Quiet, Too Quiet

“THE FERMI PARADOX is an avenue of cosmological speculation popularly attributed to Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, who developed the world’s first nuclear reactor as part of the Manhattan Project and who is thus considered (alongside men like Oppenheimer, Einstein, and Szilard) one of the fathers of the atomic bomb. Around 1950, during one of his visits to Los Alamos, Fermi pondered the possibility of alien life in the galaxy with his lunchtime companions and asked the unexpected question, “Where are they?””

“Fermi’s question comes down to this: given what we know or expect to find out about the age of the universe; the number of stars within it; the number of those stars likely to have planets; the number of those planets likely to support life; the amount of time it took life to evolve; the amount of time it took human life to evolve; the relatively short leap from the invention of agriculture to fully technologized, world-transforming civilization; and the relatively short distances between stars, the Earth should have already been visited or colonized by alien life (and perhaps many times over across its four-billion-year history). And yet there is no serious indication that this is the case. Moreover, there is no significant indication from any of our observations — either in 1950, or in any of the years since that we have spent searching for extraterrestrial intelligence — that there are any aliens out there either.”

“The “Great Silence” thus implies what Robin Hanson has called a “Great Filter” located somewhere in our near future rather than in our past. Perhaps there is something — some inexorable natural tendency towards species collapse — that intervenes between our current level of technological development and the level of technological development required to spread across the galaxy that stops civilizations from achieving it.”

“Whatever that Great Filter is, the news doesn’t seem good; given that exploration of the stars appears tantalizingly within our own species’ grasp, the most obvious sorts of potential “Filters” involve imminent civilizational collapse or ecological catastrophe, and perhaps even near-term human extinction. Perhaps extinction-level collisions with astronomical bodies are much more common than they seem to be; perhaps fossil-fuel sources of energy always run out before anyone manages to get and stay off-world; perhaps civilizations always blow themselves up, or always crash their planetary ecosystems, or always retreat into the orgiastic comforts of virtual reality instead, before they hit the threshold where they become truly “galactic.””

“Maybe what the Fermi Paradox tells us is that there’s no future, at least not a future that looks very much like an extension or expansion of our present.”