Fermi Paradox

I enjoy thinking about the Fermi Paradox.

The Fermi Paradox, if you haven't heard of it, basically amounts to the question "Where the hell is everyone?" If the universe is as old as we think it is, and if it's as large as we think it is, and if it's as full of water, organic molecules, and temperate planets as we think it is, how come the universe isn't teeming with intelligent life? How come all our SETI screensavers aren't finding alien radio signals all the time? Why the hell is the universe so silent?

Who knows why. But it's fun to posit possible answers to the Fermi Paradox, mostly because it's so much like writing science fiction. There's no evidence one way or the other, and for now there isn't even hope of find any evidence, so we can imagine whatever we want, in effect projecting our particular outlooks on the universe at large.

Some answers are religious in nature - that is, that God made man in His image on one planet and one planet alone, and the rest of the universe is nothing but a fairly showy backdrop for our terrestrial drama. Some answers have a deep-rooted pessimism that basically argue that the coefficients we plug into the Drake Equation aren't just wrong, they're wildly wrong, many orders of magnitude wrong, leading to so-called "lonely Earth" scenarios.

But the best ones sound like the plots of science fiction novels, or vice versa.

Such as the theory that the aliens are already here, but such is their technological sophistication and their discretion that they only reveal themselves to selected individuals, often in rural settings. Why they'll visit the guy that runs the body shop and not the President is a question I leave to the specialists.

Such as the theory that some alien race somewhere along the line developed nanotechnology, but didn't put enough safeguards in place. Their nanoassemblers got loose, and now the biospheres of most of the planets in the universe consist of barren rock and a grey goo of trillions of nanoassemblers.

Such as the theory that some alien race, on the losing side of some terrible war, built a doomsday weapon of some sort that got out of control, and this weapon now cruises the universe, still faithful to its original programming of finding and exterminating life where it finds it (insert here any number of science fiction stories, everything from Star Trek to Fred Saberhagen's Berzerkers). Who knows, maybe even as you read this, this terrible doomsday machine has detected the ghostly signals of Three's Company re-runs and is already on its way to Earth.

Or maybe the "default egghead position" is wrong, and that advanced alien civilizations are not necessarily peaceful, benevolent, or even indifferent; maybe they're openly and avowedly hostile and think nothing of wiping out, enslaving, or even eating lesser civilizations, such as ours.

Or maybe the universe is populated by some incredibly powerful alien civilization, a civilization so advanced that it doesn't even recognize us as being intelligent, and maybe this alien race dispassionately exterminates young civilizations where it finds them, the same way we spray new ant colonies where we find them.

Or maybe some group of wise alien civilizations had a big meeting and decided that we were currently too brutal, too primitive, too warlike to make contact with just yet, so they've put us in a kind of galactic play-pen until we grow up a little.

Or maybe life is common, but intelligent life is not so common because it is the habit of technological civilizations to develop the means of mass destruction (that is, nuclear weapons) before they develop the wisdom to refrain from using them.

Or maybe it is the habit of young technological civilizations to exterminate themselves through ever more destructive wars, or to engineer their own demises through foolish genetic experiments, ecological mismanagement, or technological hijinks like the famous Tralfamadorian spaceship propulsion system accident that Kurt Vonnegut wrote about.

Or maybe it's more sociological than that. Maybe it is the habit of the citizens of technological civilizations to get so hooked on materialism and entertainment they forget that civilization doesn't exist to exalt the ego of the individual, but to ensure its own survival and success, and thus yet another civilization slips into what Arthur C. Clarke called "the dream of the lotus-eaters".

Or maybe the universe just isn't a very good place to live. Gamma ray bursts are rare, but maybe they happen just often enough that most of the universe at any given time is either being sterilized by a gamma ray burst, or recovering from being sterilized by one.

Or maybe every civilization eventually reaches the point where it can build particle accelerators powerful enough to create strange forms of "exotic matter" like magnetic monopoles and strangelets that go on to consume their planets right out from under them.

Here's my take. Maybe in every technological civilization there exist budget-cutters who kill their space programs so that when a big planet-killing asteroid comes along, and one most assuredly will, they don't have any kind of efficient nuclear propulsion systems that would allow them to deflect said planet-killing asteroid.

Hmm.