Within human history a pattern can be seen that may have more relevance to the Fermi Paradox than
one might expect and in answering just why the great silence exists. This pattern is a somewhat
disturbing one however, because there are many different factors that can cause and affect it.
It’s when we abandon cities and allow them to ultimately become archeological sites. This
phenomenon has happened around the world many times across history where a vibrant thriving
city is simply abandoned by its inhabitants and left for nature to take it back over.
These sorts of flash in the pan cities can be found everywhere. In Asia there is Angkor,
all Mayan cities in Central America, of which there were many,
in North America there is Cahokia, Pompeii in Italy, abandoned ghost towns in California,
and the environs of Chernobyl and so on. While the causes for abandonment were different,
the one common thread being that they are abandoned places for a reason,
but the similarities end there. They all had widely varying causes as to why the people left.
This is spooky. Imagine the city in which you live, if you indeed live in one. One day,
life is viable and you just go through your day to day existence. The next, it’s not, and you can no
longer hang on under the conditions presented to you. Then you must leave. The paradigm changes,
not unlike if you think about it the idea of living on a space station but it very suddenly
becoming unviable leading you to whatever escape mechanisms that you have at hand,
if any. This is very evident in the alien franchise in sci fi, where something invades
your space ultimately that defeats you, and makes life on the Nostromo unviable and you have to get
out any way you can. But these kinds of scenarios can also be far more subtle and evacuation of a
place can happen far less dramatically, but still with a pressing need to do so.
Take the ghost towns in the western US, these typically were boom towns as they were known
and built up around mining operations. But when the gold or silver was exhausted,
these towns found themselves no longer viable and were thusly abandoned. It was the presence
of one factor entirely, say a silver vein, that made them viable, but only for a time.
Compare that to Cahokia, Illinois, a great Native American mound city that flourished starting
about a thousand years ago, but was essentially finished by 1350 and the population declining,
where the decline seemed to be due to a different kind of resource depletion,
that of readily available wood. Likewise, Pompeii was simply too close to a volcano, but other
factors like invasion or political upheaval can cause abandonment, and so on. That’s a lot of ways
to collapse a city, and those ways can conspire making the situation even more complicated.
This gets worse when you look at our cities in a modern context. What we view as resources has
greatly expanded since ancient times. Today, Interrupt an electrical supply to a city for
too long and it will begin to empty out, even if it started out as an ancient city like Rome
still persisting in a modern context and not originally dependent on the availability of
electricity. But it is now. Scarce food could be a precipitating factor for abandonment and
it and always has been so, and of course nuclear war would make many cities instantly uninhabitable
and utterly destroyed driving people from the cities and into an existence not unlike a zombie
apocalypse like the walking dead. But these are cities, subsets within human civilization, could
civilization as a whole act as a city and undergo such a reset? The answer is, absolutely yes,
especially after the advent of the internet and the construction of a collective human dataome.
This has led to the well known solution to the Fermi Paradox is that all civilizations
invariably destroy themselves and go extinct after a relatively short time. But there is
another possibility in that it might be far more subtle than that, and that even seemingly
innocuous problems become insurmountable for a variety of reasons that cause civilizations to
simply reset. But here’s the problem, there may only be a finite amount of times a technological
civilization can reset before it simply doesn’t have the resources to advance again.
One glaring example of this are fossil fuels. While these types of resources enabled our ascent
up the technological ladder, they are finite, and take geologic time periods to accumulate in the
first place. Once you use them up, you basically only have one real chance to stay on track,
you must develop viable sustainable alternative energy sources like fusion to move to,
with stopgap measures like wind power to help you to the goal. But with fossil fuels being exhausted
before that, and something causing a full reset, you may find yourself in a permanent primitive
reset status without anything to stand in for fossil fuels to allow you to rise again. Indeed,
it has been said that if humans go extinct and another species achieves intelligence on earth,
by the time they come along they may simply not have enough resources left
to become a technological civilization. Achieving intelligence in a depleted world
does not guarantee technology. It may only guarantee intelligence in a primitive setting,
much like how humanity existed across most of its existence.
Some variants on these ideas as a solution to the Fermi Paradox come in a new paper
by Michael Wong and Stuart Bartlett published by the Royal Society, link in the description
below. They build on previous studies that have shown that due to the social nature of cities,
various crises result known in this context as singularities. This is in contrast to the
famed technological singularity, which is a related but different thing. The idea
is that population and resources tend towards infinity, but within a finite amount of time,
meaning that you run out of something you need to sustain your city and it comes under threat.
If innovation doesn’t keep step with this, it collapses, at least to varying degrees.
So here’s the question, if your entire world becomes an interconnected city,
as it were, then are you subject to such global singularities? Yes,
and we’ve known that for some time now. Whenever something becomes scarce, whether it’s some
raw material or manufactured computer chips originating from a factory that burnt down,
prices rise for those commodities. These could be termed as mini-singularities that don’t quite
collapse society, but shift its gears. For human civilization, this trend is likely to worsen as
we see real shortages of certain real resources long before we reach a true post-scarcity society.
This gets hard to predict. Certain rather wild in hindsight claims on resource scarcity have
not borne out, such as an infamous prediction of an aluminum shortage by 1990 that never
really had any chance of happening. It was more a scare to sell a book than a reality. But with
things like crude oil and helium, we seem to be heading to a brick wall and once that
wall is hit we have to either innovate, and hopefully do so before we hit the brick wall,
or dramatically reorder some section of how our civilization operates. And if we don’t,
we face a global reset of sorts. Suddenly gone are the days of air travel for example,
or long drives using internal combustion engines.
Doom and gloom for us aside, maybe this situational issue is something that happens
to almost all civilizations that arise in the universe. The authors term this
as asymptotic burnout, where the singularities simply hobble civilization faster than anyone
can innovate answers to fix, at least at some point. Assuming that’s even possible
for many of these very situational problems that face alien civilizations. You can ask.
What if they have less accessible oil than earth? Less accessibility to metals and so
on. But here you can also ask what if they have more? It can go both ways.
But the authors also propose another idea, that of a homeostatic awakening where a civilization
does make it through this curve and creates a fully sustainable society that can continue
to advance but in a muted form. Thus the solution to the Fermi Paradox here is that
all civilizations either burn out and fade away or they achieve sustainability, but in that case,
it may no longer make sense to become a galactic scale empire but rather keep your civilization
going for as long as you can with what you have. The reality is that such civilizations,
though highly technological in some sense, may simply have footprints too small for us to expect
to see. And it has to be said, that’s the apparent boat we are steping into as a civilization.
The latter has been put differently in the past, that all sufficiently advanced civilizations are
indistinguishable from nature. Think about it, if you look at an exoplanet exhibiting biosignature
gasses like an oxygen disequilibrium, something that may well happen with the
James Webb Space Telescope and its successors, how would you know exactly what you’re looking
at? And oxygen disequilibrium can both result from life, but also natural processes. And,
to add to the ambiguity, Earth is somewhat unrevealing here, as it betrays its biosphere
and has done so for a very long time, but not really the conditions of life on its surface.
You can maybe tell there’s something going on from a distance, but not the specifics of it.
Aliens might see earth’s biotechnosignatures, but they wouldn’t really know if this was dinosaur
world earth, rise of the mammals earth, or if they’re more than 100 or so light-years out,
human civilization dominated earth of the 18th century and onward. There just wasn’t that much
of a difference between the three enough to know what was happening here at a distance. If in our
future we become a fusion based society, based on efficiency and electric cars,
radio signals of strengths of utility rather than blasting out energy into the cosmos,
and we never leave the solar system or terraform anything …. Then it’s
no wonder that we haven’t seen anyone, and it’s unlikely anyone will see us.
And that may be the reality of the universe. Some civilizations once they arise themselves
go into disequilibrium with their environment and reset to a permanently resource poor existence
even if they don’t go extinct. Some of the lucky civilizations may get past that, but that by going
into equilibrium with their own resources they don’t really go beyond that, instead of going
into space and colonizing galaxies they might stay at home and focus on stability, sustainability
and enjoying their own existence in the universe without thoughts of empire and expansion. But that
also creates an issue for survival, if all of your eggs sit in a single basket forever, you become
rather susceptible to extinction as opposed to being a multi planet species. This might lead to
a limited expansion plan, and it may be too early in the universe for this to have happened yet.
Take human civilization. Setting aside the logistics of this,
if we were able to terraform Venus and Mars into alternative earths,
we eliminate most threats that nature presents, and those that we throw at ourselves. We don’t
really need to add proxima centauri to the list of human expansion unless we really want to,
and it would be unbelievably resource expensive to do it. That may never change. So maybe we
just hedge our bet and stay here in the solar system, but still selectively colonize it. So
the question is, would we be visible to alien civilizations if we did? Say we’ve done this,
and in a few hundred thousand years what we’ve done is visible to the entire galaxy?
Well, we would actually be visible in case since aliens could work out that Venus should
be a hothouse world and Mars should be frozen, but neither appear to be, so since they aren’t
they were likely terraformed. We’re a long way from detecting this kind of technosignature,
but aliens might have better technology but the takeaway is that we would still be a challenging
tecnosignature to see, and you wouldn’t expect aliens to see this for thousands of years yet.
And that’s assuming that they would just happen to exist at a time in order to see it. How long
does a terraforming technosignature last? Well, even if it's hundreds of millions of years, the
behavior of the sun’s luminosity is changing and a terraformed Venus won’t last long in this case,
and while Mars may last a bit longer than earth, all our inner planets still eventually burn out.
So maybe the rule of the universe is to go with sustainability as long as you can, avoid burnout,
but even that which was once sustainable stops being so and that the reality of the
resources of stars and planets and how you manage them is the solution to the
Fermi Paradox. Go as long as you can, nibble, and manage, but in the end nothing is forever.
Thanks for listening! I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently
emerging victorious after another battle with the microbial world. We were battling again,
battling. This time it was the 2022 seasonal flu, and actually wasn’t that bad as far as
symptoms go but it totally trashed my voice. All too convenient if you think about,
he talks unflatteringly about the microbes on youtube, and that was the first thing
they went after and be sure to check out my books at your favorite online book retailer
and subscribe to my channels for regular, in-depth explorations into the interesting,
weird and unknown aspects of this amazing universe in which we live.