A brief summary of The Fermi Paradox
(This article is purely a simplified version of a WaitButWhy article, for junior students in my school to understand. I do not claim any rights to this writing.)
The term ‘extraterrestrial life’ is commonly associated with aliens, bringing back those haunting memories of green-ish, tentacled beings exterminating all life on Earth. Obviously inspired by several sci-fi movies, these statements are completely absurd. The question is not about ugly beings coming from outer space to destroy humanity. Rather, why hasn’t such an event occurred yet?
Scientists have not, yet, managed to solve the mystery once and for all. The best they could do was come up with certain rational explanations. So the purpose of this article is to list those reasons as succinctly as possible.
As for humans, we have invested astronomical sums of money to search for extraterrestrial life with government-funded initiatives like SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). So, it is very likely that if there is intelligent life out there, it will try to make contact.
One obvious theory would be that the there is no intelligent life, except here on Earth. In that case, only we may have passed a certain test, termed as the ‘The Great Filter’, that all forms of life have to go through, with the outcomes being either complete extinction or unprecedented propagation.
However, the scary part may be that the Great Filter is ahead of us. Even scarier, when we do hit the Great Filter, we may not successfully cross it, as might have been the case for countless other civilizations out there.
On the other hand, if there is intelligent, or even super-intelligent, life out there, why is it we still haven’t made contact?
We’re too ‘primitive’: Let’s say you saw a pack of dolphins. You will not even understand that they are speaking as you are listening for human languages. Or if you could hear them, it may be that you are not sophisticated enough to decipher what they are saying.
To put this in perspective, there may be intelligent life out there but we lack the advanced technology needed to detect them. In another scenario, ‘aliens’ may be broadcasting signals to Earth, but we are searching for the wrong signals.
We’re too late: It is quite possible that intelligent life did evolve in another planet and they did visit Earth. But humans have been around for a mere 50,000 years. So it is quite possible that those aliens paid the dinosaurs a visit, who couldn’t pass on their legacy to us humans. (In case you were wondering, they went extinct).
We don’t matter: We may be living in a Mughal Empire, the size of the universe, with the super-intelligent ‘emperor’ living in some far distant planet and Earth being an insignificant village. Does it ever happen that the all-mighty emperor visits every single village? No, it does not.
It’s better to hide: Let’s consider an example — a man is living in a forest. At night, he has to decide whether to light a fire or not. The man, aware that dangerous animals are lurking nearby, will decide not to light a fire and alert the animals of his location.
Such may be the case for the universe too. These super-intelligent civilizations out there may decide that broadcasting their location was a sure enough way of getting themselves exterminated by those predatory aliens lurking in the vast expanse of the universe. In that case, the movies were not joking. Perhaps, we too should consider the same.
We’ve lost the race: As a competitor, you would try your best to make sure other players cannot reach your level of skills and outperform you. Same may be true for a super-intelligent civilization out there. Once they reached their immensely high level of intelligence, they made sure that no other civilization could do the same by exterminating the ones who even came close. If this is indeed true, we should be very wary of our progress. It may very well be us who lands on the hit-list next.
Scientists have also come up with another hypothesis that the government is hiding information about any contact with extraterrestrials. While this may seem absurd, it may very well be true, taking into consideration that the very fact that there are aliens out there can cause nationwide panic. The government may decide, correctly, that the people are better off without the added stress.
Now we’re diving into the difficult bits of the article. The next few explanations are the prominent ones, thus they may be difficult to understand.
In order to understand the next hypothesis, you have to take a brief look at history. If you examine the trend over the past century or so, it will become clear that our world is moving towards ‘automation’. That is, the world is transitioning from human labour to machines, which is evident since most manufacturing today is heavily reliant on machines and robots.
So it is very probable that alien civilizations, since they are much much smarter than us, have already ditched their physical forms and rely completely on machines and technology. So the entire concept of conquering other planets and their inhabitants is ‘alien’ to them, which may be why they haven’t made contact with us yet.
We’re the rats: The aliens out there might have already discovered us but are keenly observing us from a distance, like we do to the laboratory rats. The purpose of such observation is inexplicable to us, however, the point being that they are so stealthily watching us, it is impossible for us to even notice that they exist.
The alien world may be so unbelievably complicated and advanced that even if we can see it, we would not be able to grasp what we’re seeing. The aliens may even be living side by side with us, but in a state of matter we cannot even imagine, let alone understand. The best we have come up with is virtual reality. But the aliens, considering that they are miles ahead in intelligence, may be inhabiting a space completely unfathomable to us mere humans.
Or perhaps we don’t exist. Like all those simulation games we play on our phones, our entire universe may just be a computer simulation, created at will by the so-called ‘aliens’, and we are just insignificant pieces of this vast cosmic puzzle.
We may be mere actors in this movie directed by forces completely beyond our understanding.
