Have you heard of the Fermi Paradox? Named after physicist Enrico Fermi, is an argument explored by him and physicist Michael H. Hart. At its most basic, it goes like this: if we, humanity, have started our attempts at space travel in the past century and are now already exploring the far edges of our solar system, and with billions of Earth-like planets in the universe, how is it that we haven’t yet encountered any aliens?
Bluesat recently shared an infographic created by Jaime Trosper of “From Quarks to Quasars.” It includes some of the most popular answers to the Fermi Paradox, in an easy-to-remember way that can serve as a great writing prompt as well!
Tip: to enlarge, right-click on the image and select “Open image in new tab.”
Many thanks to Sebastian for alerting me to this!
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Very late, I know, but the paradox is a lot more obvious and less arrogant.
We don’t have the technology yet, but it is not a hard technical problem to solve to get moderately sized (for interstellar spaceships!) ship up to about 10% of the speed of light. It will just take a long while at low acceleration.
With that kind of speed we could reach the nearest star in 50 years. Getting to the other side of our galaxy would take a couple of million years.
Life on earth was sufficiently complex 50 million years ago that intelligence /could/ have evolved. Those were of course the dinosaurs and they lost against a series of volcanic eruptions and an asteroid, but we can not expect that the exact same thing happens on every planet.
Which means that at leat 50 million years ago somewhere in our galaxy a species might have evolved and reached the same level of technology we expect by the end of this century. The Drake equation by our current best estimates says there /should/ be some thousand intelligent species in our galaxy at this moment (and the same was true 50 million years ago). Such a species should have been able to spread across most if not all of our galaxy by now.
Even if interstallar travel is factually impossible (for which there really is no good reason to assume, it is just going to take a long time) we /still/ should have seen by now the signs of several growing interplanetary civilisations (if only by the fact that they would have a ‘sun’ that would emits infrared radiations way below what would be possible for a sun to sustain itself).
We see neither the spread of civilisations across the galaxy nor the muted suns we must expect to see. So, where are all those intelligent species?
Several of the proposed solutions here to the Fermi Paradox will not actually work.
Our Wires Are Crossed goes counter to the logic of a species attempting to make contact as those would be tied in with the natural laws (we would use signals that interfere with natural phenomenon just to make it obvious it is an artificial signal)
Destroy Or Be Destroyed would have had us see these murderous aliens already at our door, as you can not really hide a interplanetary or interstellar civilisation from detection.
Space Is Too Vast does not work either as some of the signals are about the absense of signals rather than about broadcasts. That’s what that excitement was all about last year about a sun that seemed to dim impossibly quickly (hinting at the potential of a dyson swarm being constructed around it)
They Live In Unlikely Places is indeed unlikely, as the laws of physics, chemistry and biology put rather strict constraints on what life might emerge. Alternate dimensions are not likely to exist. Species that exist entirely of electromagnetic radiation can not reasonably evolve.
They Are Already Here is possible, but again highly unlikely. If you are spending thousands of years to travel here, why bother hiding? And again the laws of chemistry and biology dictate that any alien lifeform would find earth quite horribly toxic most likely.
I loved this analysis so much, I’ve scheduled it as a post to go live tomorrow. Please do visit to respond to comments!
You gotta love this bloke’s hubris. It’s just another version of, ‘if a tree falls in the forest’.
..it’s an alien’s fault?
I had never heard of it. So thanks, Nicholas!
(Whether or not I am any the wiser, the jury’s out…)
Best wishes, Pete.
We learn something new every day. As to whether that makes us any wiser, that’s anyone’s guess 😀