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	This article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page as Today's featured article on January 13, 2005.
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TODO: Add the actual Fermi paradox solution's critical key element (besides it being a compound solution within to observations compatible components) for deduction & its resulting dynamic of the solution:

Ethical explanation

It is possible that ethical assessment of general forms of evolution of life in the universe constitutes the central issue which intelligent alien species' macroscopic decision-making, such as for the topic of natural panspermia, directed panspermia, space colonization, megastructures, or self-replicating spacecraft, revolves around. If the result of utility evaluations of enough and sufficiently in time extended initial or lasting portions of expected or prospective cases of evolution is among all other ethically relevant factors the dominant ethical concern of intelligent alien species, and if furthermore a large enough negative expected utility is assigned to sufficiently common forms of expected or prospective cases of evolution, then foregoing directed panspermia, space colonization, the construction of megastructures, sending out self-replicating spacecraft, but also active attempts to mitigate the consequences of interplanetary and interstellar forms of natural panspermia may follow. While in the case of space colonization it might ultimately stay too uncontrollable to - by technical or educational means - ensure settlers or emerging space colonies themselves consistently keep acting in accordance to the awareness of by colonizer considered major ethical dangers accompanying physical interstellar space exploration, and for the case of interstellar self-replicating spacecraft, due to potential prebiotic substances in interstellar clouds and exoplanets' atmospheres and soils, it may forever stay impossible to ensure their sterility to avoid contamination of celestial bodies which may kick-start uncontrollable evolution processes, reasons to forego the creation of a megastructure, even if such may be beneficial to an intelligent alien species and also to some other intelligent alien species imitators, may mainly have psychological origin. Since certain megastructures may be identifiable to be of unnatural, intelligent design requiring origin by foreign intelligent alien species, for as long as the by an intelligent alien species expected number of (especially less experienced or less far developed) from them foreign intelligent alien species capable of identifying their megastructure as such is large enough, the by them rather uncontrollable spectrum of interstellar space endeavor related influences this may have on those foreign intelligent alien species might constitute a too strong ethical deterrence from creating megastructures that are from outer space identifiable as such, until eventually a lasting state of cosmic privacy may be attained by natural or technological means.

And so consequently, the steady-state solution of the Fermi Paradox consists of naturally emerging civilizations that just stay on their home-world, hide and by their location of emergence are assigned a region of space around them in which they can exercise local cosmic intervention operations for the macro-ethical good, until a galaxy is covered by regions of civilizations' local influences, similar to a mathematical minimal packing problem, but for covering a galaxy with the least required amount of civilizations in order to keep as much of it overall as sterile as possible for as long as possible. And for the case of a spiral galaxy, chances are that the majority - if not all - of such civilizations will inhabit star systems moving together with the main-stream of stars around the galactic center, since for wrong-way-driver star systems, due to their severely increased interaction rates with different galaxy regions, both the emergence of a civilization as well as their continued long-term presence is at far higher risk. The only exception to this general behavior might arise near the very end of the universe's development when galaxies have ran out of material with which to keep stars burning, darkened severely with "the lights having gone out", and planets have cooled out sufficiently far, so that the risk of accidental or intentional, direct or indirect causation by civilizations of lasting, uncontrolled evolutions of wildlife has upon astronomically slow, gradual decay finally diminished to a sufficiently low level as to potentially conceivably provide macro-ethical allowance or even justification for civilizations to not have to hide and be silent anymore.

based on the following reasoning:

1. Axiom of Importance: The ethical importance of an issue increases alongside the number of therein involved sentient lifeforms, the time duration during which they are affected by it, and the vastness of the affected space to the extent to which changes of it affect the lifeforms. Or more directly, it increases with the absolute difference in caused, resulting time-integrals over all (with receptor-specific intensities weighed) pleasure & pain receptor-signals for any and all sentient beings.

2. Extreme case: By the in the above statement defined abstract, general standard, according to the current body of humanity's knowledge, general forms of evolution of life (if on earth or on exoplanets) forever constitute the most ethically important issue to exist in the universe: With billions of species - each with numerous individual lifeforms - together with durations on the scale of billions of years, and spacial extension of at least a whole planet, it dwarfs any other conceivable ethical issue's level of importance.

3. Valuation Axiom for the extreme case: According to many scientific studies, such as by Richard Dawkins, Brian Tomasik, Alejandro Villamor Iglesias, Oscar Horta, pain and suffering dominates over joy for animal wildlife in general forms of Darwinian evolution of life due to the global war-like situation commonly framed as survival of the fittest (rather than the demise of all unfit), and therefore - when accumulated across all logically entangled parameters such as duration and count of involved individuals - instances of such forms of evolution of life has to be kept at a minimum in the universe, as there never was and never will be anything that could be more important, to change the conclusion of this Anti-Panspermia-implying directive.

1. Macro-Ethical Scale of Evolution of Life: Certainly, if evolution of life happens somewhere or not is a very big deal in (macro) ethical terms since easily millions of species can be subjected to it, be involved in it, for several hundreds of millions, possibly even billions of years.

2. Macro-Ethical Importance of Evolution of Life: Now, what also is surely very agreeable is that evolution can play out in extremely many different ways and with extremely large variety in its short- and long-term dynamic, with that depending on all kinds of events (of various qualitatively different types) happening during it at all or not, or later or sooner. And so the window, or (in terms of all in the process aggregated joy and suffering) distance between the worst kinds of an instance of evolution of life and the best kinds of it surely is astronomically huge, providing the subject matter with monumental relevance, importance due to its scale. And this is independent of where (i.e. wholly on the negative side or between the negative and the positive side, or entirely on the positive side) such an interval or window consisting of the whole range or spectrum of cases of evolution of life between the worst and the best cases lies on any continuous axis (from - infinity to + infinity) meant to account for the ethical evaluation of the whole, once everything of ethical relevance related to it has finished happening.

3. Nearly guaranteed expectable decision-making- or design-improvement, rapidly in short time: Also, certainly any randomly intentionally or accidentally, maybe even unnoticed, kind of initiated instance of evolution elsewhere would not with any sufficiently high likelihood result in a form of evolution of life that is anywhere close among whatever the better actually plausible possible cases of it may be. And at the same time, science and technologies progress rapidly and surely can keep progressing speedily for millennia, if not hundreds of thousands of years, putting humanity then into a position with far greater holistic overview and comprehension of the matter. And given how gargantuan of a macro-ethically important matter this is, even if in the future we only could turn it into e.g. a 5% (relative to the window width) better version than any now possibly as such then irreversible version of evolution of life, the absolute difference would be unimaginably titanic.

4. Humanity's historical, contextually as empirical reference frame relevant, abysmal track record: As our history repeatedly shows, humanity does not have a track record of managing complex large-scale matters anywhere near perfectly right, the 1st time around, in part due to unaccounted for side-effects. Huge problems tied in with them are more the norm than an exception. And on top of this, unfortunately there is several factors that likely make it harder for contemporary people to care about this topic, such as all the crises we had and still have here on earth, but also that it's about a huge risk for others, not ourselves, and it'd not be humans (though it could also eventually lead to species with human level intelligence being subjected to it) but wildlife animals (which generally are by people judged to have a lower priority of care compared to other humans), and the disaster would unfold far in the future (long past the lifetime of anyone that lives currently) and far away, and the means by which it'd happen would be in a very subtle manner of which the comprehension, understanding of all that is made less accessible by the interdisciplinary complexity of the subject and that it has to be explained in rather little time, as it doesn't take long anymore for future space missions and activities in general carrying these grave risks with them. And so it seems that just about all odds stand in opposition rather than in favor of people taking it seriously with the right mindset about it.

5. It holds true that there is lack of any urgency or need for near-future final decision-making, by which to lock humanity out of otherwise currently still available, significant alternatives.

Conclusion: Unchallengeably, unquestionably it makes sense and is entirely far safer for humanity to have discipline, patience, and hold itself back from all its outer space activities that carry at least the slightest forward contamination risks.

Besides all of this, the same general line of reasoning would apply for all intelligent aliens with exo-biospheres of different biological constitution analogously. And not just that either, but all alien civilizations would have to account for all biologically distinct kinds of evolution of life possible in the universe - for if distinct kinds do exist - depending on the general distribution of habitable candidate worlds specific to each of them individually, and so in particular, intelligent aliens would have to account for our DNA-based kind of biosphere, and vice versa, humanity would have to account for the possibility of the emergence of biologically distinct cases of evolution of life.

--- — Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.192.195.234 (talk) 03:14, 22 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This section is long and not that interesting. Can it be shortened? 88.212.128.82 (talk) 13:27, 29 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

 Done. I agree and took a crack at shortening it. –CWenger (^ • @) 21:25, 29 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

In the Revelation Space Universe of several novels he suggests that early in the life of our galaxy one of the the first space-faring civillizations came to the conclusion that it is harmful for a society to expand beyond its home star system and so the set up a way of detecting and destroying space-faring cultures whenever they arose. Steve77moss (talk) 05:47, 11 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Meta comment: start including pop culture (Dark Forest) in a science article, and it'll attract more.... Geogene (talk) 15:28, 11 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I think what we actually need is to demand WP:SECONDARY WP:DUE-establishing coverage of stuff like this. Our own interpretations of these novels is not enough. We need secondary reliable sources to establish these connections for us. That is also how we, through WP:RSUW, prevent over-proliferation of these pop culture one-off mentions. — Shibbolethink ^{(♔ ♕)} 16:51, 11 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This article is about real life alien intelligences, not about fictional ones. Works of fiction are not valid references. Cambalachero (talk) 22:41, 11 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, but if a fictional scenario brings our attention to a real-universe possibility? You needn't mention the books, it could just say "Explanation xxx: an aggressively anti-spacefaring culture or other entity may be snuffing out interstellar travel whenever it arises".

To me that's a real non-fictional hypothesis. I do though agree that this article isn't the place for sharing about our favourite stories... Steve77moss (talk) 03:27, 12 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Harvard physicist plans expedition to find ‘alien artefact’ that fell from space Doug Weller talk 15:36, 26 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The only real news is that they will search for that object. It is of scientific interest because it is a meteor that came from beyond the Solar System, and that's a thing even if no aliens were involved. But as for using it on Wikipedia, I think that right now it's only relevant for the biography of Avi Loeb. The meteor itself may have an article, if it's retrieved, studied and there's something to say about it. I don't think it is relevant for this article. Cambalachero (talk) 16:09, 26 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Doug Weller talk 16:12, 26 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

According to articles published in the peer-reviewed journal Astrobiology (journal), the term "Fermi paradox", though widely known, inaccurately reflects Fermi's views regarding the feasibility of interstellar travel and the potential existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life. In addition, it incorrectly attributes ideas primarily from Hart and Tipler to Fermi, using his reputation for endorsement. Furthermore, it suggests a logical inconsistency where there isn't one.

1. [1]The Fermi Paradox Is Neither Fermi's Nor a Paradox

2. [2]Fermi's Paradox Is a Daunting Problem—Under Whatever Label

3. The So-Called Fermi Paradox Is Misleading, Flawed, and Harmful

I think this is worth mentioning. I added this but was removed immediately with the reason: "unattributed opinions".

On the contrary, all the sources cited in the very first paragraph introducing the "Fermi paradox" are online media websites. I don't understand how online media websites are more reliable than a serious peer-reviewed scientific journal (except for the most prestigious multidisciplinary journals like Nature and Science, Astrobiology (journal) is likely the best in this area).

Ortsaxu (talk) 22:48, 3 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Those seem like extravagant claims to source from two WP:PRIMARY papers in a single journal. Whats more, they were stated in Wikivoice and added directly to the lead. Geogene (talk) 23:30, 3 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]