Solving the Fermi Paradox with Transitive Logic? The Stellar Death Clock (A Whitepaper Hypothesis)
Hello everyone,
As a data scientist/engineer, I wanted to approach the Fermi Paradox by stripping away sociological assumptions (nuclear war, rogue AI) and focusing strictly on thermodynamic constraints.
Using the Earth-Sun baseline, we know complex life takes ~4.5B years to build space-faring tech, but main-sequence stellar evolution models (Sackmann et al.) show atmospheric depletion happens around 5.5B years due to a 10% increase in luminosity. This leaves an asymmetric, critically narrow window of opportunity (barely 18% of the planet's theoretical life).
The Great Filter is vertical: it's right above our heads at noon. I just self-published a short whitepaper on Zenodo breaking down this "Stellar Death Clock" hypothesis. I'd love to get your technical feedback on the logic.
Whitepaper link: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20302966