Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

We're talking millions of years, potentially. 

you'll prolly be in a traveling league then and won't even notice

We're talking millions of years, potentially. 

And yes, failure to detect radio waves in interesting, but at the same time, there are so many stars out there we might simply not have "listened" to the right one yet, or the radio frequencies were attenuated to the point of nondetectability by dust or distance.  A civilization MIGHT only emit radio significantly for a few centuries.

At any rate, it's conjecture.  I think in millions of years an advanced civilization would colonize other planets in other systems unless earthlike planets are that rare.

This is another possibility of course, unless they get terraformed.

Well, the other bit of the Fermi paradox is the idea of the "Great Filter", meaning that advanced civilizations may have a very high likelihood of wiping themselves out. 

Evolution favors the most competitive species, and competition is by nature conflict. Advancing technology makes the weapons of conflict more and more devastating, and yet it doesn't change a species' competitive nature. If competition is part of the defining impetus for advancement, across wide possible species around the entire galaxy, it might be that those other advanced civilizations wiped themselves out before they got to colonize anything. Many would argue that our own species is well on its way to doing the same. 

That said, let's bring this back to books--specifically sci-fi...

• The trilogy [now 4 books?] starting with The Three Body Problem very directly addresses this. Any sci-fi fans here have probably already read it as it's very well-known (Amazon Video produced a series about it), but if any of you haven't, I highly recommend it. 
• Another currently unfinished trilogy (only 2 of the 3 books have so far been released) starts with Harbinger. Since this one is much less well-known, I don't want to give away any spoilers. But I enjoyed the first two books and am looking forward to the third. 

I maintain that people need to look at the extraordinary amount of features that must be present for advanced life, and how absent they are, ubiquitously.  And I'm talking, can rule out entire galaxy clusters....not just galaxies.  Almost all that we know of, in fact. 

I'm not saying the possibility can be ruled out, but I am saying based on current research, it seems extraordinarily remote.  And that's without even getting into Great Filter scenarios, or other things.   

As Neil deGrasse Tyson said, if the universe has so much life, why is it trying so hard and so effectively to kill everything?  

Aliens make for such great stories though, in a variety of genres, that I'm glad we at least have them in literature (and film too, I guess).  

on this day...........
16 July 1951. JD Salinger’s cult novel of teenage rebellion, The Catcher in the Rye, was first published in the USA. The novel’s chief character Holden Caulfield became an icon for teenage rebellion. Over 65 million copies of the book have been sold.

Was one of the novels we covered in 8th grade AP English.  I remember thinking "meh."  We had a few other classics that year as well....I remember liking To Kill A Mockingbird okay. 

Did not like Lord of the Flies. 


EDIT:  A Separate Peace.  Worst of the bunch.  3 out of 10, did not enjoy, did not recommend.  

Never read it.  

Potentially, a major problem for me was we got no sci-fi assignments.  If they'd have been giving us some Asimov, Heinlein, Card, or people like that, I'd have eaten it up.  

As it was, I did it eat up, on my own time.  I just didn't get to do book reports, take tests, and do class discussions about them.  Probably for the best.  Those troglodytes wouldn't have understood them anyway.  

Should probably move this discussion over to the novels thread, might get more folks engaged.