Scientists Found the Answer to the Fermi Paradox.. It's a Countdown

A four-page study in the Royal Astronomical Society's journal puts a ceiling of about 5,000 years on how long a typical technological civilization lasts, if every Earth-like planet ends up with one. The same pages hold a second number: roughly 200,000 years for one civilization to reach another.

This video runs the count behind that ceiling, from a million Earth-like planets to one lit window at a time. It takes the top Reddit objection, "isn't this just guessing?", and the radio objection under Sabine Hossenfelder's video. Then the second clock: Voyager's 73,000 years to the nearest star, 3,000-year hops at a tenth of light speed, and why lifetimes up to about 100,000 years still fit the silence. Last, what happens when a civilization collapses and comes back, with a 2026 model of ten futures for Earth.

The collapse-recovery study (Blanco, Haqq-Misra and Profitiliotis) is a preprint. It has not been peer reviewed yet.

More papers read past the abstract: https://www.youtube.com/@SpacializeEN?sub_confirmation=1

The Spacialize Briefing, free, straight to your inbox: https://tinyurl.com/2bslz6ov

SOURCES
Rahvar & Rouhani, "Constraints on the lifespan of intelligent technological civilizations in the Galaxy," MNRAS 548 (2026): https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stag405
Preprint version: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22252
Royal Astronomical Society on MNRAS and Oxford University Press: https://ras.ac.uk/oxford-university-press
NASA, The Nearest Neighbor Star (Voyager, Proxima Centauri): https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/features/cosmic/nearest_star_info.html
Blanco, Haqq-Misra & Profitiliotis, "Projections of Earth's Technosphere: Civilization Collapse-Recovery Dynamics and Detectability," arXiv preprint, 15 April 2026: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13774
Sabine Hossenfelder on the study:

r/FermiParadox discussion, June 2026: https://www.reddit.com/r/FermiParadox/comments/1ty092c/

#FermiParadox #RoyalAstronomicalSociety #Space