Rahvin writes:
AGI is irrelevant to the Fermi Paradox. You don't need AGI to be bleeding radio and other transmissions all over the Universe. We've been doing it since the 30s, long before we even conceived of such things as Turing tests. Hell, that was before
transistors.
Say we have been sending out electromagnetic radiation for ~100 years out of 4.5 billion years of Earth's existence.
Considering Arthur C. Clarke's approximate saying,
"any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", the implications of another technological existence out there in space still using something so arcane as to be limited by the speed of light is ludicrous. Ursula LeGuinn has many stories set in 1 ficton where communication is done instantaneously via the Ansible. Surely any sufficiently higher level of technology would have long ago abandoned using electromagnetic waves. It would be like a country today, anxious to communicate with other countries, setting up some watchmen in towers, looking for horses on the horizon - horses of the Pony Express.
In other words, we may have already missed the signal shell, expanding at the speed of light, as it's 100-200 light-year thickness went through the earth's neighborhood millions of years ago already.
However, the Von Neumann machines, being some kind of AGI or even less, could be a different story, since no one would be out there to shut them all off. Perhaps the FTL technology would allow them to do it.
- xongsmith, 5.7d