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[The Fermi Paradox] : ITT We Answer the Question, "Where is Everybody?"
The Ender
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In 1950, Enrico Fermi stood up at a luncheon he was having with other physicists and loudly asked, "Where is everybody?"
'Everybody' as in 'every civilization that ought to exist aside from humanity'. This question, known today as, "Fermi's Paradox," and sometimes referred to as, "The Great Silence," seems problematic / disturbing to some people (myself among them) in light of the following observations:
- Our Sun is very young in comparison to the age of the oldest stars. It's very unlikely that the Earth would've harbored the first life in the universe.
- Many, many suns have planetary systems surrounding them. Perhaps even most suns. That suggests there should be at least a few billion planets in our galaxy alone that mirror the Earth's conditions.
- Life on Earth developed very rapidly after the planet's formation. It's sensible to assume that this would also be the case on many or most Earth-like analogues.
So, in theory, the universe ought to be humming with life. There ought to be, at the very least, billion upon billions of tons of extraterrestrial space junk (probes in particular) drifting around, degraded old radio signals, and - if we assume that space colonization is a possible future for us - widespread colonization of the galaxy.
But it's not humming. In fact, it's completely silent. Since 1960, SETI has been monitoring a very wide spectrum of radio frequencies for even the slightest hint of a broadcast message or 'residue' from an old sphere of radio signals, like the one currently expanding from Earth at the speed of light. And we've heard nothing, aside from one possible contact that we've never heard from again.
There are a few competing mainstream answers to Fermi's question today, some scary to think about, some not.
1: The Earth is Incredibly Rare
This would mean that only one in about ten billion (or more) suns has an Earth analogue orbiting it. This isn't out of the question, certainly: Earth is the only inner planet in the solar system with an apparently active core, seismic activity and a strong magnetic field. This suggests that these traits, at the very least, aren't common among planets of the Earth's size. Earth also seems to exist on a knife edge in terms of it's climate, partly due to it's atmospheric composition and partly due to it's distance from the sun.
2: Technology is Incredibly Rare
This isn't necessarily exclusive to the hypothesis that the Earth itself is a rare planet. The argument here is that the jump from simple microbial life to complex sentient life is difficult (our current understanding of life's development on Earth lends credibility to this idea - for most of life's history, it was nothing but simple microbes. Only after the planet became more rich with oxygen did more complex life develop), and more often than not an Earth analogue will become sterile before any civilization could develop on it.
3: We're Not Looking For the Right Signals
This hypothesis argues that sufficiently advanced civilizations stop using radio communications in favor of some other form of communication we're not yet aware of, so the universe is humming, but we're not yet tuned-in.
4: Interplanetary Colonization / Exploration Never Happens
Or, it happens so rarely and on such a small scale that it's not noticeable. Basically, nobody ever goes beyond Apollo; for whatever reason, they give up on space (perhaps it really is totally impossible to solve the problem of travelling over interstellar / interplanetary distances, or the solutions are seen as too costly to be worthwhile) and eventually die-out on their home planet once their sun matures.
5: Everybody Is Dead
Well, not necessarily everybody, but mostly everybody. This hypothesis often follows from the 'Interplanetary Colonization / Exploration Never Happens' hypothesis, but isn't necessarily exclusive to it. Either all civilizations have killed themselves off with their technology before they could colonize other worlds, or they went to colonize other worlds and were subsequently killed by some unknown threat (like a grey goo weapon; a threat that the U.S. state department currently considers credible enough to warrant a ban on active SETI), or they were constrained to their solar system before ultimately going extinct as their star died.
So, D&D:
Where is everybody?
With Love and Courage
The Ender on
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I mean a hypothetical technological species has to be competitive enough to develop tools to outdo the neighbors but not competitive enough to kill everyone.
Or imagine if humans had a breeding season during which every male was compelled to fight every other male. It would make cities and agriculture impossible.
Life is rare, but radio signals don't travel that good. I mean, I'm pretty sure we don't actually have the capability to generate a signal strong enough to be detected by our own equipment even modestly far away in astronomical terms. SETI isn't looking for residual electronic signals. It is looking for a targeted, extremely powerful signal, being beamed exactly at Earth.
Interstellar travel may not be a thing that happens all that much. It is kinda a hard nut to crack.
Why would that be a bad thing? I would think such a civilization would have a better chance of survival than us, not a lesser one.
I've read multiple books on this and related topics and from what I can gather the most likely explanation leans heavily on the second option in op of tech/intelligence being rare.
This. E. O. Wilson's "The Social Conquest of Earth" makes the case that the development of an intelligent social species (humans) arose as the result of many adaptations that just so happened to set us further and further along the road to where we are today. Human traits that at first glance seem to have nothing to do with intelligence or social behavior (such as the fact that we live on land as opposed to the sea and that we can only walk so far in a day) were important factors in our development (if we lived in the sea we could not make fire and learn to harness it; if we could travel farther it would mean humans would have been spread out in larger areas, making it less likely for different groups of humans to come in contact with each other). Even if other intelligent forms of life evolved there is no guarantee that they would be anything like us in form or thought.
Other possible answers to the Fermi Paradox could be "there is some kind of ban on contact with Earth and other certain worlds for whatever reason" or, for certain religions, "life was only created on Earth".
That's science fiction. There is no such thing as a perfect exclusion security bubble (or perfect anything) in reality. And if it's not perfect, then stuff would leak through and we would know about it. Just one stray spaceship slipping through would be enough to settle the debate.
This is the answer I dislike the most, probably because I think it's right, and it's depressing. It means that, for whatever reason, the difficulties of interstellar travel are insurmountable. Earth will ultimately be our tomb, sooner or later.
http://www.aeonmagazine.com/world-views/ross-andersen-human-extinction/
It's possible that a nearly unavoidable extinction event claims all sentient life before it can expand to an interstellar scale. The article covers an angle I hadn't thought of before. Basically it would be best if we find no evidence of life on mars or elsewhere. If life is common then the likeliness of that extinction event lying in our future goes up. If it's not then our future is our own to make.
Yeah, I know. That's why the rest of my post that didn't get quoted went on to establish my reality based opinion.
But! If we as a species get to the point of interstellar travel and happen upon an alien world are we going to just swoop in and say hi. Or will we grant them space and allow them to develop at whatever rate they might, all the while using our advanced tech to monitor their developments?
why do you say this?
That means that even in that phenomenally extreme example, there's a hell of a lot of intelligent life that - even if they were far, far more advanced than we - we'd likely never have any chance to contact, ever. If we could travel to Mars in two days, we'd still have no shot at talking to the galaxy next door.
Actually that's not what I meant. I meant that there are no alien civilizations. Interstellar travel might be possible, but no one's ever done it because there is no one else out there. The Earth doesn't have to be our tomb. The entire galaxy is vacant for us to move in.
Why aren't there any alien civilizations? Maybe there's something special about the earth, or the sun, or the corner of the galaxy we're in, that made life possible here, and we haven't realized it yet. Maybe some external chance event played in - the impact of the moon or some well-placed solar flare or something else - that never happened in the right place at the right time elsewhere. Or maybe life is common, but the specific evolutionary path that leads to technological civilization is unique somehow. Keep in mind we have only really studied one example so far, ourselves, so we have no basis to compare and know what's normal and what's a one-in-a-trillion unique.
This is something that is often forgotten. TV and radio signals tend to degrade over time, so by the time I Love Lucy and Hitler's speech get to Alpha Homonculi VII they might not even recognize it as artificial and it may well be indistinguishable from background radiation and shit
I don't remember the exact distance, but I think it' pretty small, galactically speaking. Maybe a little over a light year from source?
Add to that the fact that space is big, like really really big, so the idea that we will just run into someone else's stuff are, quite literally, astronomical.
This is the most asinine train of thought. Space is huge, life developed on Earth basically by accident so we can assume it is rare as hell. Assuming you just can't go faster than light in this reality the universe could be teeming with life and we would never ever find out.
Anyone who thinks we would know about them with definitive certainty should try standing in the desert three miles outside of Las Vegas and shout for people to at the Trump Hotel to send you a car.
Fucking startrek nerds need to learn how to walk up to people and say hi, rather than being all creepy and stand-offish, watching from a far and telling themselves they are respecting the other party. Awe... I saw this really cute civilization the other day, but I didn't say anything because it was just way too young for me.
Screw being galactic society's that guy.
Because millions of civilizations flying around the galaxy for millions of years would not go unnoticed or disappear without leaving a single trace. If technological civilizations were in any way a normal occurrence, then the galaxy would be teeming with life or with the remains of that life. We would not be desperately scanning the heavens for the slightest shred of evidence, we would have piles of evidence staring us in the face.
I really do want to reinforce that space is impossibly, unimaginably huge. Like, our brains are not equipped to meaningfully understand what kind of distances between objects we're talking about.
This isn't equivalent to arguing that there are too many humans and too little forest for bigfoot to hide in. The forest we're talking about is bigger than anything I can compare it to without descending into some kind of Lovecraftian madness.
There's room to hide from one planet that's scarcely able to perceive what happens beyond its own solar system.
There are so many other possible answers, though. I'm sure Richy will dismiss them as science fiction, but how do we know for certainty what technology could be capable of?
Let me rattle off a few more possibilities of the top of my head:
* Maybe the technology allowing interstellar travel develops at about the same time as technology that eliminates any practical need for interstellar travel (and the species that attain such technology are the least likely to have any desire for interstellar travel or can produce simulations that accurately represent other worlds without requiring interference that could possibly bring about harm).
* There is some sort of government capable of not only interstellar travel, but also of travel to other universes. Civilizations that wish to associate with each other are required by law to operate within a universe dedicated for that purpose.
I'll refer to the "apes or angels" hypothesis; the transition from the technological incapability of interstellar travel and communication to the capability of such is less than a blink of an eye in the history of a species, and it is very unlikely that any species we managed to contact would be in this transitional period (as we currently are). Effectively all civilizations capable of acting beyond their worlds would possess technology likely beyond anything we can imagine; it would be very unlikely for there to not to be any sort of governing body uniting these civilizations.
I'm not saying I believe that this is true, but I will say that I believe such a thing is more likely than the existence of a supernatural deity. I'm an agnostic in regards to both subjects, although I lean closer to a believer in terms of extraterrestrial civilizations and closer to an atheist in terms of a god.
And as long as we can only look for somebody else doing the same, there's also depressingly few places we can hear - more than could hear us as a civilization expanded only to the interplanetary scale (not interstellar) may be sending much more powerful signals out of their system than we are, but unless somebody targets a beam at us we're still talking about a sad few thousand or tens of thousands possible systems. We're not searching the universe, we're searching a slice of the galaxy so small that even the most optimistic coefficients in the Drake Equation suggest has approximately zero civilizations. The fact that we're in that tiny slice is a statistical anomaly.
It kinda says something about us as a people if we're losing hope after less than one lifetime playing Where's Waldo with just a corner of a page.
I do get what you mean, but even the scope of our own galaxy is pretty far beyond us.
I mean, we're pretty sure that the center of the galaxy is a supermassive black hole. We're pretty sure that the biggest single thing in our galaxy, the thing that might help to explain its very structure, is there, but we're not certain.
A civilization that spans, say, three or four planets on the opposite end of the galaxy would still, very likely, be beyond our detection.
I agree with you. If we ever learn of other civilizations in the universe it will probably because they let us know they exist.
I didn't direct it at you specifically. In my experience in these debates the difference between our galaxy and the universe gets blurred quickly, and I already saw "the universe" come up in some replies in the thread, so I wanted to get that distinction out there.
Our capacity to search for evidence is still pretty limited, and we've only been looking with the tools available to us for a few decades. The search hasn't been that concerted either. Think about how long and how much effort it took to find convincing evidence of the Higgs boson. And with that, we pretty much knew what we were looking for and roughly how to find it. We don't have nearly the same clarity when it comes to looking for evidence of advanced extraterrestrial civilization.
Oh no worries, and it's a meaningful distinction - my point is that even to limit the scope to our own galaxy doesn't fully reconcile the problems of scale that could, arguably, mask the presence of the life Fermi is interested in.
If FTL travel is possible, then tons of spaceships. Tourists coming to see the untamed wilderness of earth, missionaries coming to convert us, warlords coming to conquer us, diplomats coming to talk to us, traders coming to rip us off, scientists coming to study us...
If FTL travel is not possible and space-faring civilizations are thriving right now, then automated scientific probes studying us, automated factory probes exploiting our resources to make more probes or outposts, and generational ships or cryogenic ships carrying colonists looking for new places to settle.
If FTL travel is not possible and space-faring civilizations died out, then remains. Derelict spaceships drifting in space and crashing down, abandoned space stations and deserted colonial outposts.
The galaxy is big, yes. But it is finite. One civilization, spreading exponentially, even at slower-than-light speeds, would be able to touch every single star in some million years. Multiple civilizations (as people believe), civilizations given a billion year head start on us (given the relative youth of the sun) or civilizations that figured out FTL travel (if it is possible) would leave no doubt as to their existence.
We need to mind our assumptions. There isn't a lot about earth that would necessarily apply to anywhere else.
Space is huge.
Hell, it's very likely that if there is a 21st century Earth level civilization in even Alpha Centauri or Sirius we would not know about it and they wouldn't know about us.
Fermi's paradox is kind of... well... crap because it is based on a lot of assumptions about the state of the universe that we simply don't have an answer to right now.
So to the question "is there life out there?" the only accurate response is "I'm sorry I haven't a clue."
I love Star Trek and Star Wars as much as the next guy, but I just don't think those are realistic assumptions about the interstellar reality on the, erm, ground.
Why do you assume that the Solar System and Earth are interesting or worthwhile enough that aliens would come and stick around long enough and in such numbers as to leave traces of their presence?
I mean, how many on the total asteroids have we mapped? Or just look at how much we know about Pluto, a probe could be parked right there and we would not have a clue. That's to say nothing of our current trend of making automated systems smaller and smaller which makes finding something even less likely.
To me at least, stateing that there that there isn't life outside of earth in the solar system is a hugely arrogant statement and you are assuming that to the millionth power.
This. Even within our own solar system, every single resource except slave labor is available in more accessible forms which aren't infested with apes armed with uncontrolled weaponized nuclear reactions. And as for slave labor, that'd be like us running factories with trained chimps. Theoretically possible, but there's a reason we just build robots.
There's no reason to assume an interstellar civilization would be any more detectable than an interplanetary one.
A. If they do not have FTL communication, each system would have to be effectively an independent interplanetary civilization. Communication would almost have to be by directed beam communication (meaning if we're not on line of sight we won't pick it up), if at all. Any communication "leaking" out should be no more than an single-system interplanetary civilization, putting it in a really tight range requirement of Earth for us to detect.
B. If they do have FTL communication (whether by some advanced device or snail mail through FTL spacecraft), we wouldn't be able to detect it at all. It could be giving us all cancer and we'd be no closer to finding alien life than we are now.
Actually, Fermi's paradox is based on the assumption that Earth and our evolution is entirely ordinary and not special. Which is the same assumption that underlies the idea that alien civilizations exist elsewhere in the galaxy. So the only way to break out of it is to discard the basic assumption, which also means admitting that there's something special about us that wouldn't happen elsewhere and therefore that there are no alien civilizations.
I also disagree with your statement that "if there is a 21st century Earth level civilization in even Alpha Centauri or Sirius we would not know about it". Or at least, I need you to qualify that to a civilization that has been 21st-century-earth level for no more than a few centuries. Why? Because, with our current 21st century technology, we can reach Alpha Centauri and Sirius. It would take several centuries of travel, yes, but we could do it. And I hope you'll agree that, if we ever found evidence that there's something interesting there (like, say, a Goldilocks-zone earth-size rock planet with signs of an atmosphere) after a few centuries of studying it from afar we would start shooting automated probes and satellites there to go take a closer look. Likewise, one would expect that if there are similar civilizations nearby, given enough time even stagnating at our current level of technology, they would have sent something our way that would have reached us.
The only reason they would not have done this is if they, as a civilization, are completely devoid of curiosity and interest and just don't want to know about us, or if they nuked themselves back into the stone age before they got around to sending space probes to us. Either of these are possible for one civilization. But when we start accounting for the thousands of civilizations that presumably inhabit our galaxy, it becomes increasingly unlikely that not a single one of them ever got around to sending a space probe to us.
And this leaves the question of, why would these civilizations only be 21st century Earth level? What about all the civilizations that had million years head-starts on us, what happened to them?
Yeah, basically the technology required to maintain and interstellar civilization is so advanced that we're not going to find out about it until we stumble across it or they purposefully land in Red Square or something.
And the technology for interplanetary civilization is such that right now we're probably not capable of receiving it.
It doesn't even have to be. The galaxy may be big, but it's still finite. Even if our solar system ranks last on the list of places to visit, given enough people and enough time (both of which are assumed when people say that alien civilizations exist) then it would have been visited.
At least with FTL, you can have meaningful interdependence between to solar systems, and the possibility of some sort of internal collapse that takes out the whole culture.
I don't get how there is a mechanism by which the mold stops growing with a interstellar non-FTL species.
What evidence would you expect to find from a single probe or exploratory mission that landed on Earth, say, 75,000 years ago? Where would you look for this evidence?