Musings on being fucked: Christian millennialism and the Fermi paradox

[tacit]

When all the world's armies are assembled in the valley that surrounds Mount Megiddo they will be staging a resistance front against the advancing armies of the Chinese. It will be the world's worst nightmare - nuclear holocaust at its worst. A full-out nuclear bombardment between the armies of the Antichrist's and the Kings of the East

Comments

There are more options for the Fermi Paradox, of course

[fallingupthesky]

1. Earth's radio-wave communications probably can't be detected even from Alpha Centauri because they disintegrate into faint static by the time they get only a few light-years out. If humans are nothing special, why would we expect aliens to use super-powered blaster waves which can be detected hundreds of light years away to communicate with each other? That would be the equivalent of using nukes to send smoke signals.

2. The Prime Directive, or something similar. It's *very* strictly enforced.

3. Faster-than-light travel is so prohibitively expensive (or far too unreliable, or not actually possible) that nobody bothers. It's nearly unheard of for a species to expand beyond its local star cluster, if at all. Likewise, maybe some of the other technologies we've conceptualized for the far distant future are too impractical.

4. Why would anyone want to live in a gravity well? Planets are sooo 27th century.

5. This universe sucks, man. Reality #3481AQ is where the happenin's currently at.

6. Leave the holodeck? Where's the fun in that?

7. Can't detect megastructures yet, or else can't yet recognize them as such.

8. Our ancestors gave up their flesh for bodies of plasma and crystal several million years ago. We have already achieved the closest any living being can come to perfection, and no good can come from contacting or being noticed by flesh beings.

9. Most sapient beings are aquatic, have no hands, and have little concept of math.

(I came up with several other examples, but realized that they're just variants of the rather broad "we're rare" or "we're fucked" scenarios, with only the reasons behind it being different.)

That being said, it doesn't mean that the possibility you presented isn't a concern, though personally I'm less concerned with extreme religious groups (who are mostly known and monitored) and more about "I'll put you all out of my misery" types, who probably aren't nearly as visible.