Matt Giwer wrote:

There is an answer to Fermi's paradox.

Where are they?
.......

(see the Matt's post in his original, it's pretty long so
it's not quoted here)

There's a very good page on this very topic at

http://www.transhumanist.com/Smart-Fermi.htm

The problem I see with the idea of civilizations
evolving from Type I, II and then III (planet, sun, galaxy
power utilization) is that it doesn't really make sense.
Since there's likely no way to aggregate all that power,
each star is pretty much on it's own. So there's no
real advantage to massive star travel other than avoiding
the risk of your one planet from being wiped out.
Inhabiting more and more stars just gets you more
beings and more planets. Plus due to light speed
limitations, the vast numbers of more beings in that
civilization can't even communicate efficiently.
An advanced civilization could colonize a few star systems and
accomplish that to a good degree (besides gamma ray bursts which are
so hard to avoid that it's kind of pointless). Since the
rate of advancement seems to be hyperexponential, solutions
will almost certainly come before threats are likely to
occur so they might even stay with their own star.

Moving out into space doesn't buy more computational
power because of the hampering effect of light speed
delay, working down into microspace does. Since computation
seems to be a major goal of most civilizations we
could imagine (it is here, vis Moore's law and so on)
I'd think aliens would not expend lots
of energy on moving out into space, but would put more
investigation into nanotechnology, quantum physics,
string theory, etc. Advances into these areas would
likely reduce the visibility of super civilizations
to us and not increase it (the opposite of the Type I -
Type II - type III concept). If you push computational
efficiently to the max (reversible logic, etc), even
waste energy into space for us to see goes down.


Mark