So: that "Fermi Paradox"

Every video about alien civilizations and the Fermi Paradox sooner or later always mention that same stupid "prisoner dilemma" "logical" theory, basically "what if aliens kill other civilizations before becoming a threat!!!1!!1" which, as far as I know, came from a science fiction book (The Killing Star) which got really popular and people started treating as some real thing that makes sense when it falls apart once you think more than five minutes about it. Because civilizations, as we know, are very simple, logical things that operate in binary switches of "kill/don't kill". It's a logical thing, you know? don't you know the Prisoner's Dilemma, it's a logical game, it's just logical to kill your enemies, it's logic, and aliens should be logically trying to exterminate us!

Interesting that this became so widespread, because it seems to reveal a fear on people that advanced civilizations will just strike us from the map. Which has some political subtext too. In Soviet science fiction, alien civilizations were thought to be communist and pacifist, because what other kind of civilization would explore the stars otherwise? Which gave us this awesome meme:

(Usamerican Wojak: Noooo, why are you invading, colonizing and extermining us?

Evil Aliens: Haha, we are created in your image and likeness, we are a reflection of your system, we are your fears of yourself.

Soviet Chad: Wait, so you explore space, build communism and you don't colonize or exterminate anything?

Communist Aliens: Naturally.)

It's just kinda funny that in Soviet science fiction, a major theme was that advanced civilizations will just abandon war and explore things and such, while in Usamerican science fiction it's sometimes even given as a logical development that aliens would just want to exterminate everyone, so much that you find it in otherwise coherent discussions of possible alien civilizations.

some possible explanations for the fermi paradox, according to wikipedia (inspired by this vid)

downloadable as a zine on my etsy!

On alien star maps that show our part of the Milky Way, there's an image of a mushroom cloud and it says "Here there be assholes."

What is the Fermi paradox?

Here's a fun analogy: You walk up to an ocean with a bucket and fill this with water. After looking into the bucket you see there's no fish. Can you then conclude that there are no fish in the ocean? This is something that crosses my mind often when I think about extraterrestrial life. Can we really make the conclusion that we are alone in the universe when we can't even see all of it? The universe as we know it has trillions and trillions of other habitable planets so it would be absurd to think that there is absolutely no other life apart from right here on our little planet. But where is it? That's the Fermi paradox. Sure, we've concluded that the possibility of other planets with life isn't crazy to think about, it's pretty high, but then how come we don't know anything about it at all? It's often assumed that other life out there would have to be a much higher, more advanced form of civilization. Afterall, other planets and suns have existed for billions of years longer than Earth has, so even if we haven't found them yet, how come there has been absolutely no sign of anything bigger than us? The explanation would be that there is no civilization that's that much bigger and further in their technology than we are. But if there are so many more planets and there have been for so long that have the same conditions as Earth, there has to be something stopping that from happening. The Great Filter. But what if there is super-intelligent life out there and they have no reason to come anywhere near us or show any signs? There are lots and lots more possibilities we have thought about for this one. It could be that that life has already visited our planet before we were here or that there's been a lot of signs out there, but we don't have the technology to pick it up and we're listening for the wrong things or another popular one, we have already been in contact with a higher civilization but the government is hiding it from us. Whatever you choose to believe, I'll leave you with my favorite quote on this topic. "Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying" - Arthur C. Clarke

A common argument as to why aliens aren't making their presence formally known to humans is that "To them we are like ants, they wouldn't care about us" to which I call bullshit. Genuinely.

There are hundreds of people who care about ants a lot. Who spend hours and hours studying them, doing experiments and shit. Not just ants, there is always a guy obsessing over some bacteria in his glass vessels and shit, of course aliens would care about us. There would be at least one guy obsessing over humans and studying them extensively because he has Alien ADHD or something.

Every time I see or hear people discussing the Fermi paradox they talk about stuff like the great filter, aliens hiding from us, humans being the first intelligent life, etc, but I almost never hear what I think is the simplest and most probable solution. That the aliens are really far away from us because the universe is fucking huge

final sketch. now a few days of coloring. I played that game all night yesterday.. an indescribable feeling of existential dread. All my life, touching on the topic of space, I feel incredible fear. void, what a beautiful word. Thinking about the Fermi Paradox and the Great Cosmic Filter, I ask only one question, how? although it might be more correct to say who? maybe one day the great void will reach us too

Tonight I started reading theories about extraterrestrial life. I am an extremely paranoid person and these theories certainly don't help, but I enjoy reading them and so I do it.

According to the Drake equation, there should be about 20 extraterrestrial intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way alone. And we're off to a bad start.

There are two possible reasons why we have never encountered even one: the Dark Forest hypothesis or the Great Filter theory.

Let's start from the first: let's say that a person is in a dark forest, aware of the fact that there are other predators around whose existence, however, has no proof whatsoever. This is the same situation in which humanity finds itself according to the Fermi paradox. Humans live in a world where there is a very high probability that other forms of life exist, but of which there is no actual proof.

Now: would this person ever scream for help? Probably not, because they would let other predators know their location. And that's what these possible extraterrestrial presences are probably doing: they hide, because they are afraid and paranoid that other forms of life may be stronger than them.

The problem? Humanity is literally playing the person screaming in the forest. For more or less 100 years now, so since radio was invented, we have been transmitting every aspect of our life into space. This applies to radio, TV, phone calls and chats.

If there is a civilization out there, in 100 light years it will know what happened on our earth this year, and right now it knows what happened 100 years ago.

We are extremely stupid.

The theory of the Great Filter, on the other hand, states that no civilization is yet equipped with the necessary "colonising" technology since there is an obstacle to achieving this goal, a great filter, which makes the "interplanetary colonization" scenario extremely implausible.

If we want to be optimistic, the filter is "in the past", in the sense that it is very rare that intelligent life forms develop and therefore we, as human beings, have already overcome the obstacle and are about to colonize the Universe. This scenario would be all the more probable the more habitable planets were discovered but devoid of intelligent life forms and would have as a consequence the fact that one day we will probably find ourselves sailing alone in the infinite night (so sad, eh?).

Thinking pessimistically, however, the filter is "in the future", in the sense that, like us, billions of intelligent species exist and have existed, but they have all failed in their attempt to colonize the Universe: this could mean, for example, that it is not possible to colonize planets between one star and another and therefore the fate of each civilization is inextricably linked to the fate of its mother star, or even that all intelligent civilizations arrive at self-destruction before being able to reach a certain technological level, or so many other things… anyway, if that were the case, we should start preparing ourselves as a species to face some great obstacle that could spell our end.

Also, any contact with an alien civilization could only indicate one thing: we'd all be screwed, human and alien, because it means the filter is in the future for both of us.

But why hasn't it happened yet? Well, if at this precise moment someone were looking at the Earth from the Andromeda Galaxy, they would see the earth of 2,537,000 years ago: therefore, as for us some habitable exoplanets appear uninhabited, the Earth would also be devoid of intelligent life forms for them, making it impossible to establish a contact.

John Murdoch – Scientist of the Day

Dark City, a science-fiction film, premiered on Feb. 27, 1998. 

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easy answers to the "fERmI PAroDoX"

the fermi paradox is fucking stupid, and this is why:

IT'S NOT A PARADOX.

there are SO MANY possible solutions to this "paradox" its maddening to think that so many people think it IS one.

(btw i'm not saying that alien life, or even intelligent alien life, doesn't exist. i'm just saying that all this hullabaloo about "not finding it yet" is ridiculous. we'll find it when we find it.)

the most basic solution to the paradox is a variation on the "great filter": that we are just seriously, completely, hillariously overestimating the chances of life coming into existence in the first place. The fact of the matter is that we still don't know for sure what the circumstances were that led to it's emergence; some likely answers might include the emergence of proto-cells from a kind of primordial soul of organic molecules stimulated by lightning. if this is the case, the circumstances on earth would have to be PERFECT for life to emerge at all. Earth is vast, and it's climate varied, but it was still a long shot. this life would have also needed to survive long enough to evolve and adapt to it's surroundings well enough to survive changes in it's environment.

lot's of fuss is put out about how many "earth-like" planets we have found, but in order for life to emerge in the first place on those worlds it would have to have already had centuries of evolution under it's belt. worlds that are baking on one side and frozen on the other are NOT good candidates for life, nor are ones that are covered in magma, nor are ones that are gigantic oceans with little in the way of organic molecules to feed on, nor are worlds that have no liquid water whatsoever. most of the "earth-like" planets that have been touted about would NEVER have been suited for the emergence of life, though life could conceivably evolve to live on them. People always forget that the evolutionary process takes time, and that in order for it to occur at all some members of the original forms of life have to survive the conditions that killed everything else.

the "natural" assumption that evolution has an arrow that points to the emergence of intelligence, and further, civilization. if biodiversity on a planet is low, the chance that any biological lineage would need to evolve a survival strategy as convoluted as intelligence is also low. why evolve a big brain when you can evolve a big mouth with lots of pointy teeth? a form of intelligent life might emerge that is a solitary predator, like an octopus, unwilling to work with others of its kind for any reason. they could fail to develop a complex language or the means of expressing it. they could have short lifespans that curtails the accumulation of experience and the ability to pass it to the next generation. they could completely lack hands or tentacles, and thus be unable to build technology. or they could develop beaks for manipulating objects, but as a result be completely unable to manipulate radioactive, poisonous, or explosive materials without killing themselves. they could evolve as an aquatic-only species, and thus be unable to develop fire or metallurgy, barring them from developing aircraft or spacecraft entirely.

at the next level up, low biodiversity could actually curtail scientific development. numerous technologies on earth have been inspired by, or even copied directly from, other living organisms. we copied the battery from the electric eel's physiology, and we were inspired to learn to fly by birds and bats, even if the methods of flight we eventually developed turned out to be vastly different. without these inspirations, i believe technology would develop much slower.

at the modern level, we got nukes. if the cold war had gone differently, it would have sent us back to the stone age, or worse. imagine a species that just keeps doing that, over and over again; they reach 20th century tech, nuke their respective civilizations to bits, start all over, get back to the 20th century, and nuke themselves all over again. Why do we imagine that alien life would be any more enlightened, any less warlike, any less xenophobic or self-destructive than we are? perhaps we haven't seen radio signals from them because the window of time where they knew how to transmit radio signals was so short.

how about space travel? a couple of decades ago space colonization seemed inevitable, but now? it honestly seems more likely that we will achieve world peace than reach mars with a manned expedition. there are just so many reasons why NOT to do it, from money to politics to sheer indifference. without the rabid patriotism of the cold wars to drive us, it seems the entire world has settled into comfortable inactivity. sure, some billionaire might start space tourism, but that's unlikely to take anyone out of orbiting hotels. it would take about seven months to get to mars from earth with our current tech, and unlike in previous generations of exploration support from the "mainland" would not likely be forthcoming. fuck, even if we DID manage it, the supply lines could be cut a couple months into the mission due to political infighting or a war. again, if this is our reality, why do we assume the aliens have it any better than us?

ftl travel. what will it take to get it through people's heads that it's NEVER GONNA HAPPEN. on that note, without ftl how many people do you think are actually going to volunteer for an expedition to proxima centauri, all to settle on a world that just looks like the moon, but bigger than earth. again, WHY SHOULD WE EXPECT ALIENS TO ACT MORE ALTRUISTICALLY THAN WE WOULD? WHICH AMONG YOU WOULD TRADE THE BEAUTY AND BIODIVERSITY OF EARTH FOR A DEAD ROCK?

that would take 6300 years BTW, and that's our closest neighbor. discounting the fact that all the original crew will die in that time if we don't develop actual functional cryogenics, SO MUCH can go wrong during that time. consider, for example, if the ship is diverted EVEN A LITTLE BIT from it's course. we could end up with the ship running out of fuel and power light years away from it's destination, and then everyone dies. or a disease could spring up. or the ship could be hit by a micrometeorite and completely decompress. all that before anyone knows if terraforming proxima centauri b is even an option. WHY SHOULD WE EXPECT ALIENS TO TAKE THIS RISK?

terraforming. a pipe dream. preparing a world in our own solar system for habitation would take multiple lifetimes, and that's a generous estimation. it would also be prohibitively expensive and would require resources from other worlds to do properly. do you think this is something a government or a corporation would try to accomplish? to please who? the shareholders would fire any CEO who tried, and just imagine a politician trying to explain to his voting base that all their tax money went to terraforming a distant rock instead of social services or national defense? it wouldn't benefit anyone for so long, and would likely be abandoned part-way through. WHY SHOULD WE EXPECT MORE OF ALIEN PEOPLES?

honestly, the fermi paradox strikes me as less an actual "paradox", and more of a way to cope with the utter loneliness of the human race in a purely rationalistic universe. it's a case of us expecting evidence, not finding it, and forming convoluted theoretical conspiracies to explain why the evidence we expected was erased, like how 7-day creationists try to explain away prehistoric fossil evidence with "the devil did it".

we'll find life when we find it, if we find it, and in such a case we will probably just find some parallel to archaebacteria or, if we're lucky, protists. sentient life almost certainly exists. the universe is just too vast for it NOT to exist. but that vastness includes galaxies we will never explore or send probes to, in clusters far outside the scope of our imaginations.

so no, the fermi paradox isn't a paradox. it is pure copium.

Fermi Paradox Solution Number 3243

"Why would aliens care about us? We might be like ants to them."

me: 😳 "Yeah, what kind of nerd ET would be obsessed with collecting, filming and learning about ants. Ha ha. We have nothing to worry about." 😬

What the Fermi Paradox actually means

I felt it might be interesting to write this out because, well, it's a topic that came up.

So, first, the definition. The Fermi Paradox fundamentally amounts to the question - where are all the aliens?

There are a lot of stars in the galaxy, and of those stars it seems like a lot of those have planets. We don't know a lot about how likely it is for simple life to arise, or evolve into complex life, or evolve intelligence, or for intelligence to become a tool-using society that is able to leave its home planet... but there are three fundamental possibilities about completing all of those steps.

Either it's really, really hard (as in, less than one in a million planets will do it over the course of billions of years), and the reason why is something that Earth has already got past.

Or it's really, really hard, and it's something awaiting in our future.

Or it's not really, really hard. In which case... well, where are the aliens?

Of these possibilities, the first is a bit boring but also the one which is rather the best for us (as in, humans as a whole). It means that we're just about the only technological society in the whole history of the galaxy - lonely, perhaps, but that's not a big problem.

The second is really worrying, because if there's a really hard thing awaiting in our future that prevents most civilizations leaving their planet... oh dear.

And the third is what gives rise to the Fermi Paradox. But why?

If a civilization arising that is able to leave its home planet is easy, then all it would really take is for one of those civilizations that arises to want to spread out and live on new worlds - even if most of them would prefer to stay at home. If it starts doing that, then you end up with that civilization spreading out across the whole galaxy. It would not take very long; a ship moving at 0.1% of the speed of light would cross the whole galaxy in about a hundred million years, and the galaxy has been around for well over five billion years already - fifty times as long. And once a technological species is established on dozens of planets, it's hard to conceive of a disaster that could possibly change that - so once the galaxy gets colonized, it stays colonized.

The result of that is that the Fermi Paradox isn't so much "Why can't we detect alien spacecraft visiting", or "Why can't we pick up alien radio transmissions". It's "Why didn't we become a home for alien colonists two hundred and thirty million years ago".

There have been more than five billion years, across the planets of a hundred million stars, for this to happen.

It hasn't yet.

This all leads to the conclusion that there is something that makes alien life spreading out into the universe almost impossible. One potential reason is that there simply isn't any out there, but if you reject that possibility you end up with more worrying scenarios.

What is The Great Filter?

Where is everybody? If you know about the Fermi Paradox you might've already heard about The Great Filter, being one of the solutions to this mind-blowing theory. The Great Filter theory says that somewhere between pre-life and a highly advanced civilization there has to be a wall, a filter that all life has to get through. We don't know what this filter is. However, we know that depending on where it is, there's three possibilities: we're extremely rare, we're first, or we're fucked. (doomed, I mean.) If The Great Filter is behind us and we've managed to survive going through it, that would mean that we're special. It would mean that it's extremely hard for life to make it to our level of intelligence. It would explain why there haven't been any signs of very advanced life out there, since it could mean we're an exception with how far we've made it so far. It could even mean that The Great Filter is at the very, very start of life.

If The Great Filter is not behind us, the only hope we could have is that we're the first. It would be the first time that conditions in the Universe have reached a place that would allow intelligent life to develop and in this case we could be on our way to being one of the first, if not the first, super-intelligent civilization. If The Great Filter is ahead of us, then we're screwed. If it's not true that we as a civilization are rare or first, then The Great Filter has to be in our future. In this case it would mean that life can develop up to a certain point and then something prevents it from developing any further. This is why a lot of philosophers say it's a good sign that we haven't had any signs of other life out there, since that makes the possibility that The Great Filter is behind us bigger.

My hypothesized answer to the Fermi paradox is that every extraterrestrial sapient species took one look at the radioactive death void outside their planet's atmosphere and went "fuck that, we're staying home."

I solved the Fermi Paradox. You know, the question "if the probability for aliens is so high, where are they?" One of the newer contestants is the so-called "Dark Forest" theory. It basically says we're surrounded by nightmare predators, and everyone who makes themselves known gets instantly eaten. It's a grim, predatory capitalist interpretation. There are of course more. Dark answers (because civilizations always crumble and fail), hopeful ones (because we are the first out there and ahead of us is a golden age of possibility, exploration and wonder)

There is also the theory that earth is simply a protected place. A museum. A zoo. A lab. A meat farm. I propose a better theory:

Seriously, if you want meat and have a galaxy faring civilization, you can propably grow meat in tubes 'n stuff. What can we as humans do very well? Earth is a ressource of culture, art and stories. We have been called "pan narrans", the storytelling ape (Pratchett, Cohen, Stewart). What we do best is tell stories and put them into neat, beautiful, horrendous or mentally exhausting little packets. Written stories, pictures, games. So basically, we don't see any aliens because they all desperately wait for Half Life 3.