What is the answer to the Fermi Paradox?

[Valmy]

No one's voted for the Reapers?

There Tim, just for you.

Though I was in fact voting for The Eternal Ones from Star Control 3...which is weird since that game had a horrible plot.

[Grinning_Colossus]

It wouldn't have to be a single civilization, or even a very ancient one. The ability to detect intelligent life and launch and target a relativistic projectile as well as an understanding of the advantages of defection in game theory is all it would take.

[Ideologue]

I also wouldn't be surprised if there were many non-radiating civilizations.  Nukes and television isn't humanity's default state, living in small groups as hunters and gatherers is.  That such people would be incredibly boring to meet also seems to have failed to cross would-be space explorers' minds.

Are you seriously retarded? 

Meeting an intelligent alien race, even one in a stage of development equivalent to the paleolithic would be the most interesting encounter in the history of humanity.

OK.  Let me restate my thesis: they would be boring to talk to.  "No, thunderbolts aren't evil spirits.  No, I don't want to eat your poisonous indigenous food.  No, I'm not a god."

[Queequeg]

That's totally and completely absurd.  There'd be millions of man-hours of research in to their language alone.

[Queequeg]

Pinker, Chomsky and the entire MIT Linguistics department would bust entire rivers of cum for the ability to look at development of language in completely unrelated sapient species. Anthropology would change it's name and at least double in size.  It'd be nuts.  Totally and completely nuts.  What are you talking about?

[Eddie Teach]

95% of what the MIT Linguistics department does would probably bore a normal person to tears.

[Queequeg]

So?  I can't really think of a part of the Academy that wouldn't be interested in Stone Age equivalent non-terrestrial Sapient species.  Maybe Physics.  Biology and the Humanities would freak the hell out.  It wouldn't even be the Humanities anymore.

[Queequeg]

Anthropology has spent the last 70 years freaking out over a few Frenchmen's experiences in the Amazon. This would just upend everything.

[Ideologue]

I accepted that it would be interesting from a scientific standpoint.  But that's true of any new species, terrestrial or otherwise, intelligent or otherwise.  I'm talking about economic and cultural interchange; in those terms, a paleolithic civilization has little to offer in comparison even to a shitty bronze age society.

[The Brain]

My impression is that life probably is fairly common. But it's very hard to say how likely the step from life to intelligent life is. And then there's the step from intelligent life to intelligent life that develops a technologically advanced civilization. One bal-de-sac is intelligent life that lives in the ocean; they are very unlikely to ever develop advanced technology.

[Eddie Teach]

Why not, they could manipulate objects with their tentacles.

[Grinning_Colossus]

No fire means no metallurgy.

[The Brain]

Why not, they could manipulate objects with their tentacles.

Why is it that whenever you mention marine life everyone just assumes "tentacles"?

[Eddie Teach]

[The Brain]

Best spell ever: Brew Space-Mead