Intelligent Aliens - Part 2: Fermi's Paradox
G'day team,
Today I thought we'd kick off where we left off after chatting about Drake's equation, and how it leaves us with a few unanswered questions regarding where all the damn aliens are hiding!
Image from Pixabay
Fermi's Paradox
Now let's get one thing out of the way straight up... "Fermi's Paradox" is a bit of a misnomer. It wasn't first suggested by the Nobel Prize winner Enrico Fermi to who it is credited, and it is not technically a paradox.
Fermi's Paradox put simply, is a term given to the apparent discrepancy between the number of alien civilizations that should exist in the universe, according to the Drake Equation, and the fact we haven't found any. Since any relatively advanced civilization shouldn’t have too many problems colonizing a galaxy over just a few million years, the conclusion that we must draw, therefore, is that aliens do not exist. Now, this is clearly a conundrum (but not a paradox) and the origins of the idea appear to stem from the scientist Michael Hart.
Fermi’s original statements are similar but do not imply the same problem. His view was that since many alien civilizations must exist in the universe, the fact we haven’t seen them in the Milky Way implies inter-galactic travel is not possible!
So how can we explain Fermi's Paradox? Let's have a look at some popular ideas...
Solutions
We can break down potential solutions to Fermi’s paradox by explaining where they sit within Drake’ Equation. For example, the “intelligent civilizations do exist but not at the same time as us, due to the age of the universe” solution, would sit under ”L”.
Timelines
Since we mentioned it above, let’s start with the ‘timelines’concept….
According to the most recent estimations, the universe is about 6000 years old, as per the Holy Bible… lol just kidding! God, I’m edgy! It’s about 13.8 billion years old, the Earth is 4.5, and life on Earth is about 3.5 to 4 billion years. That’s a long time, but human civilization has only arisen in the last 6000 years and we’ve only really been ‘advanced’ for 100 years. By ’advanced’ I mean capable of sending and detecting interstellar transmissions.
So in order for us to find aliens, they have to exist and be transmitting or looking for us in the exact same 100-year time frame that we’ve been advanced for. That’s 100 years out of 14 billion or a fraction of 7.14x10-9.
So alien civilizations may have existed in our galaxy, there may have been dozens or hundreds or even thousands of them. But the chances of them existing now are pretty scant.
Filters
There are a set of explanations that fall under the components of Drake’s Equation labeled fi and fc, or the fraction of life forms which evolve to intelligence and the fraction of intelligent life forms that create civilizations advanced enough to reach out.
If we’re looking at these values we can consider that perhaps many life-forms or civilizations arise, but they all face a number of tests or filters, and many life forms falter at each filter thus driving the values of fi and fc down dramatically. These filters could be anything… war, famine, disease, climate change or other problems that we haven’t reached yet.
The scary part of this proposition is that we have no way to know if these ’filters’ are behind us… or ahead!
The threat of nuclear war is still very real, as are some of these other popular future' filters...
- Overpopulation and depletion of home-word resources
- Destruction of life due to experimentation with physics
- The “grey goo problem”or the creation of self-replicating nano-bots which destroy everything in their never-ending march to consume
Image from Pixabay
We Are the Aliens
This is a pretty crazy idea, but what if life on earth didn’t evolve on earth. This isn’t as far out as it may seem though, so far we’ve not been able to create self-replicating molecules in the lab, like those that make life. So there’s no evidence to either support or refute the claim that life on earth stemmed from an extra-terrestrial civilization, though it would seem odd they’d not come back to check up once in a while... or did they?
Aliens Have Made Contact
This is pretty simple and will get some conspiracy theorists super excited, but a possible solution to Fermi’s Paradox is that earth is simply under observation. Perhaps we’re not yet advanced enough or civil enough to be included in extra-terrestrial interactions, perhaps Earth is a zoo and perhaps there’s some other spookier motive. Perhaps our Alein creators simply check-in every few thousand years to see how their batch is brewing and we're just in-between check-ups. We’ll never know for sure, but it’s a thought I’d rather not dwell on!
Image from Pixabay
Language Barriers
Perhaps aliens do exist and they’re trying to contact us with all their might, but we simply don’t understand. There’s no reason to believe that alien life would think, behave or communicate like us, so it’s possible they’re attempts to make contact are simply going ignored.
It’s the Simulations!
This is a pretty popular little theory/ mind-fuck that has even been discussed by Elon Musk. The idea goes as such…
“If it’s possible to create a computer simulation of a universe, in which intelligence exists and reproduced entirely in the software then we are probably just in a simulation. Since if it is possible to create such a simulation, then more than one would invariably be created, then there is only one reality and an indeterminate number of possible simulations. We have no reason to believe we are the original reality, instead of simply a simulation.”
No there are two reasons this applies to the Drake Equation... we may simply exist within a simulation where no other aliens have been allowed in. Alternatively, the aliens themselves may be busy inside simulation which they've created ot escape the real world, too busy to waste time searching for us!
Image from Pixabay
We are the First
This is an interesting concept that stems from research done by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2015. The research indicated that Earth is quite a young planet, and when it came together only 8% of ‘planet producing’ material in the universe was in planets… the rest was dust. As such the number of planets capable of supporting life for the last 4 billion years is relatively low compared to our assumptions, and perhaps intelligent life usually takes much longer to evolve than we have. As such, we’d be the first intelligent civilization.
Thanks
Thanks for taking the time to read about Fermi’s Paradox. As usual I hope everyone had fun and learned something while they were at it.
Thanks
-tfc
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Our universe is 13.8 billion years old, which seems old, but really isn't, when compared how old the universe theoretically could be. Stars will be created for approximately another million billion years. We're just the first to arrive on the stage. No wonder it's a bit quiet :)
Food for thought!
Followed you hoping I will read good science from you!
Followed back. I think of Carl Sagan's quote "We are a way for the cosmos to know itself" whenever I begin to think humanity is inconsequential in the grand sceme of things. Damn if that doesn't give us a cosmic purpose.
Sorry for the late response guys... but you're right... we're tiny. But we may be the only things to have ever have, or that will ever have, the thought "we're tiny"!
I like how you mentioned the language barrier thing. Someone clever once said, humans sending out radio waves in the hope of getting a response from ETs is like a native American putting up smoke signals expecting to hear back from Europe. If something truly is alien, then it's probably going to communicate in ways that we don't anticipate, and therefore any serious researcher of ETs has to look in strange and disreputable places - UFO sightings, alien abductions, channelling by mediums, the use of DMT and other psychedelics.
For example, there is the curious case of Stanley Romanek, a man who claims to be a serial abductee, and to sleepwalk and sleepwrite strange physics formulae which supposedly describe faster-than-light travel.
A couple of physics professors have commented on Stan's sleepwriting:
Pretty bizarre. Knowledge about intelligences completely alien to us is never going to fit neatly into a box.
That's really interesting... there's a postulate called the Sagan's paradox which states that alien civilizations could not be visiting us because it would simply use too much of the matter in the universe.
Putting on my medicine cap it's quite possible for people to have subconscious understandings of things that they would have no idea about normally... this is seen regularly in psychotic and delusional patients. That being said I don't know much about this case so it would be brash of me to make the assumption that that is the case here.
You got most of the ideas out there, sadly I am thinking that we might never evolve to get past our own local group (Milky Way and Andromeda). The discussion about space expansion at speeds greater than light is shining more light on the calculation but it's still improbable that we will ever leave the local group. Unless we generate wormholes or develop Alcubierre drives, that is, which is not very possible now or in near future.
Hey man, yeah you're right! So I was trying to keep using the term "in our galaxy" consistent throughout the article, because both Drake's Equation and Fermi's Paradox really refer to just our galaxy, unfortunately, I must have left "universe" in a few too many times!
I did come across the space expansion problem in my readings, it's interesting to note that only intelligent civilizations that developed very early in the creation of the universe would have had a chance of traveling before everything got too spread out, but at the same time the chances of life developing this early are super slim.
There were tons of other solutions to the paradox btw, but some of them were just a little too far out there for my liking!
BTW, I found a paper that suggests an even wilder hypothesis, that the other civilizations are simply dormant and are waiting for the universe to cool down, at which point they can engange in large scale computation more efficiently. It's quite out there, but an interesting take nonetheless.
That's a pretty cool solution... I have always thought that if I were an alien civilization biding my time to make contact with another civilization, I would wait till they evolved past the mass-belief in religion or gods.
If you're looking to maintain a peaceful relationship, conflicting with deeply ingrained beliefs about deities doesn't seem like a great way to go about it. Better to wait that one out!