The Fermi Paradox: Visualisation · Signals from the Periphery

Scenario

Hart's wave

Epoch

T+0 yr

Colonized

Fill time

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THE FERMI PARADOX
posed summer 1950 · Los Alamos · over lunch
"Where is everybody?" · never published by Fermi
the arena: 2×10¹¹ stars · 13.6 Gyr old
the wave: Hart 1975 · Tipler 1980
no confirmed technosignature · 1960 → 2026

Feature

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Evidence

fact ⇄ what kind of claim · live

A disk of 2×10¹¹ stars, 100,000 ly wide

Gaia's galaxy · the arena is measured, not imagined

MEASURED

The stars are old: 13.6 Gyr of head start

most Sun-like stars formed Gyr before the Sun

MEASURED

No confirmed technosignature, 1960 → 2026

radio SETI · all-sky IR · Ĝ · Hephaistos: file empty

MEASURED

A 0.1c wave fills the disk in ~20 Myr

Hart 1975 · Tipler 1980 · exact arithmetic on your dials

MODELLED

0.1c probes break no known physics

laser sails at 100 GW · INST-20 next door

MODELLED

Where the Great Filter sits

behind us or ahead · the data does not yet say

READING

What the silence means

every card in the Filter view survives the data

READING

View

Scenario · who expands, and how

MODELLED · Hart 1975: a tenth of light and patience

▶ Expand compresses ~20 Myr into ~45 s · the physics readouts never depend on playback speed

The expansion

Epoch since first launch0 yr

millions of years since the first seed launches. The disk empties of silence from one point outward; drag through it, or press ▶ Expand.

Probe speed0.10 c

0.01c is fusion-ship territory, 0.1c a laser sail (INST-20), 0.3c a beamed fleet. Watch how little the fill time cares.

Refit pause per hop1,000 yr

years a landed seed spends building the next two ships. Sociology's whole say in the arithmetic; give it 10,000 and see what changes.

Hop distance6.0 ly

stars near the Sun sit 4-6 ly apart. Longer hops spend more time flying, fewer pauses; the front speed barely moves.

Seed civilizations1

how many expanders ever arise. One is Hart's thought experiment; eight is a Drake-optimist's galaxy. The union is computed honestly.

Overlays

Wavefront rings

Distance grid · 10,000 ly

Labels

Readout · exact from v, τ, d, seeds

Front speed

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Fill time

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…as galaxy age

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Colonized stars

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Colonized fraction

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The Sun swept?

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Seeds

Status

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What is measured vs modelled here

Measured: the disk's 100,000 ly, its ~2×10¹¹ stars, the Sun's 26,700 ly from the core, the 13.6-Gyr age of the oldest stars, and every survey null this site's SETI arc reports. Modelled: the wavefront, v = d/(d/v+τ), Hart's and Tipler's arithmetic run exactly on your dials, and the probes themselves, costed but never built. Reading: where the Filter sits, and what the silence means. This instrument takes no side.

Where this drawing takes liberties

Each drawn star stands for about 10⁸ real ones, and the disk's spiral arms are drawn for recognition, not from a survey map. The wave is a clean circle; a real front would percolate star to star, ragged at every scale. Stellar orbits are frozen: over a 20-Myr fill the disk rotates ~8%, a smear this map ignores. Colonized stars dim to bronze as a reading, flagged as such: nobody knows what a million-year-old colony looks like. The readouts are never stylized: speeds, times, counts and fractions follow the formulas exactly.

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drag = orbit · scroll = zoom · click a label to inspect · press ▶ Expand and watch the disk go quiet