Where Is Everybody?
The flaw in Fermi’s paradoxical question.
[Letter #030]
Good morning, son.
I wrote the following paragraph on June 17, with every expectation that I would post it on the 18th. It ended up being true, except for the “three weeks away” part, so I’ve left it in.
We’re now about three weeks away from your expected arrival. Your mother is barely able to move about, and she does her best to continue to perform at her job, but you’re not making things any easier for her. Our last OB appointment measured the little fella in question at the 93rd percentile in size, but at least he’s head-down and ready to go now. Seems like you’ll be making a rather flamboyant entrance, I’d say.
Little did Papa Bear know how right he would be.
Your mother has been increasingly annoyed at my incessant habit of accumulating books. I can’t help it. There are things I’ll need to know in the future, and I’m certain that these books will either hold that information or set me in the right direction to find it. To provide some relief for my growing backlog of arcane tomes, your mother has set me to the task of constructing a set of large bookshelves, and I really think they’re coming together well. Something that I really want to do is read books of all sorts to you as you grow. You’re going to need to be more clever than I am by a mile, particularly in the latter half of your life. So, it’s best we start early and often with getting you exposed to smartness-makings.
Someone else who was smarter than I am by several hundred miles was a physicist back in the 20th century named Enrico Fermi. He worked along other smart guys like Oppenheimer, Teller, Heisenberg, and Einstein back in the 1940s when they were trying to develop the big bomb. Nuclear physics is well beyond my pay-grade though, so my concern today is more about the paradox that gets its name from Fermi. Wiki tells me that he wasn’t the first to ask this question, that credit goes to a Russian named Tsiolkovsky, but his name is easier to pronounce for an American, and history is written by the dominant empire — Fermi it is, then.
The paradox works like this. In just our Milky Way galaxy alone, there are billions of stars similar to our Sun. Not too large or small, not too hot or cool — billions that are very much like our homestar. Fermi and his buddies figured that random chance would give us a high probability that some of these stars would have Earth-like planets, such that they would theoretically be capable of supporting life. These days, stargazing folks tend to call these “exo-planets,” and they’ve discovered more than a few of them. Since they’re so far away though, studying them (let alone visiting them) is still pretty challenging.
Many of these Sun-like stars, along with their Earth-like planets, would be/are older than our Sun or Earth. The Sun itself is pretty young, as stars go, at only 4.6 billion years. That may sound old but there are other stars out there dated twice or three-times that old. The Earth was spun out not long after our Sun, at about 4.5 billion years ago. In the cosmic timescale, that’s fairly recent.
Life on Earth, by the way, first popped up around 4 billion years ago. This was very simple life, and it developed slowly over the next few billion years, but note that it didn’t take long to originate after the planet’s own birth — only about a half billion years, give or take a few million. On the cosmic calendar, that’s a pretty rapid development, given the favorable conditions..
So, if there are Sun-like stars with Earth-like planets out there, and they’ve been out there potentially for billions of years longer than our planet has, then we could reasonably presume there’s a good chance that life would have developed at random on at least a tiny fraction of those planets. A tiny fraction of a mind-bogglingly large number is still a tremendously large number. Then, if we presume that life behaves similarly across the universe as it does here on Earth, then evolution would likewise see advancement in complexity in those lifeforms, to the degree that something that we identify as “intelligent life” should have developed eons ago, possibly even before the existence of Earth itself.
Intelligent life, as defined by our modern culture, will eventually organize itself into civilizations, presumably destined to arrive at a singular cooperative civilization, not unlike how we imagine such species in our science-fiction stories. Humans, as young as we are as a lifeform, have already begun the first stages of research in interstellar travel. We have taken our nascent steps into space and landed on our Moon. We have arranged satellites in our planet’s orbit to study celestial bodies far beyond our current reach to explore. Intelligent lifeforms, as we typically imagine them, could have already taken these wobbly first steps and surpassed these milestones long before us.
Even if interstellar travel could never reach the speed of light, even if warp speed or faster-than-light travel could never be developed, traveling across the diameter of the entire Milky Way would still only take a few million years. If other civilizations have had billion-year headstarts on humanity, if they’ve been traveling the stars since before Earth possibly even existed, but certainly since before humanity existed, then they would have had enough time by now to explore and colonize vast chunks of the galaxy. If only just one other species in the entire galaxy developed into an advanced civilization, a infinitesimally tiny chance considering our given parameters, then it’s still highly probable that such a species by itself could colonize all of the suitable planets in the Milky Way in well under a billion years.
With all of this in mind, knowing the odds that the above should have happened, knowing that we should have already observed life from other planets by now or at least artifacts that demonstrate extraterrestrial life (either on Earth or in our solar system somewhere), Fermi supposedly asked of his colleagues, “But, where is everybody?”
There has been no evidence of a visit from another lifeform. There are no artifacts, no probes — nothing. I mean, there are stories of UFOs every day, of course, but there’s no proof. Ever. According to the logic above, not only should there be obvious evidence of such “alien” life, but that we should have always known about it — that it would have always been obvious. Yet, there’s nothing. Nothing here on Earth; nothing anywhere that we can observe in space. Just — nothing. Where is everybody?
The first guy to ask this, Tsiolkovsky, proposed what is today referred to as the “zoo hypothesis.” This approach frames advanced lifeforms in the same way as civilizations here on Earth, with respect to “uncontacted” tribes that still remain outside of civilization. The idea is that we try to leave these cultures alone to develop “naturally” without influence from civilized society. This hypothesis sets humanity in the “uncivilized” position, in that we are not permitted to interact with the higher lifeforms that are presumably out there. We are only allowed to see what “they’’ want us to see. Perhaps once we reach a level of sophistication, whether with our tech or with our philosophy, then the other advanced civilizations will reveal themselves to us. This has been the premise of a great many sci-fi stories, and I’m sure you can already see the issues I take with it.
From there, we’ve had a long list of possible explanations for the paradox. Maybe intelligent life is just rare, actually, and Earth is special in that humanity developed on it. Maybe life is periodically wiped out by cosmic forces, as space is a harsh and unforgiving place. Maybe it’s the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself or others, as humanity has shown significant tendencies toward self-annihilation (nuclear, etc). There’s one idea called the “dark forest hypothesis” that suggests that it’s dangerous to broadcast a location into the void, as there’s no telling who will come knocking, and so this is why we don’t hear other civilizations’ broadcasts out there. Maybe we have somehow observed evidence of other life, but it’s just not comprehensible to human senses. Maybe alien life is already here among us, but we just can’t perceive it.
We fire apes have incredibly active imaginations. We love our stories, and the more fantastic, the better.
Robin Hanson, back in 1996, tried to reframe the paradox as “The Great Filter.” The idea suggests that a space-faring civilization, beginning from “scratch,” would have to follow a series of steps in an “evolutionary path.”
1] The right star system (including organics and potentially habitable planets)
2] Reproductive molecules (e.g. RNA)
3] Simple (prokaryotic) single-cell life
4] Complex (eukaryotic) single-cell life
5] Sexual reproduction
6] Multi-cell life
7] Tool-using animals with intelligence
8] A civilization advancing toward the potential for a colonization explosion (where we are now)
9] Colonization explosion
Hanson submits that there’s some force, some phenomena, that prevents life from ever reaching Step 9. Maybe abiogenesis is nearly impossible, and it’s miraculous that it happened for us on Earth. Maybe technology is self-destructive. The reason we haven’t discovered any other advanced civilizations is because this “filter” just keeps any civilizations from ever advancing far enough to be seen. It isn’t much of an explanation, but in fairness, Hanson studied economics, so fabricating flimsy interpretations of data is part of his job.
By this point, I’m sure it’s terribly obvious to you where my opinion falls on the subject. Even so, I’ll explain it. The problem that I see with every explanation above, and accordingly with Fermi’s (and Tsiolkovsky’s) question from the start, is that there’s an implicit assumption baked into it. There’s an expectation that a particular aberration of our culture is actually normal and desirable, an expectation that our history, our evolutionary journey, is somehow the standard by which any intelligent lifeform’s journey should be compared. Our journey from “there” to “here” is not normal.
I’ll use a metaphor, although I recognize that it has become cliched nearly beyond usefulness. If we were to imagine a cell operating within a body, and we were to consider the function of that cell, we could study the many behaviors that such a cell might exhibit. We could observe how it metabolizes energy, how it performs its tasks to benefit the collective organism, how it reproduces, how it expels waste substances, how it dies, and what happens to it after death. If we observed many generations of such a cell, I think it would become obvious what the evolutionary journey would look like, at least within a handful of such generations. Maybe we could extrapolate our data to make some predictions about the evolutionary trajectory in a million years or whatever, but you get the idea.
The cell is operating within its normal parameters. It’s meeting its evolutionary objectives — survive long enough to reproduce, using available energy and resources to do so. It metabolizes the fuel it needs appropriately, it does what it was “designed” to do, and it doesn’t overstay its welcome. It dies off to make room for the next generation cell. Circle of life, and all that.
What happens when this cell gets a bad twist in its DNA, and it turns off some of the evolutionary instructions that prior generations used for good operation? This cell perhaps decides to absorb more and more energy around it, and with that energy, it’ll grow larger and replicate itself into other cells that share this deficient behavior, even if that means depriving the remaining regular cells of their necessary nutrients. The cell grows much larger than it was “designed” to and it does so more quickly as well. Along with stealing away the available energy, it and all of its duplicate cells fail to perform their normal cellular functions. This sort of condition is what we call “cancer.”
Let’s now personify this cell a bit for the analogy. A story.
For many generations, our cancerous cell has grown and prospered, consuming the biomass around him and colonizing areas on other parts of the body, far from where his ancestor-cells originated. This sort of growth is all that he’s ever known. His father lived this way, as did his grandfather’s grandfather, as far back as anyone can remember. This is how life has always worked. He takes a little, or maybe a lot if he’s especially hungry, but the body will surely regrow. It always does.
Recently though, parts of the body have started to visibly change and the temperature has been getting hotter. Some cells are claiming that the body is getting sick, calling this “Climate Fever,” but that’s still heavily debated. It’s unclear whether this so-called sickness is cellular-caused or not. The increased temperatures do slow things down a bit, for sure, and bodily disasters have increased overall, but most of the cancer cells are still fed well, and the population is still growing. If necessary, other parts of the body could be cultivated for food for the tumors. Surely, someone will think of something.
Our cell isn’t concerned with that. His job is to search outside the body, to try to find evidence of other intelligent cellular life out there in other bodies. He’s searched for his entire life, always peering through his micro-telescope, examining sector by sector. He’s certain that they’re out there somewhere. The galaxy he studies, dubbed “The Football Stadium,” contains thousands of bodies, each containing billions of cells. Surely, the odds are that one of them will host intelligent life. Some other body out there simply must have independently originated a cancerous growth. He’s determined that he or one of his progeny will someday make contact.
There’s my silly story. I want to make it very clear that I’m not comparing humanity to cancer. I’m comparing humanity to a regular cell, operating normally in a healthy body. I’m saying that something happened to that cell. Parts of humanity (not all of it) began to embark down a road to consume a lot more than was necessary and reproduce more than appropriate. Humans began to build cities (“tumors”?) and to import energy (food, resources) from the surrounding area, even if that meant depriving other humans or animals who had lived in a healthy way before. These city-builders, this “civilization,” continued to grow and so destroyed other species in order to build more cities and consume more of the planet.
This behavior is what’s cancerous. This is the part that’s abnormal. But, you see, this is the baked-in assumption with Fermi’s question and the rest of it. Since we are normal, then we should see other life out there. But, we don’t see anyone. Why? Where is everyone? Just like our cancer cell friend searching for “cellular intelligence” in the other bodies in “The Football Stadium” galaxy, we’re constantly looking to other star systems to try to find evidence of life that behaves in the same aberrant way that our civilization has.
Why is that unlikely? Well, it’s just my opinion, but I’d say that cancerous behavior isn’t normal in life anywhere in the universe. Evolution selects against it. Our species behaved in a healthy manner for over 200 thousand years. While I’ve seen it argued that our expansion out of Africa 75 thousand years ago was the beginning of our destructive behavior, I’m not sure that I agree with that yet. What I’m definitely certain of is that the moment we decided to strip-mine the soil for food and began locking that food up to enforce hierarchy, our cultural “DNA” had certainly become twisted. That was the point when we began to reproduce exponentially, to extract energy and resources without any regard for the planet, and to cease any functions that we might have performed in service to Earth’s body. The ancestors of our modern culture began taking everything for themselves.
When our ancestors started all of this, there were many healthy “cells” out there (that is, healthy cultures). We’ve killed or assimilated almost all of them by the present day. In the current vernacular, we call our culture “consumerist.” We call ourselves “consumers.” Our cancer cell friend above doesn’t seem so strange in this context.
I’ll make this fairly bold prediction: we won’t find “intelligent life” out there, and it’s not because I’m sure there isn’t any. I mean, there almost certainly is. Lots of different lifeforms out there — gotta be. But, we shouldn’t expect to make contact with them for the same reason that we really shouldn’t expect to find a planet of dolphins: dolphins have better things to do than to seek out other planets for life. Things like relaxing, eating fish, playing, mating, and socializing. They aren’t making cosmic noise because healthy bodies don’t need to cry out.
Is it possible that we would find an advanced civilization in space? Sure, I suppose. Anything is possible, but some assumptions would be necessary. Let’s say that lifeforms do develop some degree of intelligence every few million years on planets around the universe. It would also then be plausible that, say, one in every thousand of these planets experiences an intelligent lifeform that exhibits cancerous (civilizational) characteristics. It could be, as it is with our situation, that evolution takes at least 10 thousand years to select against such behavior.
In the ten plus millennium duration of this species’ malignant growth phase, its members could very well develop the technology to cry out into the universe for others like themselves, others that would validate their existence and their search, just like humans of Earth have done. But again, 10 thousand years is just a tiny blip of time on the cosmic scale. Thus, what are the odds that:
A] of all life that might exist on planets out there, that some of them would develop “intelligence” as we understand it;
B] that a subset of those would develop cancerous characteristics and build cities and reproduce wildly,
C] that a smaller subset of those would survive natural selection long enough to begin broadcasting and listening into space; and that finally;
D] all of this would happen to align perfectly with the time that another species (e.g. humans) was broadcasting and listening close enough nearby to make contact?
I can’t even fake being a good mathematician, but I’d wager that even if A, B, and C were to occur often — frequently even –, then the vast timescale of the universe would still leave one species long dead and silent before another could come along and make D true.
So, that’s it. That’s Papa Bear’s reason for the Fermi Paradox. Life isn’t supposed to reproduce and consume without limitation. Life probably exists all over the universe, but it’s just that the great majority of lifeforms operate normally within the parameters of evolution. Aberrant traits are selected against, just as our civilizational behavior is presently being selected against. Species that don’t live in civilizations don’t bother to search for life among the stars, so that would mean that life out there doesn’t do what we do. They live sustainably, and that means that, galactically speaking, they remain silent.
Once our civilization ends, should any of us survive the transition back into a normalized non-cancerous way of life, our species will also remain silent. We will no longer cry out into the darkness.
Maybe in a few hundred-million years, another species out there will burn up its planet’s resources in the vain quest to find others like itself. Who knows? By then, we surely won’t care, either because we’ll be long extinct, or we’ll have evolved into a sustainable way of life that will last until the Sun consumes our planet. Circle of life, and all that.
As I am finally finishing this letter just over two weeks after starting it, I realize I’ve had to make a number of adaptations. Not the least of which is that I am currently typing this out with a very adorable Tiny Bear sleeping on my chest. Also, I’m not sleeping much, so hopefully I can keep up my pace of these weekly letters. I still manage to sleep more than your mother for now, but you really like to wake up every two hours (more or less) every night with very vocal demands. I’ll try my best to keep up.
I love you, son. I hope that you’re doing well and staying safe out there. Watch out for alien invasions!
Your father,
Papa Bear
[Author’s note: This is a series of letters that I intend to print to paper and deliver to my son, probably around the year 2040. You are more than welcome to read along. The links in the article are only for you, the reader, and will include citations, jokes, asides, and links to books or other items. If you happen to purchase anything through such a link, I’ll get a small commission. Every little bit helps, right?]
