Thoughts on The Fermi Paradox

            So from time to time, I’ll lay awake in bed at 2am, and think about the big questions. Tonight’s question: the Fermi paradox. The galaxy is several billions of years old, why haven’t we seen or been contacted by any intelligent aliens yet? Why haven’t we already been conquered by the Siths? According to Wikipedia: “The Fermi paradox, named after Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi, is the apparent contradiction between the lack of evidence for extraterrestrial civilizations and various high estimates for their probability.” Barring any government cover-ups and conspiracies, of course. I’ve seen weird things in the sky before. Who knows, maybe they have been here. Now before I begin, I’m no scientist. I have a degree in Creative Writing, not science or astronomy. So, my opinion probably doesn’t carry that much weight. This is just my own opinion from doing my own research, which mainly consists of reading books and watching documentaries and such.

            Anyway, I watched this video during one of those late nights grappling with existentialism. This video specifically looks at the Fermi Paradox from the perspective of “why haven’t we already been conquered by colonizing aliens”? And does the fact that we apparently haven’t been conquered mean that intelligent life doesn’t exist outside Earth, at least within our galaxy? It brings up “Fact A”, which is that the aliens have not contacted us or colonized us. And if the simplest explanation in science is most often the correct one, this would suggest that there are no other intelligent aliens in the galaxy and we are alone.

            I think that this is a narrow-minded approach to the question. One of the shortcomings of modern science is that it is founded upon Eurocentric materialist thought. One example of this is that scientists seem to expect intelligent aliens to act just like Europeans did during the colonization of the Americas. They seem to be under the assumption that intelligent aliens, if they saw another planet capable of supporting life, would immediately invade and kill the natives. It’s what we want to do, after all. It’s why astronomers get so excited discovering exoplanets. Isn’t this how all civilizations act? Or maybe, as I’m more willing to believe, this behavior is uniquely human. Who’s to say it would even occur to an intelligent species to invade another planet, even if they found one that they could survive on? Perhaps they actually take care of their own planet, unlike humans, who are so eager to bleed their world dry and then move onto the next planet to destroy, as seems to be the end game for our consumer society. Maybe their society never developed an economic system and proceeded to kill their own environment. Maybe they’re not greedy. There are an infinite number of other ways for intelligent beings to live. We’ve even had many human societies here on Earth that never conquered or colonized, and that lived in harmony with nature. And as for why they haven’t at least tried to contact us, it could be that the distances are too great, the radio signals reached us before we were technologically advanced enough to receive them, or they used some type of signal that hasn’t been discovered here yet. I’ve noticed modern mainstream science doesn’t usually like to think outside the box when it comes to questions like whether or not life exists on other planets. If life exists anywhere, scientists seem to assume, it must be exactly like Earth’s life, evolving under the exact same conditions, and they must be just like us. But life exists in extreme conditions on Earth. Perhaps it is more common than is typically assumed.

            But even if an intelligent species arose somewhere that found Earth through their telescopes and proceeded to salivate and rub their hands together greedily, there are some other logical barriers for why they wouldn’t be able to make the trip. A big one is the vast distances. The nearest star to the sun is about four lightyears away. A lightyear is how far light travels in one Earth orbit. To put that in perspective, it takes 8 minutes for light to travel from the sun to Earth, and light could travel around the Earth seven times in one second. Now think about how far it would get in a year. And it’s nearly impossible to travel anywhere near as fast as the speed of light. Light from Earth takes 12 minutes to get to Mars, yet the estimated time it would take for a manned mission to get to Mars is two years. Chances are we wouldn’t be able to reach the next star within a human lifetime. There’s another theoretical idea of a “generation starship”, where you’d have generations of people being born and living their whole lives on a ship. Firstly, that sounds like a cruel fate to bestow on someone who had no choice in being born on one of these ships. Another thing people don’t usually think about is how screwed up your body would be if you were born in space. Here’s a video for more on that topic. Once the generation starship got to the destination everyone’s body would be so screwed up they probably wouldn’t be able to even stand. I think realistically we’re stuck on this planet, and probably any intelligent alien species would be too.

            And as for the idea of a galactic empire, take a look at some of the biggest empires here on Earth through history. Alexander the Great’s empire, the British Empire, Genghis Khan’s empire. None of them lasted very long before breaking apart. Territories rebelled and gained independence, there was in-fighting with the leadership leading to empires splitting up, once the central leader died the empire became disunited. How then, could an empire last when it spans multiple planets? I think Galactic empires, while fun to entertain in science fiction, are likely impossible, and would fall apart before it got very far. But it’s a big, old universe. Maybe it’s happened somewhere, just not in the Milky Way.

            Anyway, those are my thoughts, coming from someone who’s no expert on these things of course. I think there definitely is life on other planets, but the fact that they apparently haven’t tried to visit or contact us isn’t surprising at all when you actually look at it logically, and stop to think that maybe they wouldn’t think like humans at all.