The Fermi Paradox
I’ve been thinking about the Fermi Paradox, which is the observation that high estimates for extraterrestrial civilizations are inconsistent with a complete lack of evidence for them. What got me thinking about it, was current issues with space exploration. Getting to Mars seems like an incredible challenge. Several years in space, a completely hostile environment, followed by landing on Mars, which is only slightly less hostile, followed by a return trip that seems likely to fail. Extending that challenge to interstellar distances seems impossible.
From there, I think about a civilization capable of such a feat of interstellar travel. What interest would such a civilization have in diving down into the gravity well of earth? What could they possibly learn from Earth or us, after pulling off such travel? Maybe that’s why we haven’t seen them, because they have no reason to come here. The Fermi Paradox depends on the notion of our own self-importance and the failure of our imagination to grapple with the true scale of the universe.
Deep in the earth, there might be a tiny damp crack with a colony of microscopic organisms wondering about why we’ve never visited them, when it seems so likely we must exist. It really doesn’t occur to them that we just don’t care.
This is a neat coincidence. My Astronomy professor mentioned the Fermi Paradox just a few days ago.
I agree that a sufficiently advanced civilization wouldn’t have much to gain by directly visiting us. But what about radio communications? If there are lots of other civilizations in the Milky Way, surely some of them must exist in our past light cone, broadcasting alien TV signals or something… Maybe our radio telescopes can’t detect it for some reason? Or would it be possible for an advanced civilization to exist without using light to transmit information?
One theory is that broadcast radio signals are likely a fairly short window for a civilization. We are already moving away from over-the-air broadcast to point-to-point satellite-based communication. I would think that the total amount of RF power leaking out will be dropping over time. This means that there’s a relatively short window to pick up these kinds of communication. This may limit our ability to detect anything with a SETI program, especially when you consider that we’re only been at it for a short time, with very few resources,
so passive detection on our part may take quite a while, perhaps hundreds of years.
My question is about the motivations necessary for some kind of visit or active communication, relative to the technological ability to pull it off. It seems to me that Civilization X would be more interested in doing things beyond out imagination. The scenario spelled-out in Sagan’s Contact novel seems pretty unlikely. Civilization X would have to be listening to pick up TV or radio leakage, then we’d have to be running a SETI-like program at the right time to pick up a recognizable response. After that, what then? The amount of time needed to start communications back and forth is very long, and we’d all have to remain both curious and capable for a long, long time.
Maybe this will happen some day, but I don’t think it’s surprising that it hasn’t.
The size of our earth with gravity on the surface is just right for advanced civilization to thrive on land. If the Earth were larger, the force of gravity would be too great for evolution to occur.
We are the arch type for any other advanced civilization to be more like us, than something foreign. A planet not much larger than earth, with a moon, and a star similar in size to our sun. There is no other formula that will work. This is why I suspect that we are freaks, and the only civilization in the universe. Other planets may have oceans with Jurassic life at best, and we are the next step that should not have been. This is why we are alone in the universe.
I’ve got a thought experiment for you: What if today the force of gravity on the surface of the earth increased by 10% ? It would certainly mess some things up, but would civilization end? How about 25% ?
There must be some sort of range of conditions for civilizations to arise, be it gravity, or any other condition. If there is, given the size of the Universe, they must be out there.
Obviously this is all guess-work, so, you might be right.