The Fermi Paradox ("Where are all the aliens?")

[Kyng]

Here's a thread I've been meaning to cross-post for a while . The original is here:

https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/the_coff...=57&t=3695

Some of you might have heard of the Fermi paradox. If you haven't, then Enrico Fermi's argument was as follows: the Sun is a relatively young star (many stars in the galaxy are billions of years older), and we'd expect some of these older stars to have planets, some of which have intelligent life that's billions of years ahead of us in technological development. In those billions of years, they would easily have been able to spread their influence across the entire galaxy - including the Earth. However, we see no convincing evidence of such advanced civilizations even existing, let alone controlling us. Why is this?

There are a lot of possible answers to this question, most of which can be grouped into the following basic categories:

1. They never existed in the first place. Either we truly are alone, or any other life that did develop hasn't become intelligent. (Perhaps there's some kind of "Great Filter" that stops almost all life from becoming intelligent)
   
   
2. They did exist at one time, but don't now. Maybe they have a strong tendency to destroy themselves once they become technologically capable of doing so. (Maybe this "Great Filter" is not behind us, but ahead of us - which is a pretty unsettling thought ...)
   
   
3. They do exist, but they can't/won't colonize the galaxy. Perhaps it's technologically impossible, or they consider it too unsafe or too expensive.
   
   
4. They have colonized the galaxy, but we can't see them. Maybe we're not looking/listening hard enough, or they're purposely keeping out of our way.
   

Of course, within each of these broad categories, there's a wide range of specific possibilities (and there are some that straddle multiple categories without clearly fitting into any of them ). In the following video, YouTube user John Michael Godier lists some of the more unusual and obscure ones:



If you don't have time to watch the video, here's a summary of the list:

10 obscure solutions to the Fermi Paradox

10. Aliens don't like planets. We've never seen a civilisation that's conquered a galaxy (we're not there yet ourselves), so we don't know what such a civilisation would look like. We look for them on other planets (because we live on one ourselves); however, aliens may choose not to do this, for any number of reasons.

9. Surface oceans might be rare. We still don't know how the Earth acquired its water. One possibility is that it came from comets - but, what caused the disturbance that set the comets on a collision course with the young Earth in the first place? We don't know - but it could have been a rare event, like a passing star. (Sub-surface oceans, on the other hand, are likely to be relatively common)

8. Aliens have different mathematics (or none at all). Some animals on Earth do have an ability to comprehend numbers (i.e. being able to compare 'smaller' and 'larger' quantities), but it's not what we humans would think of as 'counting'. So, perhaps the conditions which predisposed us to mathematics are rare (and, without mathematics, an otherwise-intelligent alien civilisation won't be able to get very far: space travel would certainly be out of the question).

7. The chemistry of life is too hard to happen often. We still don't know how life first originated on the Earth: we know that the basic building blocks could have been formed quite easily, but we don't know how we got from "the building blocks of life" to "actual life". We're working towards a solution to this - and, if it turns out that the chemistry is very complex, then it's not something that'll happen spontaneously on very many planets.

6a. Aliens become "scientifically frustrated". For example, we could discover the technology to upload ourselves into a computer, or heavily augment ourselves, to the point where we'd no longer be 'human'. Would we want that - and would alien civilisations facing the same question want that for themselves? Perhaps there's a future scientific discovery which is considered so toxic that it causes virtually all alien species to abandon any further scientific development.

6b. We might run out of science. We might find that some scientific questions are simply unanswerable - and, these eternal mysteries prevent any civilisation from developing to a point where it can colonise a galaxy.

5. You need more than one inhabitable planet. Perhaps life originated on Mars, at a time when it was more hospitable to life than it is now, and then spread to Earth before the Martian surface became uninhabitable. In other systems, it could be rare for there to be more than one inhabitable planet - so, perhaps life simply dies out when the planet on which it originated can no longer support it?

4. Intelligence is a fluke. Right now, there are several million species living on Earth (and there have been countless others in the past that have gone extinct) - and yet, we're the only one that can launch rockets. Since species on Earth have such a low 'success rate' at developing intelligence, perhaps it's just a fluke that we did?

3. Aliens become "scientifically happy". This is closely related to point #6 - but, instead of finding something that actively puts them off from making further scientific discoveries, perhaps they just lose the motivation to do so. For example, maybe they discover an alternate universe, which is far more interesting to study than our current one. Or, maybe they discover that our universe is a simulation, and lose all interest in studying it further.

2. Most worlds don't experience enough mass extinctions. While mass extinctions are terrible from the point of view of someone interested in biology, they do clear the way for new species to rise up. For example, without the extinction of the dinosaurs, it's very unlikely that we'd be here today. What if these events were rarer on most other planets - so, intelligent life has fewer opportunities to arise?

1. It's very slow out there. Aliens might operate on a much slower timescale than us humans do (for example, the process of saying "Hello, how are you?" could take years for them, as opposed to a couple of seconds for us). This means that, even if they are sending out signals, they might only repeat every 100 years or so - and, since we haven't even been picking up signals for 100 years, it's no wonder we haven't found any repeating signals!

So, what do you think is the most likely explanation?

[Detective Osprey]

I voted for the latter two options.

[Kyng]

Isaac Arthur has put out a video about the "Zoo Hypothesis". Essentially, this is a family of solutions which says "Advanced aliens exist, but they're hiding themselves from us, for our own protection":



There are several versions, of this; for example:

• They have a "Prime Directive" not to disturb pre-interstellar civilisations, as in Star Trek. The problem is, how would such a thing be enforced - bearing in mind that they'd have to hide us from every single alien who tries to expose themselves to us?
  
• They've surrounded the Solar System with monitors, showing a fake universe. This runs into problems as soon as our space probes leave their TV monitor bubble - but, perhaps they're going really far with this, and sending us faked signals to match the ones we would have been receiving from our probes ?
  
• Perhaps, at some point, they killed us all and put us into a computer simulation, without us even noticing .
  

I have to admit, I don't really buy into any of these solutions. The first one sounds too difficult to enforce (as Arthur himself acknowledges), while the second and third sound very conspiratorial (and, if you're going with the third, then you might as well just assume that we've always been in a simulation). However, Arthur's not trying to convince us of the Zoo Hypothesis here, because he himself isn't an advocate of it (he's stated in his earlier Fermi Paradox episodes that he leans towards "Advanced aliens don't exist" solutions). He's merely entertaining and examining the idea, to see whether it's plausible .

[Jarkko]

What's your take on Bill Watterson's answer to this?:



While a bit light-hearted and perhaps facetious, it may raise a point: that it's entirely possible that humanity has done such a good job of making a mess of its own world that aliens may have taken one look at us and gone "NOPE."

[Kyng]

What's your take on Bill Watterson's answer to this?:



While a bit light-hearted and perhaps facetious, it may raise a point: that it's entirely possible that humanity has done such a good job of making a mess of its own world that aliens may have taken one look at us and gone "NOPE."

It's amusing, to say the least ! It's also not an idea I'd thought of previously.

(On a somewhat more serious note: I suppose some of the aliens might have been tempted to come here and try to educate us. Then again, it's entirely possible that they've already tried doing this on other worlds, and it's ended in disaster - much like many "civilizing savages" missions here on Earth, and presumably also on the aliens' home worlds before they developed space flight. Which is pretty sad... so, I guess I'll just go back to laughing at the comic )

[Kyng]

Time for another Isaac Arthur video - this time, about another class of possible solutions. Here, he examines the possibility that there was a galaxy-wide, universe-wide or even multiverse-wide disaster in the past, which wiped out all existing intelligent life - and Earth is one of the first places where it has re-emerged:



I have to admit, solutions like this are difficult for me to get behind, because they don't work unless the disaster wipes out literally all intelligent life: if there's even one hold-out in even one galactic backwater, then it doesn't work as a Fermi Paradox solution. However, like I said in a previous post, Arthur isn't a proponent of these kinds of solutions: he leans towards the "Advanced alien civilisations don't exist (and never have done)" kinds of solutions. As with the Zoo Hypothesis video, he's just entertaining the idea here .

[SpookyZalost]

so here's what I think.

I'm actually currently siding with the humans as being an early developer in our region of space/time regarding other races, we certainly could have evolved a lot slower than we did and it's not like our corner of the universe is full of ruins, abandoned mega structures, and unexplained space debris.

it's not that there isn't anyone around but that there simply hasn't been stable enough conditions in our region of space (milky way, local cluster, etc.), for long enough to produce complex life.

either that or some sort of recurring disaster is preventing type 2+ civilizations from existing around here in which case we need to be very careful though if hawking was right it may be too late... we are a very noisy planet in the grand scheme of things.

perhapse we should get to working on a nicoll-dyson beam...

[SpookyZalost]

So an addendum to my previous statement about rocky planets with the right conditions being more recent.

After the discovery of phosphine on venus I began looking into it as a life signature and I now have an even better reason why humans are early.

Besides carbon, oxygen, etc almost all the nucleic acids that make up life on earth have a phosphorus base.  This is important because phosphorus is actually pretty uncommon In the universe as we know it.

If it's a key element for life, then a phosphorus deficiency could be a major cause for the lack of other civilizations out there.

[Kyng]

So an addendum to my previous statement about rocky planets with the right conditions being more recent.

After the discovery of phosphine on venus I began looking into it as a life signature and I now have an even better reason why humans are early.

Besides carbon, oxygen, etc almost all the nucleic acids that make up life on earth have a phosphorus base.  This is important because phosphorus is actually pretty uncommon In the universe as we know it.

If it's a key element for life, then a phosphorus deficiency could be a major cause for the lack of other civilizations out there.

Indeed. I just watched Isaac Arthur's video about the "phosphorus problem":



Interestingly, this video was actually planned and scripted before the discovery of phosphine gas on Venus was announced - so, this is a case of fortunate/coincidental timing . However, it does explain how phosphorus is likely very rare on planets across the universe (and, crucially for the Fermi Paradox, was probably rarer still on planets older than Earth!)

Furthermore, even if other civilisations do emerge on those planets lucky enough to have plenty of phosphorus, they may have difficulty colonising planets which lack this element (which I guess would help to explain why no advanced civilisation has colonised the Milky Way, even if they do exist !)

[Kyng]

And now, another instalment of Isaac Arthur's series, this time focusing on the "Prime Directive" solution, whereby aliens can reveal their existence to us, but they feel a strong moral obligation not to do so:



Of course, he did talk about this before, in the 'Zoo Hypothesis' video that I posted further up in this thread several months back. However, he's taking a more in-depth look at the subject this time, to see if he can make it work - and, here are his main conclusions:

• As noted in my previous post: how do we make sure everybody follows the Prime Directive? Even if many species have a moral standpoint of non-interference, we can't expect interstellar travel to be exclusive to these species. Indeed, even within Star Trek, the Klingons, Romulans and Borg clearly don't have this moral standpoint - and, even if a species as a whole takes a moral stance of non-interference, there might be individuals within that species who don't. So, why hasn't one of these contacted us on Earth? (After all, it only takes one to make first contact!)
  
  
• One option is that interstellar exploration really is exclusive to civilizations with a belief in universal non-interference. Perhaps there's some objective moral system (as absolute as the laws of physics) that we as a species haven't figured out yet - but that all species will tend to figure out before they go interstellar. If this system includes universal non-interference, then every space-faring civilization could discover it and adhere to it. However, this raises the 'teacher problem': if a fundamental ethical truth exists, shouldn't we be spreading it to other civilisations in order to help them? Perhaps we can argue that they need to find it on their own in order to really appreciate it... but then, we don't expect members of our own species to find all ethical truths on their own, so why should we expect this for another species?
  
  
• Another issue with the Prime Directive is: is it really all that ethical to begin with? Perhaps an alien civilization is threatened by a giant meteor, or a pandemic, or other imminent existential threat. Even if you take the stance of non-interference, on the basis that they need to discover the ethical truths on their own... well, they certainly won't discover them after the meteor has wiped them out. (To be fair, The Original Series and The Next Generation don't prohibit intervention in these extreme circumstances; however, this does underscore the need for the existence of an objective, unarguable moral system which all interstellar civilizations discover. Without this, there will be too many grey areas, and too many 'helpful' interventions for the Prime Directive to work as a Fermi Paradox solution)
  
  
• However, there is another option, that doesn't entail obligatory non-interference being an objective moral truth. Perhaps one highly powerful civilization has got a centuries-long headstart on everybody else, and made a commitment to quarantine less advanced species (like ourselves) from the rest of the universe until they reach some technological milestone. Perhaps they'd go as far as to dump these more primitive civilizations into virtual worlds or pocket universes, until they're ready to rejoin the 'real' world (and, if they've done that to us, how could we tell?). Of course, even here, they'd probably require at least some one-time interference in order to establish this!

I must say, this is one of the less convincing solutions . If one civilization has a major head-start on the rest the universe, then that civilization could very easily be us (as it would be in many of the more traditional solutions to the Fermi Paradox - particularly the "Advanced aliens don't exist" kind!)