When we look up into the night sky, we can see hundreds of stars with our naked eye. Use any reasonably priced telescope and you see thousands. Even that is a tiny portion of our galaxy. By those simple measures we realize space is BIG.
But when we look further and deeper using the technology available, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers estimate there are around a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe – Each of those containing hundreds of billions of stars.
Now, not all of them have the potential for life to develop on them. Many of them are in particularly inhospitable places. They might be too close to each other, too hot or too cold or simply haven’t developed planets. Maybe those stars haven’t developed planets in what is called the Goldlock’s zone – the band where liquid water could form on a world. Most would be too near the hostile heart of the galaxy where we strongly believe a massive black hole lies – That can’t exactly be prime real estate.
But even so, there must be trillions of opportunities in the universe for life to have developed.
And out of that life, surely some developed intelligence?
Yet we don’t see them. We see no signs. We haven’t overheard their radio transmissions, we haven’t had a verifiable visit from anyone. We see no signs of their starships crossing the void or vast construction projects such as Dyson Spheres signifying their existence.
So where are they?
One lunch time in 1950, Enrico Fermi postulated this with a statement which became known as the Fermi Paradox:
“The apparent size and age of the universe suggest that many technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations ought to exist. However, this hypothesis seems inconsistent with the lack of observational evidence to support it.”
An interesting conundrum some might say.
So what are the reasons for this silence? Let’s run through a few possible answers:
- We’re alone. That’s it. Whether it’s because a God has dictated it or that we are simply the winners of a monumental universal lottery is irrelevant. It is simply the case that this vast universe only has us within it.
- We’re one of the first. The Universe is old, 14 billion years or so. Maybe we are simply living in an epoch where we are the first to begin to look outwards. Maybe there are hundreds of intelligences sprouting all over the galaxy in a similar state. Maybe right now they are beholding the universe as we do. Wondering if they are alone, or whether it is simply the case that they are among those first ones.
- We’re in quarantine. Somehow, somewhere, in some way a far more developed culture, or cultures has put us in isolation. They might be out there, yet ‘cloaking us’ from the rest of the universe – or the rest of the universe from us.
- Someone or something out there is deliberately keeping intelligent races down. Maybe even now a race of killer robot intelligence pacifiers is heading towards us.
- Natural phenomena. The world is subject to terrestrial extinction events -Things like asteroids, super volcanoes, atmospheric changes and what not. There are galactic scale ones too. The random passing of black holes, nearby supernovas, or other things even more deadly. These events could potentially clear out whole galactic regions.
- Races become introspective. Maybe they simply lose interest in exploring the stars. We went to the moon in 1969, but a human hasn’t been back since 1972. NASA’s best estimate to go to Mars is circa mid-2030s. A gap of around 60 years. And that’s assuming the plan survives several administrations and the inevitable technical challenges and delays that will arise. Of course, there is always the private sector or other nations to consider. But NASA’s is the plan with the most pedigree.
- We don’t recognize them. We measure what would be intelligent life by ourselves and the races around us. SF shows tend to have aliens with funny foreheads, but are generally bipedal and speak English. Maybe there are many other types of life that we wouldn’t even recognize as such. Silicon based life is often touted as an alternative to our own carbon basis. There could be life out there, Jim. But not as we know it.
- We’re too far apart. As mentioned, space is big. A chap called Frank Drake tried to quantify this in 1961 with something that became known as the Drake Equation. This factored in a number of values including how long a race is expected to last for, the likelihood of it being communicative, how many stars there are and a number of other factors. Using this measure, currently active in the Milky Way, he estimated between 1000 and 100 million civilizations. If at the lower end, chances are we would all be spread pretty far apart.
- We’re too far apart… in time. Races would potentially have a window of communication where they are neither too primitive nor to advanced. If we miss that window, then the more advanced might not bother.
There are many many other potential reasons. Some of them are more likely than others, however none that we can definitely say is the answer to the Fermi Paradox. Yet.
My recently re-released novel, Endeavour, considers this question and puts forwards an answer. Maybe it’s one of those mentioned above, maybe it’s a different one. I will say it is the one I believe is the strongest candidate.
But you’ll have to read the book to find out.
And who knows, maybe tomorrow will be the day when everything changes. When the first alien ship hovers over the White House or we receive a transmission from another star. I think that would be a strange event. Everything would change in a single moment.
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Ralph Kern is the author of Endeavour, now available from Amazon and Tantor Media.
The Universe is a darn big place! Way bigger than most realize. I wrote about this on my blog a couple of years back: http://kennyachaffin.blogspot.com/2013/03/to-stars.html
Will definitely check out the book! Thanks!
It’s hard to believe that we are the only ones.
I’m thinking the most likely reason is that we just don’t have the technology to find other life, and the life we’re looking for aren’t interested in us.
Hi Kenny,
That’s a great piece. You wonderfully capture the sheer distances involved. When i first started writing Endeavour, I did so with the lose thought in mind of how could I get humanity to the stars in my own lifetime using some form of method that would be at least possible…ish. (Which would obviously be a total carte blanche for resources and money). That was something I gave up on pretty early in the research phase!
Hi Jevon,
Agreed. Or if we are alone, there must be a good reason for it.
I’ve seen a wry suggestion that the crucial factor which might let us humans boil out into the universe was the Carboniferous era, which piled up lots of handy fossil fuel before a wood-eating fungus evolved.
That era allowed the ‘Industrial Revolution’ etc etc, may yet boot-strap us to controlled fusion, In turn, fusion becomes the enabling technology to access our solar system’s resources, disperse into, then across the Oort Cloud…
Okay, there are other rungs on the ladder, such as Reaction Engine’s truly astonishing heat-exchanger. Also, that hollow-cone thruster that either can’t work or must work depending on how you solve the math, so needs testing soonest…
‘Getting From Here To There’ in a hurry is a big, big problem for any writer who wants to keep a foot in the ‘real world’. I know, the usual SciFi rule is that FTL’s your one impossible thing allowed to make stuff happen…
eg from ‘Soft Target’…
About eight light-hours out, you reach flatter space. Beyond the deep bell of a star’s g-well, cheeky math can bend the c-limit, wrap, wrinkle, warp or bubble space to cross light-years fast…
Imagine ‘OverSpace’ as an ocean– No, not the ‘Silver Ship on a Silver Sea’ beloved of TriVid, think of Cape Horn. Stars’ g-wells form iron-bound island coasts, with summits clad in cloud. Their solar wind’s heliopause is breakers on a harbour bar, their bow-shock a barrier reef. Cutting the galaxy’s magnetic field generates incredible aurorae, re-connection arcs writhe, snarl and spit St Elmo’s Fire. The neutrino flux is a grim, cold current. The galactic wind howls, slashing at your ship with cosmic rays. Gravity waves ripple, slap or crash across the ship like an earthquake. A great star’s paroxysmic death may raise a tsunami. Between the stars is not empty. Dust and gas mascons gather, swirl like drifts of pumice or weed. Oort clouds’ nascent comets drift across the space-lanes like so many titanic ice-bergs. Dim ‘Brown Dwarf’ sub-stars lurk like Orcadian sea-stacks.
And now it gets hard…
However you do the math, your tech must ripple ‘OverSpace’. Early ships vary: Some look like mutant paddle-steamers, with multi-finned gubbins at side, quarter or stern. A ‘caterpillar’ configuration lends itself to elegant outriggers. The cranky Vortex Drive’s giant ‘rotor’ still suggests ‘air-boat’. A Casimir-Warshawski’s splendid vanes can resemble sails. Modern designs, of course, keep their workings within the hull. Old or new tech, all must drive the ship and, rudderless, steer with thrust.
Intelligence is not a long term survival trait for a species. We certainly appear to be hell bent on killing ourselves off. So perhaps they all dug up their fossil fuels, burnt them, and climate changed themselves into extinction in about a century or so.
All the explanations I’ve seen for the Fermi paradox make a degree of sense, but I think they ignore the fact that the whole Fermi paradox is somewhat based on faulty assumptions.
The first, imo, faulty assumption is that given enough time a civilization could develop the technology needed to colonize the whole universe.
I cannot prove it, but I believe that while it’s true that technology and science can improve our lives, there is no evidence that given time they can make everything we can dream of possible.
So, one easy explanation is that FTL travel or extremely long distance communication across space are just impossible. Our current knowledge of physics actually supports this….
The only theoretical possibility that could allow FTL travel are wormholes, but how could humans survive passage through a portal created by forces powerful enough to distort space and the nature of reality as we know it?
Black holes in theory could be wormholes, but SF movies aside humans would be long destroyed before being able to find out.
The second issue is TIME……. Life has been on this planet for a relatively short time compared to the age of the universe. Humans have been around for a much much shorter time compared to the age of the Earth, even less compared to the age of the universe, a fraction so tiny as to be almost unnoticeable,.
When you combine that with the immense size of the Universe the odds of us being alive at the same time as a civilization located somewhat in the vicinity of the Earth the odds are almost non-existent.
There is no doubt in my mind that there is intelligent life in the Universe, but as stated the basic odds of us actually meeting such life forms are ridiculously low.
The only real reason why the Fermi paradox is discussed is that it’s based on the assumption that an older civilization should have colonized the Universe by now, but if you accept that such a thing as colonizing the Universe is simply impossible, or not practical, it seems clear that there is no paradox at all.
Scientists think eventually everything will be possible as a civilization evolves, but that’s how they think of reality, not what reality really is.
The whole “self reproducing machines colonizing the Universe” btw, is ridiculous for other reasons…… it just makes no sense.