Solving Fermi’s Paradox
It was over a lunchtime conversation at Los Alamos in 1950 between physicists discussing the likelihood of intelligent life up there in the vaulting desert sky. The debate shifted back and forth across the table, moving between the probability that a planet that could support intelligent life, the number of such planets within our galaxy, and the possibility of moving between galaxies.
Eventually this conversation moved on to some other piece of scientific small-talk - whether or not up there teemed with alien life was filed away for another day. But then quite out of the blue Italian physicist Enrico Fermi who had been quietly mulling over something asked his famous question “Well where is everybody?” So was born the paradox that bears his name.
Embedded within Fermi’s remark are some profound implications. If earth-like planets are relatively common and civilisations expand then sooner or later they must meet. So, as Fermi enquired, where are they? To answer that usually ends in a dark place - existentially dark.
Some have offered sidesteps for the absence of alien contact: perhaps they are lying in wait for us to reach some predetermined critical level of technological advancement. This seems a little too Hollywood to me - to convenient for a plot and not how events occur within the universe. Far more likely is this darker reason - civilisations must eventually burn themselves out. In support of this is the simple law of averages - that the universe is so massive and all our attempts to reach out across the void have been met with only silence means the odds are overwhelming that civilisations that may become capable of contact contain some inherent flaw that returns them back to a earlier stage of development at best or, at worst, destroys them entirely.
Such implications for our own civilisation are grim. As of yesterday, for example, Voyager 1 is still sending back messages after 42 years in space. Think of the technological progress over that period. This means that we are close to the brink that most civilisations on average annihilate themselves. This must have seemed utterly credible to Fermi at Los Alamos, the very location where the atomic bomb was invented (perhaps discovered is a better word here).
To put it bluntly: Fermi is implying we cannot control the power unleashed by progress - explosive technological evolution results in an unstable state for civilisations. Looking at the character of society now and the existential challenges offered up at an accelerating rate: nuclear war appears positively antique when backgrounded against climate change, antimicrobial resistance or a destructive superhuman AI. See Dr Nick Bostrom for full notes here.
I propose this is not the case. In fact the paradox contains some fundamental assumptions relating civilisation to progress. First of all it assumes that civilisational progress is expansive. Can we take this as a given? To do so assumes that baked within technological progress as we understand it is an exploratory character - that as we invent new technologies we grow outward. This is definitely consistent with how we traditionally understand things on Earth - especially if you consider historical moments of high innovation. Consider colonialism and the accompanying industrial revolution or the current golden age of technological achievement and globalisation. In these cases in epochs of high technological innovation - a demand for resources is expressed as conquering and expansion.
Yet this is a very narrow Eurocentric view of civilisation. In fact history tells us that aggressively expansive civilisations are actually in the minority. Consider the vast majority of what we call “indigenous” civilisations - they actually reached a steady state independent of the technology curve. The Australian aborigines for example existed for 120,000 years and never achieved space travel. It is reasonable to assume then this could have continued on indefinitely. So too with the native Americans and Melanesian and Polynesian people of the Pacific.
In fact, to look at the people that colonial Europe came across in their expansion is to discover many examples of societies that had reached a self-sustaining level without the need or appetite for aggressive expansion. Seen in this light our civilisation is actually pathological. Our “you can’t stop progress” mentality in which a discussion about whether we should invent something is whispered in the background but never seriously entertained is the very thing that makes us unstable.
And so there are countless examples in which civilisations pose a solution to the Italian physicist’s problem. Today perhaps we may call these stable civilisations - sustainable. This means that technological progress is the guaranteed road to self destruction, rather than a flaw inherent in civilisation itself.