You might be right. I never looked at the calculation, just report what I read.

I suppose it is about the exponential of the growth, every planet you reach launch a new ship: 1 planet -> 2 planet -> 4 planet- 8,16,32...

... by the 36th time (72k years in my example) you did that you're at 34 billions planets.

And that not even counting the fact, that the first planets can continue to launch new ships in the meantime.

So the paradox is : since none of that happened, what prevented it. You can tweak the time to reach planet , rate of new planet conquest, and stuff and it still should have happened, so there must one fondamental reason it didnt, hence the article about living in equilibrium with your planet

The paradox take into account the vast distance between stars.

The idea is that in the billion of year of the universe, even when going very slow, even if it take 1000+ year to get to the next star with a generational ship, and then another 1000 year to build a society on that planet before launching the next ship, the univers is so old, that if there was an intelligent alien, it must already have colonized ALL the milky way. ALL of it, every star, and there are a lot. As big is the space, the age of the universe is far far bigger.

Another counter argument, beside the usual (earth is a zoo monitored by hidden alien; life is super rare; intelligence is super rare and we are the first; there is a great filter that kill any intelligent life during their time, alien dont care to expand as in the article..) ; so another one is from kurzgesagt :

It state that life appears so fast on earth, and grew so fast, that it must have been already a long way into its evolution. The first microbe was already super complex. So, may be it took the billions of years of the universe to get to that first microbe. So we are amongst the first intelligent life that can exist, because life took so long to get the first microbe. And only now can start the colonization for every intelligent species

What was that shit newspaper in France? Charlie Hebdo? Ain't nobody said anything nice about Charlie Hebdo until AQAP started shooting cartoonists.

Couldnt resist the chance to correct you. Charlie Hebdo was well revered in France before the shooting.

Not only for its carton but for a lot of articles who proved some corruption in France politicians, and ruined some career.

Very local corruption affair, and very french newspaper , but revered in the country.

Your point stand, never heard about Rushdie before the Fatwa. Still he probably was revered in his home country

Was excited to read my first Ian Banks book in the culture serie:

The player of game.

Disapointed.

The culture is a cool concept for a book. What we have are an uninspired personnage saying hello and goodbye before and after every conversation. A fist half dealing with the uninspired protagonist and his insipid conversation with personnages who will totally diseapear in second half when the conflict really begin.

The conflict is okayish. The alien civilisation feel alien. The dig at autoritative society isnt event too on the nose.

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One cool short James Ellroy novella (he is always cool):

Shakedown

It is ellroy: misogynist, racist , republican, but he do it with panache.

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Some bad french Sci-fi (my favorite genre tend to do bad book 99% of the time) , and one cool Sci-fi:

Salvager of Time (Wesley Chu 2015)

Fun premice: human society is in shamble, they only survive by going in the past salvaging ressource. Well written. Unfortunatly nothing is resolved, we are waiting for a scond tome, which didnt come yet. Still a good read.

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The killing Joke (A.Moore)

What a deception. I discovered that comics could be epic with Moore (Vandeta, From HEll, Watchmen...)

The killing joke, is just a short story, 40 page, where nothing interesting happen. Joker back story is bland. Batman doesnt do anything remarquable. Joker tell him where he is, and batman come and kick his ass, end.

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Next will be 2 James Ellroy (I'm closing on having read all his books now). One of which is in English.. and as I feared, I realized after the 1st few pages , that my english is not good enough for that level of slang.

You say that Biden could be mentally impacted by his age.

Which is fair after the poor debate. But the man is known for his lack of debate prowess.

Politically it look like he is the best president US had in years. He already did more good things for the US people and on the international front, than Obama (a great debater ) did.

We can argue that he is not the creative mind behind all those good things (and I rather see you guys have Cortez or Bernie as president), but they happened either way.

Finally the left prevail.

And the Far right, got 3rd place.

BUT, still 9 millions peoples voted for them, which is a lot in 60 million population.

An interesting point in the article is that Macron hoped to create a strong Moderate party (which seems reasonable).. there never was a strong middle party in France historically (only strong left and strong right, like Democrat and Republican).

And curiously what happened, is that, the left and right disappeared in a few years, and got replaced with far left and far right. Very telling about human mind, somehow.