Alright, well, the Fermi paradox is like... our planet is pretty cool, and human life is amazing, but it's not exactly unique, y'know? The odds of Earth bein' the only planet that supports life are like, vanishingly small! 'Cause space is so huge! We don't even know how big it is, really. And when you look at the whole timeline of the earth and the galaxy, we're basically still infants! So, if that's all true... how come we haven't ever been visited by other civilizations? They should be hundreds of thousands of years ahead of us on technology and stuff, but there's just been nothin'!
...But what makes it scary is how light works: All the stars and galaxies we can see, it's all just echoes. Lights shinin' from stars that are so many light years away that we could take off for 'em right now and your grandchildren's grandchildren probably still wouldn't make it, that's how long it'd take!
So what if there used to be other civilizations, but they're just... gone now? What if everything outside our galaxy is actually just gone? We'd have no way of knowin', 'cause we're just now getting the light from 'em! It might be that every other livin' thing out there - and every rock and planet and hunk of ice -- what if that's all been gone for hundreds of thousands of years and we're literally the only life left. Alone, in the middle of a bunch of infinite nothing.
Hey, also--did you know it takes like eight and a half minutes for the light from the sun to reach us? That means if somethin' ever happened to the sun, like it exploded or somethin', we'd just go on not knowin' it for eight minutes and then--absolute blackness, and sub zero temperatures! Just outta nowhere!
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...But fine, whatever. Uh... you know about the Fermi Paradox?
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...But what makes it scary is how light works: All the stars and galaxies we can see, it's all just echoes. Lights shinin' from stars that are so many light years away that we could take off for 'em right now and your grandchildren's grandchildren probably still wouldn't make it, that's how long it'd take!
So what if there used to be other civilizations, but they're just... gone now? What if everything outside our galaxy is actually just gone? We'd have no way of knowin', 'cause we're just now getting the light from 'em! It might be that every other livin' thing out there - and every rock and planet and hunk of ice -- what if that's all been gone for hundreds of thousands of years and we're literally the only life left. Alone, in the middle of a bunch of infinite nothing.
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NnnnnnEAT.
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Hey, also--did you know it takes like eight and a half minutes for the light from the sun to reach us? That means if somethin' ever happened to the sun, like it exploded or somethin', we'd just go on not knowin' it for eight minutes and then--absolute blackness, and sub zero temperatures! Just outta nowhere!
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Anyway, those're probably the scariest stories I know.
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O-kay then! Thanks for sharing X, that was. . .that was enlightening.
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