In the course of creating content for this channel over the last seven years, I’ve made many videos
on the question of are we alone. This is perhaps the most profound question that can be asked,
because either way, yes or no, the implications are among the greatest possible factors defining
the human condition. But the question in my head goes back much further than youtube,
as a kid looking up to the stars and wondering if there might be anyone out there.
This of course is a question that may never be answered because the only way to answer it is
if the answer is in the positive. We would need to find evidence of other intelligent
beings in the universe to know, and this most likely confined to anything that may exist in
our home galaxy. Not so much beyond it. On the contrary, a definitive no, we are indeed alone,
is impossible to ever determine because not only do we stand very low chances of ever
seeing life evident in another galaxy even if its there, we are also confined to looking at
only relatively nearby galaxies, with much of the population being too distant not only in space,
but time. We see galaxies as they were, most before they could have possibly
spawned life and a galaxy spanning civilization encasing all their stars in Dyson's spheres.
For our own galaxy, it remains silent. We see no definitive evidence of the presence of an
alien civilization. There are candidates, typically fleeting and not very good,
but all are still ambiguous. So, in the end, all we know is that we are not impossible. Therefore
alien life is not impossible. My own suspicion is that intelligent life is simply very rare,
but far from unique. A galaxy may spawn microbial life everywhere,
it might be ubiquitous across the universe. But complex life, less so.
Just the idea that the universe is a place largely
of microbial life answers my question however. One alien microbe detection,
say from Mars or the atmosphere of Venus or the numerous ice shell moon and Kuiper belt objects,
or even fossils in a meteorite, is enough for me to say we are not alone. Rather, life on
earth is not alone. I find something beautiful about a universe teeming with microbial life,
but only rarely anything else. This is why I have followed the search for that so intensely.
Beyond the world of simple life, it’s harder. It may be that things like dinosaurs, cows,
crocodiles and goldfish are organisms of a complexity uncommon in the universe. Not unique,
though their individual species would be, but complex life may require the passage of too
many evolutionary, environmental and biological hurdles to make it scarce. Here we’d very likely
need to go to another star system to find something we could call an alien animal,
they do not appear to be present here other than the earth, though finding some analogue of a
fish in the ocean of Europa or similar world is on the table still for the solar system.
Civilizations however may be that much more rare, only occasionally appearing in any given
galaxy. We may be alone in the Milky Way. An even rarer circumstance is that intelligent life might
exist at the same time as another civilization in their home galaxy. Civilizations would not
be mere ships passing in the night without contact, but ships passing the same place a
billion years apart. There can be no contact in such a situation, other than if an artifact or
some evidence were left from one civilization to another. This might lead to a tombstone universe,
where first contact between civilizations comes in the form of the archeologist’s excavation.
Rarer still maybe earths and this may define just what intelligence in the universe does.
If this planet were just a bit further away from the sun, it would be an iceshell planet.
The oceans would exist through geothermal heating, but there would be no accessible
surface. This kind of world is represented in part by earth. There are environments, vibrant ones,
existing under the sea ice of the arctic and antarctica. Indeed, earth itself is hypothesized
to have gone through periods of such glaciation that most of the world was once covered in ice.
Yet here we are, despite our very situational planet. But let’s envision something more
permanent, a world the size of earth that spawns life and intelligence,
but it remains locked under the ice and unable to even perceive that there is a cosmos out there.
Their idea of the universe may be confined entirely to their ocean, and they never
become aware there is anything more. That may make detectable alien civilizations that much
rarer than intelligence itself, which could also be rare. As a result, air breathing land dwelling
technological species like our own may be orders of magnitude rarer than intelligence in general.
From the perspective of science being rare is alright, but being unique is very unlikely.
Anything that can happen in the universe, including our civilization, very likely
has counterparts given the overwhelming odds that stand against being alone. Being alone
instantly catapults us back to something like the worldview of Aristotle, while we may not
be physically at the center of the universe as he thought, we are at that point functionally
the center of the universe. The only place in the cosmos where the universe can study itself.
But being rare may just be how it is. Air breathing technological land civilizations
that go to space just may be so rare that we have no hope of ever detecting one. And within
that notion there is something else, something that may be universal to all civilizations,
rare though they might be. It’s the question of whether civilizations in similar circumstances to
our own might look to the stars and ask the same question we do. Are we alone?
As a result this may mean that the Fermi Paradox itself is a universal common denominator among
civilizations capable of astronomy and that no one across the universe ever answers the question.
This however may be unlikely, because while being alone at any given time in a galaxy is plausible,
less so is the idea that out of the potentially several trillion galaxies present in the
observable universe, not one has ever seen two civilizations existing and interacting within it.
Does some alien being sit on the sandy shore of a liquid water ocean on an astonishingly distant
exoplanet in another galaxy entirely looking to the stars, given that it has the anatomy
of vision, and wonder if it is indeed alone, without ever knowing that we are here? I have
often said that we represent someone else’s alien civilization, but it seems a shame that given that
we are here, there is a good chance that no one else will ever know. All of humanity’s hopes,
dreams, artwork, music, and everything good and bad about us may forever be confined to our own
existence on our one tiny world. The alien that would be most curious about such things, may never
have a chance to know us, nor will we know them. A somewhat melancholy and sad universe, to be sure.
Such civilizations, and us, would forever wrestle with the concept that while we all
would self-prove that intelligence is possible, we would never be able to prove it wasn’t a fluke. Or
could we. The science of studying abiogenesis can go one of two ways, should it ever fully
understand the process. Life’s genesis will either turn out very difficult, some chemical stumbling
block such as the creation of DNA may prove very difficult and situational. Or the whole thing will
prove straightforward and easy, a direction that field is currently heading. If it’s easy, then we
can infer that microbes are everywhere across the universe, if it’s not, then they aren’t.
And that provides an independent way of answering the question of is earth’s life alone. We could
find it drilling into an iceshell moon or sampling the upper atmosphere of venus, or we might find it
popping out of a test tube in a lab. Two ways to find out, both of which could happen within
decades. Aliens may do similar experiments, and reach the same conclusions, giving at least some
insight on life in the universe at large, if not how often it achieves intelligence.
But that question too might be answerable in time, even without a detection. With
a greater and ever increasing understanding of genetics, and environments, it may become
possible to model how evolution progresses and achieves intelligence. We could conceivably come
up with a reasonable estimate on just how likely it is, but doing so now is fraught with too many
unknowns. Aliens may have done this however, and concluded that they may well be alone,
or that it’s statistically impossible to be, thus they get something close to an answer,
but it’s never definitive. Unless of course, they discover or we prove that the universe
is infinite in extent, in which case it becomes virtually impossible to be alone,
and it doesn’t matter if you never find it, you simply know that it must be there.
But it also pays to remember that the universe is young, and has only
had so many chances for intelligent life to occur. That it occurred here … took billions
of years. Maybe for most other exoplanets it takes far longer. But time is on their side,
the red dwarfs for example have trillions of years left to live, and star formation and the
coalescing of planetary systems is still occurring very commonly in a huge number of galaxies.
In other words it may not be possible to answer the question right now, but in the future as
the universe has more time to develop it may be possible. In short, we, and any alien civilization
out there, are simply too early to answer our common question. Are we alone? One could
be tempted to call this model the Fermi Paradox universe, and while not a solution to the Paradox,
it would represent a common denominator and a way to begin to envision the alien mind.
Of course, this assumes that aliens behave like we do, which is an enormous whopper of an assumption.
It may be that some alien civilizations never ask the question because they simply don’t care if
they are alone. They may inherit from their evolution no capacity to worry about that,
rather they are reactive, searching only for their fellow members of their species
for reproduction, if even that, and everything else is a predator or food.
This is how most species on earth exist. They do not wonder about aliens as we do,
indeed, they have no conception of such a thing. Certainly there is curiosity among the animals,
that isn’t rare on earth by any means, but what form does curiosity take. In humans, we needed to
know the concept of aliens before we contemplated them and realized they were possible. Before then,
other intelligences were certainly contemplated, but they were of a supernatural flavor,
rather than alien. And there are the machines, an advanced artificial intelligence may not be
the least bit curious about biological alien life. Maybe that is where true rarity lies,
humans are rare because they ask the question. Others may or may not,
and perhaps that’s how alien life is, unless they run into you, then paradox itself is meaningless.
Thanks for listening! I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently
worried about my alien counterpart Glorkon the Highly Perplexed and Concerned making hypertube
videos on his homeworld regarding Grocton the Ample Brained’s alien paradox. Very unsettling,
especially for me and be sure to check out my books – new one coming soon – 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.