I already know that the latest Supercard will have Hundreds of Gogglestims. I want to know which budget alternative won't burn down my house.

We are in the age of small single word titles.

"Your honoured parentships, we request you review the wording of your original injunction, wherein defendants were merely enjoined from ordering pizza to the house not ordering pizza to the driveway."

We don't even know if Voyager 1 will actually escape the Solar gravity well, or is just on a long elliptic to return to us as a small comet. It is vastly unlikely that if it is on an escape vector, that it will reach any other star in a state that it could be recognised as an artificial spacecraft.

I don't have strong enough astrophysics math to demonstrate and don't know what keywords I'd need to look up to find a relevant paper. I am starting to think maybe we should find some PhDs in Astrophysics and Information Theory, and ask if they'd like to present a paper to Eastercon/Worldcon on this

It's still going to hit Shannon-Hartley. Because you're trying to see that one 'pure white noise' signal against a massively overwhelming background 'off-white noise'.

* The only ones we can observe. I don't think we're exceptional in that regard, there's probably evolved civilised life elsewhere, we're just too far away from them.

The odds against the Fermi Paradox's assumptions are more like a logrythmic curve, because all the limits are compounding. It makes a "Spherical Cow" assumption of perfect constant growth and expansion, with a massive lead time over our civilisation.

All that the Fermi Paradox says is 'Potential neighbours at travel distance don't exist or don't have that technology, potential neighbours at observable distance are < 1 Kardashev.' Which is not really paradoxical or indicative of a 'great filter'.

That disregards time it takes for life to develop, then intelegent life, then civilisations, then civilisations with the ability to exit their planetary gravity well, then civilisations with the ability to send something out of their solar gravity well, then the ability for it to make the distance.

(Starting to wonder if this should be written up to present at Eastercon or Worldcon, but I'm not strong enough in the astrophysics maths to demonstrate it properly.)

To simply overcome the background noise of their own star, they would need to use more energy than the fraction of the star's energy that reaches their planet. The Fermi Paradox does suggest that FTL and Stable Wormholes do not exist in our universe, because that would significantly change the maths

If it helps, the Fermi Paradox probably isn't a paradox. It understated the significance of Shannon-Hartley and Square Law on the ability to detect signals from interstellar distances. If every habitable planet has a civilisation like ours, we still couldn't see them over background noise.