David Kipping

So we're asking, where is this?

Does it lie ahead of us?

nuclear war may be imminent, that would be a filter that's ahead of us.

Or could it be behind us and that it's the advent of technology that is genuinely a rare occurrence in the universe?

And that explains the Fermi paradox.

And so that's something that obviously people have debated and argued about in SETI for decades and decades, but it remains a persistent

People argue whether it should be really called a paradox or not, but it remains a consistent, apparent contradiction that you can make a very cogent argument as to why you expect life and intelligence to be common in the universe, and yet everything, everything we know about the universe is fully compatible with just us being here.

And that's...

a haunting thought, but I have no preference or desire for that to be true.

I'm not trying to impose that view on anyone, but I do ask that we remain open-minded until evidence has been collected either way.

It speaks to the human condition, helps us understand what it is to be human to some degree.

I think, you know, I have tried to remain very agnostic about the idea of life and intelligence.

One thing I try to be more optimistic about, and I've been thinking a lot with our searches for life in the universe is life in the past.

I think it's actually not that hard to imagine we are the only civilization in the galaxy right now.

Living.

Yeah, to this current extent.

But there may be very many extinct civilizations.

If each civilization has a typical lifetime comparable to, let's say, AI is the demise of our own, that's only a few hundred years of technological development, or maybe 10,000 years if you go back to the Neolithic Revolution.

the dawn of agriculture, hardly anything can cosmic time span.

That's nothing.