
Why we downplay Fermi’s paradox - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/63/horizons/our-attitude-toward-aliens-proves-we-still-think-were-special
======
roywiggins
Here's a strange thing:

Many people believe that strong AI is inevitable, or at least possible within
the next few decades to centuries. Many people also believe that there's a
natural solution to the Fermi paradox (space travel is hard, signals are
faint).

But if strong AI is possible, then the Fermi paradox suddenly becomes much
more acute because it makes von Neumann probes seem way easier- once you have
self-replication across interstellar distance, you will blanket the galaxy
with your Cylon spawn pretty quickly. The question isn't just why haven't we
heard signals from people like us, but why haven't their robotic spawn already
shown up and disassembled a few moons into robot factories?

~~~
philipkglass
My favorite theory: the von Neumann probes are already in the solar system.
They've been continuously monitoring this system for a billion years. They
could just be unwilling to make the first move toward contact with humans --
maybe we'll notice them, eventually, once we have better monitoring of small
in-system objects. They could even be deliberately avoiding detection, like
wildlife researchers who don't want animals to notice them. They haven't
turned moons into copies of themselves for, basically, the same reason they
haven't turned everything into paperclips -- that sort of unbounded-growth
directive is useless and/or dangerous.

Note that I don't really _believe_ this, but it does seem to be a resolution
of the paradox that (like many others) we don't yet have enough evidence to
reject.

~~~
roywiggins
I'd object on the basis that it is hard to imagine everyone cooperating on
that sort of project. It implies everyone has about the same incentives and
motivations, which suggests a remarkable uniformity... so if it's true,
there's probably only one civilization in our galaxy, and it's spread
uniformly everywhere.

~~~
philipkglass
Or that one civilization (more likely: a tiny number of decision makers
_within_ one civilization) got the capability first, and had outposts waiting
everywhere before any other species could reach the same galaxy-spanning
capabilities. Or that a handful of civilizations spread out before there was
one galaxy-wide winner. But all faced similar incentives against paperclip
maximizers and toward peacefulness upon contact with other interstellar
civilizations. World powers here on Earth recognized that thermonuclear war is
a terribly bad idea even though a thermonuclear weapon has never been used in
anger. Multiple alien civilizations could perhaps foresee that deploying
Nicoll-Dyson Laser weapons would end badly without a single proof-of-concept
firing.

If a civilization _does_ expand via von Neumann replicator machine life, it
becomes a lot more plausible that every machine has similar incentives. It
also becomes a lot harder to fully exterminate all machines. There may be no
winnable wars between interstellar-capable machine civilizations, assuming
that more than one exists in the first place.

I know, I'm invoking a lot of speculation. But answering the "where are they?"
question of the original Paradox with "lots of places, but we've failed to
notice" feels more satisfying to me than guessing that Earth is
extraordinarily special. Also more satisfying than guessing that
technologically developed species inevitably self-destruct before developing
interstellar capabilities.

------
jcranmer
Fermi's paradox is basically an example of saying "the only two possibilities
are that it's impossible or inevitable, and since we don't know it to be
impossible, it must be inevitable"\--actually multiplying a few of those
together--and then being surprised that the evidence doesn't show that it's
inevitable.

We don't have enough knowledge of fundamental physics, chemistry, or biology
to come up with any reasonably tight bound (tight here meaning only a few
orders of magnitude) as to how likely alien interstellar voyaging is, to say
nothing of our complete ignorance of xenosociology. Our own experience is n=1,
which means it's extremely dangerous to generalize.

But even then, we run into a problem: intrastellar travel is _hard._ We don't
yet have the technology to colonize a single other body in our own solar
system, and it's dubious that we could send a human to and from any other body
save our own Moon. The only mechanism we have to travel in space is via
rockets, whose fuel costs are prohibitive for any sort of long journey. Even
getting out of our gravity well requires rockets, and while we have concepts
of other ideas that are less expensive, they tend to have problematic
requirements such as "requires things we haven't discovered yet."

~~~
modzu
im not sure who you're quoting but i don't think that is Fermi.

the point of the paradox is not merely wondering how likely alien life is.
rather, it starts with the simple fact that no evidence for alien life has
been observed, ever, anywhere. why?

well, there's all kinds of potential explanations, maybe its far away, maybe
its not advanced anywhere else, etc. we don't know the answer of course, but
given the vastness of space one might expect to at least see some evidence of
alien life, if not alien life directly, somewhere. that we do not suggests
something fundamentally bigger is going on (ie the speed of light is legit)

~~~
jcranmer
The very name of the Fermi paradox suggests that we ought to be surprised that
we haven't seen evidence of alien life. Instead, what I'm trying to say is
that we don't even have enough evidence to be able to assert that we should
_expect_ to see alien life in the first place.

~~~
modzu
ok, thanks for the clarification. so if fermi and you are looking up at all
the stars in the night sky and he says to you, "where is everyone??" you would
say, "what do you mean? why would there be anyone out there?"

i don't think most people would have that intuition but it's fair.

drake's equation is a fun way to try to answer fermi. it seems you would
assign n_e or f_1 a value close to 0

------
resu_nimda
Honestly I don't understand the point of this article. The evidence that "we"
as a collective whole have not given enough attention to the paradox is
lacking. I'm not even sure what he's calling for - more research into specific
areas? More people chatting about it on Twitter?

Based on the evidence we have, the proposition that "there are no interstellar
civilizations that have colonized our galaxy" seems reasonable. This whole
psychological thing about how we think we're special and how we treat
animals...I don't see how that is relevant at all. Is the assertion that this
attitude is preventing massive amounts of funding for SETI programs? We don't
have a single shred of evidence of extraterrestrial life, nor much of a clue
on how to go about finding it. All the evidence we have says that, yes, life
on earth actually is quite special. Didn't find any argument against that in
this article.

------
sgillen
Personally, my guess is that we will find that life is actually pretty common,
but that civilization like we have is very rare. I mean life on earth has been
going for what? 4 billion years? and yet only in the last 10,000 or so did
civilization actually start. And even when (modern) humans showed up on the
scene it still took them another 300,000 years to start doing civilization
looking things.

There is just such a huge variety of factors that had to go right on top of
life being on the planet already for civilization to get going.

~~~
bena
Also, dogs are pretty rare. And kangaroos. Dolphins are as uniquely rare as
humans.

We do have a surprising variety of life forms here on Earth. True, they all
developed from a common base, but they've splintered into what seems like an
infinite diversity.

I mean, as far as we know, dinosaurs weren't building spaceships.

But proponents of the Fermi paradox say that even if human-style intelligence
is incredibly rare, the universe is incredibly old. The sheer magnitude of the
timescales involved mean that there are literally no new ideas we could think
of. That it only needs to have happened once for it to be noticeable.

Of course, the Fermi paradox assumes that it is possible and desirable to do
such a thing.

~~~
bmer
How old is the universe?

~~~
bena
IIRC, it's roughly 14 billion years or so. Earth has been around for I think 4
billion. Humans for around 10,000-ish. That number may be off, but it's well
under 100,000. We, as a species, have gone from crudely drawn shapes on caves
to starting to explore beyond the bounds of our planet.

The claim is that our journey into the stars is inevitable. That we will begin
to colonize other planets. And that this colonization is exponential. To
illustrate let's say tomorrow we know how to do it. The only issue is the time
it takes. Let's pretend we can do it in 10 years. From nothing to fully
functional, autonomous human colony in 10 years. Technologically equivalent.
Which means that colony is also capable of sending out colonies. So now
instead of one planet sending out colonies, you have two. Then four, then
eight, and so on. Basically, every 10 years, you would double the number of
planets inhabited by a species. In just 100 years, there would be 1024 planets
supporting human life. In 1000 years? 100 cycles of colonization? 1.2e+30.
Huge. There are "only" 40 billion planets that seem habitable in our galaxy.
We'd have run out of planets to colonize at the 36th cycle. And even if it
takes 100 years to colonize a planet to the point where they're just as
capable, you're just really shifting the decimal one point. That's 3600 years
to a fully inhabited galaxy. Cosmically, a blip in time.

So, the Fermi paradox says that _given that colonization of other worlds is
inevitable for an intelligent species_ , if life and human-style intelligence
aren't unique, why haven't we seen evidence of other civilizations yet?

Either been contacted, run into an artifact of some sort, or found some sort
of signal.

------
mikestew
In summary, because we think we're special. Which brings to mind my long-
running thought experiment: what if we're no more special on a larger scale
than our own stomach floral are on our scale? Maybe there's no one else out
there because we're the special oil-eating bacteria, only instead of oil we
eat carbon and oxygen, turning it to "harmless CO2". Then, like many bacteria,
we consume all of the carbon and oxygen and die off.

Or maybe it's just the vast distances involved and some harsh physical
reality. Warp drives, FTL, even approaching the speed of light, perhaps it's
been tried repeatedly on one of those planets that's billions of years older
than ours. And after billions of years and the best minds of planet Argwagh
toiling away, turns out that _c_ is the universe's speed limit...period. And
when asked, "who wants to spend the remainder of their life in a tin can for
the cause? And to doom your descendants to the same fate?", not a single hand
went up.

~~~
hathawsh
If c is the issue, then some civilization will use solar systems as space
ships. They'll figure out a way to move a star along a chosen path and keep
the planets in orbit. The travelers would have all the comforts of home while
wandering the galaxies.

In fact, I wonder if anyone has done that already. It seems like we'd be able
to see their stars dancing about.

~~~
bena
> then some civilization will use solar systems as space ships.

That is a huge leap.

~~~
hathawsh
Yes it's a huge leap, but the leap might not be as big as it seems: if we can
figure out artificial gravity, then maybe we can scale up the technology and
move stars, leading to more fruitful space travel than metal ships alone can
achieve.

OTOH, that method of travel would still be rather slow and aliens might have
abandoned the idea because it's too boring.

~~~
bena
Yes, just figure out how to reverse one of the fundamental forces of the
universe that may not actually be a force.

Then perform that on a scale capable of shifting the path of something that
contains practically all of the mass of the solar system.

Far from "too boring", it seems "too implausible". Your "step 1" would be a
huge leap in and of itself.

------
mnm1
> If we humans are now on the cusp of colonizing our solar system

We're not. And we may never be, let alone able to travel through space
continuously while somehow maintaining generation after generation of life
using a finite amount of resources that could travel with us. The paradox
assumes so many things that are far from a given, to me it's confusing why
such a great thinker couldn't see his own fallacious thinking. Maybe there is
a ton of intelligent life out there that can barely get to the moon once or
twice before giving up forever. That intelligent life would be like us,
possibly dreaming of colonizing the next planet over while destroying itself.
We could not, with current technology, possibly detect such life. We can
barely detect earth like planets as is. The assumptions Fermi makes are simply
too great for this idea to be compelling.

~~~
megaman22
This sort of pessimism is depressing.

We have to at least try, and we have more than enough capability if we cared
to try - we put men on the moon while fighting a major war and engaging in a
nuclear arms race, with computers orders of magnitudes less powerful than a
raspberry pi.

~~~
mnm1
Pessimism? I think you mean a dose of reality. We aren't even close. That's
reality no matter what Musk and others like him say. If anything, it's
extreme, unwarranted, delusional optimism that sees us colonizing the planets.
And that's just our solar system. We can't even get to Mars and probably
couldn't even get to the moon at this point. I don't see why we would assume
that other intelligent species would be able to escape, except briefly, their
planets. There is nothing at all that warrants that assumption now or when
Fermi was alive. Why would anyone assume this even for the future? Progress is
not guaranteed and as we have seen throughout history, periods of progress are
often followed by periods of decline.

------
earenndil
There has been a big push, I've noticed, towards excessive generalization. We
aren't special, life is generalised. This seems to have appeared as a pushback
against the thought that we are somehow special, but it has imo gone too far.
The fact is, we're attempting to quantize extremely unknown unknowns, and to
claim that we're not special because we can conceive of other life that is
essentially equivalent to us is to make a _huge_ set of assumptions regarding
the plausibility of said life. Let the argument that exponential
societal/technological growth goes on forever be a warning that over-
generalisation is sensationalism!

------
typetehcodez
“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not.
Both are equally terrifying.”

― Arthur C. Clarke

------
skywhopper
The problem is that Fermi’s paradox assumes interstellar travel to be an
inevitable and achievable goal of intelligent life given enough time. Why
should that be? I would argue that assumption is itself far more self-
aggrandizing than what this article accuses the doubters of being. Why should
we assume that intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy that has progressed
hundreds or thousands of years beyond our level of technology would even value
interstellar travel? Maybe by the time such technology is possible, other
grander frontiers that the human race cannot even perceive will be more
compelling. Or maybe the practicalities make interstellar travel impossible.
Why do we assume this is even a solvable problem given the resources available
in a typical solar system? Or that such exploration would then be sustainable
beyond the first leg?

------
sgt101
There are two issues that are not generally considered, the first is that it
may be that the normal size of intelligent beings is rather larger than
humans. Secondly it might be that the size of the worlds that the live on is
larger than the earth.

Bigger worlds will have bigger gravity and might have thicker atmospheres,
possibly less deep though.

All of these factors would make space travel much harder, life support would
be more difficult. take off harder (much) return to the surface much, much
harder. So I think that even if civilisation is common space faring
civilisation is going to be rare, and as we know even space faring
civilisation doesn't approach interstellar civilisation.

~~~
sgt101
Also chemistry, the chemistry of an atmosphere may screw up rocketry..

------
AnimalMuppet
Why we _downplay_ Fermi's paradox is because most of us know that it's making
up numbers, and then using the made-up numbers to reach a conclusion. Most of
us have little faith in the numbers, and therefore little faith in the
conclusion. Why should it be otherwise?

People love to make these big-sounding claims of Having Figured It All Out.
But the data don't support the conclusions, most of us don't really buy the
conclusions. That's a good thing.

------
skybrian
This is handwaving at best. Here's a more rigorous argument that was published
recently:

Dissolving the Fermi Paradox
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404](https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404)

~~~
chillacy
So that would be option number 1: Rare Earth Hypothesis:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Hypothetical_exp...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Hypothetical_explanations_for_the_paradox)

------
herodotus
The obvious resolution to the "paradox" is that we are alone, at least in the
Milky Way. It is reasonable to conclude that, if the development of
intelligent, technologically capable life was likely, then we would have seen
signs of it. We have not. So it is not likely. So it is not really a paradox.
But the author of the article says we want to ignore Fermi because we think we
are special. No. If we don't ignore the paradox, the conclusion is that we are
special. Mind you, if we are special, I am not that impressed.

~~~
mavhc
We are special in one sense, we're really near the start of the universe, 1%
of its lifespan, rather than the average of 50%.

Given you probably need 3rd generation stars to create enough complex elements
for life, it's only very recently that life has been possible at all

------
ianai
I’ve never bought into the Fermi thesis. We’re still burning petroleum instead
of using it for its other amazing uses and blowing each other up over myths -
but we think we know the fundamental nature of all life in the universe enough
to say we should see it.

~~~
joe_the_user
We know that a star burns the available fuel and then expires, with a hard
limit existing on the size of it's size based on various factors. We know that
algae bloom similarly exhausts it's medium and shrinks.

However, the going assumption of the Fermi thesis is intelligent life is
different. Intelligent life forms civilizations that are expected to naturally
expands forever, eating planets, stars and so-forth.

So far, human behavior looks much like the other phenomena that expand to the
limit of their fuel and then die.

And, if somehow against all odds, we wise up and stop exhausting the resources
needed for our existence, well, then that infinite expansion tendency quite
likely won't be there.

"If we humans are now on the cusp of colonizing our solar system, and we are
not much faster than other civilizations, those civilizations should have
completed this colonization long ago and spread to other parts of the galaxy."

But what if we aren't on the cusp of this colonization, if one can argue such
colonization would happen by quite a few technological advances that are
purely hypothetical, that "colonizing the solar system" only seems plausible
by incorrect analogy with the colonization of various areas of earth by
various local societies.

Space seem wholly hostile to human from it's lack of gravity to its lack of
all other components needed by us. Our era has gone from believing "space the
final frontier" to seeing just how fragile our condition on earth is.

~~~
tomp
> So far, human behavior looks much like the other phenomena that expand to
> the limit of their fuel and then die.

Are you sure about that? It seems to me that humanity has often made a "leap"
in the past... Romans "fed" on slaves, then collapsed, and eventually we found
coal. The industrial revolution "fed" on coal, then we found "oil", there's
probably the next thing!

~~~
joe_the_user
I shouldn't have implied the feed-and-collapse sequence could only happen
once. There can be repeats even with bacteria and sure, humans are more
complex than bacteria, the process can be more complex.

The only thing not justified is the expand forever thing.

------
SteveParker60
dickbars:

[https://daringfireball.net/2017/06/medium_dickbars](https://daringfireball.net/2017/06/medium_dickbars)

------
pmichaud
I found this answer to the Fermi Paradox compelling:
[http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/03/ssc-journal-club-
dissol...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/03/ssc-journal-club-dissolving-
the-fermi-paradox/)

