The Fermi Future?

By Scot Noel

A popular topic of futurist writers, bloggers, and vloggers is the Fermi Paradox, often appropriately paired with the Drake Equation.

The Drake Equation comes first. We’ll dispense with the actual formula, but the idea is to work through the potential for alien civilizations by starting with the average rate of star formation, then how many of those stars have planets, then how many of those planets can support life, etc.

There are simply so many stars (about 100 billion in our galaxy alone), that no matter how small you make the other numbers, there should be alien civilizations out there. In 2020, a group of scientists at the University of Nottingham (one of the top 10 research universities in the UK) came up with a new spin based on the latest available data. Relying on something they call the “Astrobiological Copernican Limit,” they estimated that at least 36 civilizations should be active in the Milky Way.

The Fermi Paradox, named after Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi, starts with the simple question: “Well then, where are they?”

It’s not just a question of listening for other transmitting civilizations or looking for mega structures built around other stars, it’s the idea that the universe is so old that, almost no matter what calculation you make, they should be here, among us by now.

A space-faring civilization, even moving at our slow, rocket propelled speeds, would —once it got started— reach every corner of the galaxy in only a few million years. Possibly much faster. No warp drive required. And the universe, of course, is as terribly, unimaginably old as it is big.

So, where are they?

The Great Filter

Because we don’t look out into our own solar system and see strange ships mining the asteroids and giant solar sails tacking against our own sun’s solar wind, we have to wonder what’s up. Hence the idea of “the Great Filter.”

What keeps the sky so silent and apparently uninhabited in our time? While there is an encyclopedia worth of possibilities, here are a popular few:

Technical civilizations have short live spans. They simply never last long enough to explore the galaxy or build great mega structures.
Space faring, radio broadcasting civilizations are so rare, they can never see or communicate with one another.
Life and intelligence may be common, but our specific ability to manipulate the environment to the point of space travel is unique in the universe.
Technical civilizations reach some evolutionary stage, like an AI singularity, long before they go galaxy hopping, and so it simply looks like no one is there. We’re looking for the wrong things.

The Fermi Future

I tend to believe that life in the universe is common, though most is probably microbial. Still, complex life and intelligence does emerge, though the bulk of those examples may be physically unable to develop industrial and then technological prowess. If you happen to be something like a genius squid living in the corner of a dark ocean heated by thermal vents, under a crust of ice kilometers thick— then developing electricity and the silicon chip is quite a stretch.

Yet space and time are so immense, offering so many rolls of the dice, that creatures similar to Homo Sapiens (at least in abilities) are sure to be out there. Why can’t we see them, hear them, or perhaps smell them if they’ve been lurking nearby?

My answer lies in the future, where we basically must hang around long enough to figure it out. As it stands today, and by analogy:

We are 19th century Catuquinaru drummers conceiving of future tribes that message across great distances with bigger drums.
18th century balloonists imagining a sky full of zeppelins.
We’re radio broadcasters in a universe of energy conservers.
We are the uncontacted tribe of the Sentinelese, the modern-day people of North Sentinel Island, protected by Indian law from external interference, at risk of epidemic from modern diseases, and largely granted by the larger world the “right to be left alone.”

Clever as we are, advanced as we are, humanity is not at the pinnacle of its skills, but at the awakening of its abilities. In 200 or 300 years we will look back at the Drake Equation and the Fermi Paradox with the wisdom of experience. “Of course,” we will say, “that was pretty obvious.”

I have on my shelves a book entitled “The Craters of the Moon,” a learned tome that determines, by the weight of observational evidence, that the giant craters on the moon must be volcanic. They could not and did not conceive of asteroid impacts. In 1967. The book was written in 1967!

Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves with the Drake Equation and the Fermi Paradox. We always get ourselves in trouble when all we do is think. Socrates was wrong and Galileo far more right. Get out there and see it, do it, prove it.

Build the telescopes, the starships, the deep-space probes. Launch into the unknown. Go boldly. Touch the distant shores.

Once we set sail, we will know. Once we grow beyond the gravity well of our home-world, we will know. Once we reach a post-scarcity, Kardashev Scale, solar-system spanning civilization, we will know. And once we know, it will be plain, clear, and as obvious as night follows day.

The answer was always there, and we were not yet ready to see it. Until…