**Ask a monkey a physics question thread**

[wufwugy]

Recommend me a Lewin video

This sounds like another case of "i don't know" to "It must be" with no steps in between.

It's dismal science stuff, for sure. Not experimental science stuff. Ofc all sciences are experimental, just some are near impossible for us to run experiments on

Anyways, my point is that if we compile everything we understand about physics and biology and everything, I think we will find it would be very peculiar and perhaps entirely impossible for there to exist an alien species with strong galactic expansion behavior

It is well worth noting that humans have observed only the tiniest bit of the universe, and that questions which seem like paradoxes are common in this stage of observation. Think of all the "paradoxes" surrounding QM and GR. Schroedinger's cat, the Twin Paradox, etc. None of them is truly a paradox, they just present information in a misleading way, and that presentation implies false assumptions.

In time, the Fermi Paradox will likely be revealed to be no paradox at all (based on the observation that all explained physical paradoxes have all been shown to be false). Unfortunately, that time scale could be millions of years.

Ah that makes more sense now. Granted, I thought Schroedinger's cat and Twin Paradox are called paradoxes because they are legitimately sound paradoxes where new information changes nothing. What I understand about Schroedinger's isn't that we don't have enough information to know the state of the cat, but that we can't have enough information to know the state of the cat. Whereas Fermi's seems simply to be a question with poor assumptions and the answer comes with new information.

I would find it strange today to hear physicists give much credence to Fermi's. Relative to scale, the galaxy isn't teeming with life (and never could), and there are a million other reasons why advanced life wouldn't/couldn't expand beyond their solar systems.


RE: Panspermia. If Occam's Razor was ever needed, it's here. The probability of a planet creating its own life is probably immeasurably higher than it being brought by an asteroid created from a different star.