Solutions to the Fermi Paradox

My personal guess as to the solution of the Fermi "paradox" (not really a paradox) is fairly boring:

1. Space travel is virtually impossible.  This is really the main reason.  The Tsolkovsky Rocket Equation is a harsh taskmaster.  This shows how hard it is to get out of a planet's gravity well: you need to burn fuel to launch yourself.  But the more fuel you have, the heavier your craft is, thus the more fuel you need.  The expansion is logarithmic, and it implies that the expense of even lifting a small number of people into orbit is enormous.  And then, once you're up there, out of the atmosphere, beyond the magnetosphere, then you have real problems: space is trying to kill you.  The radiation up there is extremely unhealthy.  And the faster your spaceship moves, the more problems you have.  If your ship can move close to the speed of light, then, relativistically, there will be particles whizzing into the front of your ship at close to the speed of light - which may be enough to cause devastating explosions - perhaps something like nuclear explosions.  Plus your mass is increasing and time is slowing down, due to relativistic effects.  Even if you manage all that, space is HUGE and it will take you forever to get anywhere, let alone to another star system.

2. Even if it's possible, space travel may be unprofitable.  It could potentially be the case that a civilization could be technically capable of space travel, yet decides not to build a multi-planetary civilization, because the costs are just too high and the rewards are just not worth it.  We humans may one day make just that decision- if we're lucky enough to survive that long.

3. Life comes into existence extremely rarely.  How rare is it?  Tough to say, with a sample size of 1.  Richard Dawkins, in The Blind Watchmaker and in subsequent work, has tried to estimate the probability of a self-replicating chemical mechanism arising by chance, at least in terms of an order of magnitude.  At one end he thought about the possibility that it's 1 in a billion, and at the other end he considered one in a billion billion billion.  Either way, given the vast number of planets in the universe, chances are pretty good that life would appear on at least some of them - but they would be "few and far between".  

4. We're still early in the universe- less than 14 billion years into a universe that will last trillions of years. That probably makes us one of the earliest occupants to achieve spacefaring technology. 

5. There is undoubtedly life out there, but it's mostly microbial.  For three out of the four billion years that life existed on Earth, it was pretty much all microscopic.  (Apparently, some sea fungi may have gotten pretty large more than a billion years ago, and possibly also some algae, but that's about it.)  

6. Life on most planets probably usually doesn't last very long.  On Earth, not only did life appear - an astonishingly unlikely event, in itself - but also photosynthesis evolved, allowing for the existence of plants - which in turn enabled the possibility of animals that could eat those plants.  Drawing on the energy of the sun, living organisms could synthesize new chemical compounds: proteins, nucleic acids, carbohydrates, etc..  But photosynthesis is an extremely complex process, and it's easy to imagine that in many environments it simply never appears.  Without that renewing energy source, life on most planets probably only lasts until it uses up its resources of chemical energy - its "primordial soup".  Then it slowly winds down and finally stops.  This process may take only millions or thousands of years - or less.  We are extraordinarily fortunate to occupy a planet that has supported life for billions of years. 

7. Maybe there are advanced alien civilizations out there somewhere, but light from these other civilizations hasn't reached us yet.  These planets may be billions of light years away, and we would never know it. 

8. Or maybe there is civilization within the "light cone" that we can observe of the universe, but for a variety of reasons we're not aware of it.  Maybe it's so different from us that we can't comprehend it.  Maybe there are aliens whose lifespans last hundreds of millions of years, and their movements are so slight over the course of a decade that they look like rocks to us.  Or maybe there are aliens who experience of time is so fast that entire civilizations can rise and fall within minutes.  Maybe there was one just now, but we missed it.

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