The great elephant in the room in regards to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence
is that we haven’t conclusively seen it yet.
Everywhere we look in the Cosmos, we see objects that appear natural and normal such as stars
and nebulas that give us no reason to think that any of it is under the influence of alien
civilizations, in other words you could say that this galaxy seems to consist of nothing
but free real estate that, as far as we can tell, no one has colonized or done anything
with.
Yet, the galaxy is well old enough to have been colonized many times over.
The Fermi Paradox addresses this conundrum by asking where are the aliens?
There are many possible solutions to the Fermi Paradox, and some are fairly benign.
But others are not so nice, so here are ten of the most unsettling solutions to the Fermi
Paradox.
10.
The End Result of Existence is Technological Isolation
Within philosophy there is an old concept called the brain in a vat.
That is to say that if you were a brain isolated in a jar being fed sensory information through
wires, you would never know that your perceived world wasn’t reality.
That concept is taking on a new dimension as virtual reality technology improves and
there may come a time where virtual reality is absolutely indistinguishable from actual
reality.
This is a problem for a civilization because virtual reality can be tailored to be anything
you want it to be, including paradise, which is not so much the case for actual reality.
You could even live in the fictional world of your choice fighting dragons or exploring
the universe and meeting virtual aliens but without the limitations of the speed of light.
Even other people can be emulated perfectly, in theory.
In short, you could achieve the perfection of existence in virtual reality.
If that’s the case, why bother to pay any attention to actual reality at all?
Or might you forget that reality exists?
Questions of whether the human species will choose to explore this route aside, aliens
might just do it.
Is it possible that the reason we don’t see evidence of far-flung alien civilizations
is because their own technology gives them a better alternative to actual reality and
they simply never leave their home planet for lack of any reason to ?
9.
Humans won the lottery … for now
This solution is usually termed neocatastrophism and is based on the idea that the reason we
see no evidence of alien civilizations is that they almost always get reset by nature
before they have time to become an advanced space-faring race.
There are any number of ways this might happen ranging from getting hit by an asteroid to
all life on a world getting fried by a gamma ray burst.
In our case, we’ve simply been lucky, though even this planet has had a number of catastrophes
of its own, such as the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, that had it been just a bit
worse might have destroyed almost all complex life on this planet.
At the same time however, that particular mass extinction opened the way for the dominion
of mammals and eventually the advent of humanity, so there is that.
But, as lotteries show, there are far more losers than winners and that may also be the
case for the galaxy.
It remains to be seen however if have we indeed won the lottery, or are we simply waiting
for our own extinction at the hands of nature itself.
But in the end this solution might have an interesting effect over time.
It’s been suggested that stellar evolution will reduce the occurrence of gamma ray bursts,
and it may be that natural catastrophes in general become rarer as time passes.
If so, this may eventually lead to an explosion of complex life in the galaxy, and we happen
to exist either too early or just at the beginning of that phase.
8.
Aliens are Simply Too Violent For Long-Term Survival
This one fits under a series of great filter solutions to the Fermi Paradox.
They hypothesize that some sort of a brick wall exists somewhere along the line that
stops civilizations from rising past a certain level.
In this case, it’s a filter that may be present in our own civilization.
It’s the possibility of destroying ourselves.
As humans, we have a pretty spotty history as far as warfare and violence is concerned.
We are both capable of restraint and reasonability, and absolute horrors and we do possess the
means in which to annihilate our own civilization.
To our credit, we haven’t yet done that, but stop for a moment and think about what
that might mean for alien civilizations.
Violence is not unique to our species; if you’ve ever seen a polar bear kill and eat
something you’ve seen violence at its highest expression.
But that’s nature.
The polar bear has to eat, and it evolved to eat other animals and it will aggressively
do so whenever needed.
There’s no reason to think that this works any differently in the universe at large,
complex life, should it exist, most probably ate other life to get where it is.
We can, at least a good portion of us, control our aggressiveness through reason, yet we
still spend massive amounts of money on defense.
Still, we can reason our way out of starting a war, or we can do the opposite.
Imagine though if we were just a little bit more aggressive, and bore strong instincts
for that, like the polar bear.
The result of that would not be pretty and we would probably not have much of a civilization
as a result.
As such it may be more common for alien species to be more aggressive than we are.
Say the conditions of their world are such that it’s harder to eat, might then they
evolve even more aggressive tendencies?
Don’t you need at least some aggressiveness to spread out and head into the universe in
the first place?
Are any aliens we are likely to encounter going to be extremely aggressive?
We shall see, but other implications of this solution to the Fermi Paradox is that alien
civilizations are more interested in warring with themselves than they are in exploring
space and eventually they almost invariably destroy themselves.
Hopefully, we prove better than that.
7.
The Universe is Artificial
This gets into simulation theory and that we ourselves might already be living in a
kind of universal virtual reality, though it’s certainly far from a utopia.
If so, and it is a simulation, the associated Fermi Paradox solution is that we are the
only sentient artificial intelligences in the matrix on purpose and no other planets
anywhere in the universe are inhabited.
But that creates a huge question.
If that’s the case, why then is the universe so ridiculously huge in comparison to our
little corner of it?
There billions and billions of other galaxies and even parts of this universe so distant
that we can’t even observe them.
What would be the point to making the simulated environment so big that most it will never
be explored by us?
That question remains open.
6.
Aliens are Everywhere and Invisible
A big problem with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence is that we have to make a lot
of assumptions.
We primarily, at least right now, practice SETI by listening for radio signals.
But we have no idea if aliens use radio signals, we simply assume they do.
We must base those kinds of assumptions on the only example of a civilization we have,
our own.
But in the end, we have no idea how aliens would communicate.
And our own history with radio does not really support the idea that an alien civilization,
assuming they are like us, would use radio for contact.
Most of our day to day radio signals are not detectable at a distance.
What little would be detectable a such as various METI signals, the Arecibo signal,
radar, doesn’t repeat in the way we expect an alien beacon to repeat.
So, in short, our civilization would be very difficult for aliens to see, and even then
not much more than a hundred light-years out, so why would other civilizations be any different?
And of course, it’s also possible that a highly advanced civilization may use methods
of communication that we simply haven’t thought of.
They could be all around us chatting away and we won’t know it until we ourselves
discover that method only to find a vibrant galactic dialogue going on.
Imagine if they’re talking about us.
5.
Intelligent Life in the Universe is Exceedingly Rare
Arthur Clarke once said that two possibilities exist, we are either alone in the universe,
or we are not.
Both are equally terrifying.
Working on that theme, what happens if intelligent life is rare enough that it happens only once
every few galaxies?
There are reasons to suspect that this may be the case.
Look at earth, what factors had to come together to produce us?
We have a planet of such a size to hold this atmosphere.
We have life that evolved in a certain direction in order to oxygenate the atmosphere.
We have plate tectonics and the carbon cycle.
We have the moon.
We have liquid water, we have Jupiter and many other factors that all had to come together
just so to keep our planet right for us to arise and build a civilization.
Does that make earth extremely rare?
Are planets almost exactly the same as far as earth’s conditions the only ones capable
of spawning a civilization?
We don’t know But back to Arthur Clarke, how frightening is it that the universe might
be so vast that while it might have hundreds of civilizations in it, the numbers are still
in favor of that, but they are so far from each other that they may never be able to
communicate, or if they do, it won’t happen for billions of years?
Or say it never happens, and existence in this universe is confined to only your own
species because of the vast distances between civilizations, and the question of whether
we are alone is kept open forever due to the expanding scale of our lonely universe?
But never fear.
There’s also reason to think that planets can exist that are better than earth for developing
intelligent life.
And, If you haven’t any aliens in your galaxy, you can always make your own.
If we do indeed colonize the Milky Way, which I am hopeful we do, we can actually do it
in geologically short time scales.
Millions of years rather than billions.
And if we do that, those colonies of humans will eventually become so different from us
that they might as well be aliens.
4.
The Zoo Hypothesis
This solution is very simple.
Aliens exist and know we’re here, but intentionally hide their presence from us.
They might do this for several reasons.
One is that they’re simply waiting for the right time in our development to reveal themselves
preferring instead to simply study us and learn all they can before making contact.
But, just as easily, they could fear us and are maintaining the element of surprise until
one day they destroy us out of nowhere, or otherwise maintain our level of interstellar
travel at zero.
One particularly spooky scenario with this one is that all species in the galaxy might
be held hostage in this way by a smug overlord species that perhaps was the first to arise
in the Milky Way.
What would add insult to injury is if that overlord were a machine civilization keeping
the biologicals in check.
3.
Time
When thinking about alien civilizations we often fall into a trap.
We think in terms of distance, and how far away such a civilization would be.
But there is also another dimension here that could separate civilizations enough to make
them rare: time.
There is no guarantee that you will exist at the same time as another civilization in
your galaxy, especially if technological civilizations only last an average of a few million years.
Even worse if it’s only thousands of years.
Or hundreds.
The Milky Way is well old enough to have once supported civilizations that simply aren’t
here anymore.
We likewise may well survive for millions of years as a civilization, but go extinct
at some point in the far future.
But then another species might arise in the Milky Way and take our place.
Perhaps they might even find artifacts of us.
So the solution here is simply that civilizations are rare, but not that rare in geologic time
scales.
So a galaxy like the milky way might have hosted throughout its lifetime hundreds of
civilizations, but they just rarely coexist.
In which case, the galaxy may be full of artifacts for us to find.
What happens if we find whatever artifact that caused a civilization’s extinction?
2.
The Sustainability Solution
This is a relative newcomer to solutions to the Fermi Paradox, but one that holds serious
implications for our own civilization.
Indeed, for the entire galaxy because it may be that the reason that we do not see evidence
of alien civilizations having colonized the galaxy is because to do so may mean the inevitable
collapse of your own civilization.
In a paper by Jacob Haqq-Misra and Seth Baum, link in the description below, they challenge
commonly held assumptions that civilizations colonizing the galaxy would do so exponentially
and this is based on human expansion on our own planet.
The problem is, we don’t always do this sustainably and that’s led to multiple times
in the past where human populations and civilizations collapsed.
This could mean that we could collapse even before we colonize our own solar system.
We could likewise collapse even after we have if we don’t manage our resources properly.
This could extend further out into the galaxy, and might mean that civilizations that don’t
manage their resources carefully and expand exponentially, tend to collapse.
Also, those that are slower and more deliberate may not have had the time to colonize much
of the galaxy at all.
The remaining question here is what choices will we make?
Oddly, given the distances to the nearest stars much less the distant ones and the apparent
lack of any way to achieve faster than light travel, we may end up moving very slowly regardless
and thus the solution to the Fermi Paradox is that fast expansion is hard no matter what,
and other civilizations have tended to keep their scope small, at least for now.
1.
Maybe the Fermi Paradox was never a paradox at all.
The basic thinking behind the Fermi Paradox implies that the numbers, at least superficially,
are such that we really SHOULD be seeing evidence of alien civilizations everywhere we look.
This thinking is further bolstered by ideas like the Von Neumann self-replicating probe,
where you can literally fill the galaxy with probes in only a few million years, stationing
one or more in every star system without ever exceeding the speed of light.
Why hasn’t anyone done that?
The last possibility is that nothing says they haven’t.
If there was a von Neumann probe, or many such probes, stationed in this star system
unless they were blasting out evidence of their existence, we wouldn’t see them.
Say they were dormant, only collecting data at intervals that could last millions of years.
Say they were extinct, or simply waiting to be found by a space faring us.
Unless such a thing made itself known, and assuming that it’s not the size of an asteroid,
randomly finding one our in the solar system would be so far beyond a needle in a haystack
that it if they are discrete it could be centuries before we run across the first one, even if
hundreds of them from many different civilizations are out there floating in the vastness of
the solar system.
In short, maybe there never was a paradox, we just don’t know what to look for or how
to look for it yet.
But once we do, we may well find it, and maybe it will be far closer than we ever bargained
for since we first started asking the question, are we alone?.
Thanks for listening!
I am science fiction author and futurist John Michael Godier and be sure to check out my
books at your favorite online book retailer and subscribe to my channel for regular, in-depth
explorations into the interesting, weird and unknown aspects of this amazing universe in
which we live.