unidentified flying aliens

I don't know why I blog ..but you know, then I get stoned, and I'm just writing, because whatever. I've noticed that aliens have gone mainstream recently. I think it's interesting to imagine rapidly growing numbers of people wondering if we're about to meet space aliens. Must be exciting.

Thing is, space is really big. Time is quite long. It was the Fermi Paradox that got me thinking about the time component of the equation. It seems obvious now, but it hadn't occurred to me that such an alien encounter would require said aliens exist at the same time we do, relatively speaking, and that this is at least as astronomically unlikely as them existing nearby. Relatively speaking. If they're out there, it was a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away.

The premise of the Fermi Paradox is that given the vastness of time, if they're out there, a good portion of them should be far older and more advanced than we are. Another thousand years and we could be colonizing the solar system. What of a race that's a million years ahead of us? A billion? Given modern technology, at least some of such vast and powerful civilizations would be detectable from hundreds of lightyears away. 

We can come up with reasons why some might not be, but in decades of searching, they've found nothing. Not just government scientists, but at all levels, around the world, even avid hobbyists - nothing. The most likely explanation being that like everything else, it's all transient, fleeting, temporary. Even technologically advancing species like ours. They don't exist long enough to become that advanced. Ever. 

Maybe there are evolutionary laws at work, even at such advanced levels. Maybe this is why progress is impossible, why communism never wins. Power begets power until we're all dead. Maybe it goes this way every time, around the universe. Survival of the fittest eventually strangles itself and starts anew, every time. 

It's possible this occurs before any of them are even capable of interstellar travel, simply because it's technologically possible to destroy ourselves well before it's possible to get anywhere near the speed of light, let alone any implausible wormhole stuff.