reasons for the limited rollout.

“Feasible” is doing some heavy lifting there. The whole point of the comment you replied to is that it can take a long time for some new physical technique to become commercially feasible.

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.

“Ideological” in this context is what you say when you’re trying to deny that there’s moral dimension to the issue. Which you absolutely are.