September 17, 2012
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Step 1: Find a unicorn.
OK, I'm as likely as anyone to get excited over wonky new technology, but, isn't saying "We now only need 500 KG of exotic matter" about the same as saying "We thought we'd need a trillion unicorns, but now, we only need 100 unicorns!". IOW, isn't the real stickler that exotic matter has not been shown to exist, and that (as far as I know) there's not even a theoretical way to test if it does or can exist, and, even if it can somehow be shown to exist, we have no clue how to create any, or if it can be created?
If antimatter could be produced in bulk, devising a drive that could reach a useful fraction of C is relatively easy, so given the choice between improving the fuel efficiency of a drive that requires a substance which may or may not even exist, and trying to find ways to improve the creation of a substance that very definitely exists, the latter seems like a better bet. Radical life extension (either biological or brain uploading) and near-C drives can get us to the stars without requiring revolutions in physics, just engineering.
(Of course, the real answer to Fermi's Paradox is that any society which can solve the problems of sub-C interstellar travel might have also eliminated any of the reasons for wanting to travel, at least in physical form. The likelihood that an advanced society exists purely in data form is pretty high. Once everyone's got a near-infinity of virtual space to explore, why bother with the real thing? If curiosity is a universal trait, you can satisfy it via swarms of probes situated pretty far out from the target world -- consider that our incredibly primitive technology can already read newspapers from orbit, what could a race with a few million years head start manage? You could probably toss a few thousand marble-sized, or smaller, probes a light year or more from Earth and be able to get images down to the cellular level or beyond. "Any sufficiently advanced technology....") What else? Resources? Earth's got nothing that's not available in abundance elsewhere. Conquest? For what purpose? They wouldn't need slaves, and conquering humans would provide as much ego gratification as conquering an anthill. I doubt there's anything particularly special or unique about humans that would cause any species which had the technology to reach us to have any *desire* to reach us. So it goes.)
Of course, there's also my theory that the dominant life form in the universe is self-aware planet minds, and organic creatures are simply the means by which the planet is transformed into a consciousness communicating with other planet minds. We may be about as aware of our role in things as an individual neuron in your brain is aware of the gestalt entity called "you".
