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Some solutions to the Fermi Paradox

Mistborn

Mistborn

Location
Elendel, Scadrial
So I've been thinking about the Fermi Paradox lately. Though I'm hardly qualified to comment I can't help but note that many of the common solutions seem either outlandish, depressing, or both. Have thought on this subject quite a bit myself I'd assume that E.T.'s regrettable absence in our skies can be explained by 3 postulates.

We're pretty early in the grand scheme of things. 13 and change billion years sounds like a lot but in the scope of the 100 trillion years the era of star formation is expected to last it's hardly any time at all, less than than one percent of one percent of the age of light before the long dark. Of that small amount of time that has passed there's good reason to suspect that neither life nor technology as we know it could not have arisen in a fair chunk of it. There couldn't have been any rocky planets around the first generation of stars, there were no rocks because the elements that make them up are only forged in the cores of stars. Heck life as we know it needs iodine and that stuff is only made by neutron star collisions. Our technology is even more reliant on the of such rare calamities. As you go back in time the necessary elements for life and technology get scarcer. It's imaginable that the universe and/or our portion of the galaxy passed a sort of critical mass threshold around the time or shortly before earth formed.

We're already passed some filters that might be a lot greater than we think. The Earth has been around for 4.5 Billion years and while life has existed for most of that time complicated multicellular life has only been around for 500 million years. The sort of life that I can imagine evolving into a technological species has been around for 300-250 million years and it only ever evolved into a technological species once. While in scope of the universe we're unexpectedly early that's not the case for the planet which might be a lifeless desolation in only 300 million more years by some estimates. Given those numbers our case need not be that much of an outlier for technological civilizations to be extremely rare. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of "earthlike" planets never develop complex multi-cellular life of those that do less than one percent of one percent give rise to a technological civilization. We tend to think of evolution as a directional process with us as it's ultimate goal and that colors what we expect other worlds to look like.

We're vastly overestimating the expansion rate of technological civilizations. As dire of a picture as I'm painting many would say it's too optimistic if you punch my assumptions into the Drake equation you'd expect tens if not hundreds of thousands of civilization in the milky way. For a lot of thinkers that ought to mean we should be ass deep in aliens, with one of the early civilizations setting up shop on Earth long before we had a chance to come about. Even if we assume Einstein's law is inviolate the speed of light is not so slow nor the Galaxy too large to prevent a single determined species for colonizing it in what is an eyeblink in geologic time. The thing is that while any species would benefit form such an endeavor in some brute Darwinian sense I don't see how any civilization would. If any civilization were too pack off some number of would-be Adams and Eves into a generation ship to colonize a distant star it would gain nothing but whatever halting delayed transmissions they were able to beam back and it would irrevocably lose all the rocks, metals, and rare elements they invested in the endeavor.

Not only that but the technology needed for such a generation ship could instead with much greater ease build a space habitat. Once you're building those the resources of just the asteroid belt and Ort cloud and so on could likely amount hundreds if not thousands of earths of living space, more than enough to keep pace with the very much not exponential growth our civilization is currently experiencing. (I think this postulate is pretty deflating to the "dark forest" theory, if the other civilization lives in a fragile biosphere clinging to a big honking rock sure one RKV is gonna ruin their day, not some much if the live in millions of tiny stations zipping around their star.) The only real reason for a civilization to leave their star is if that star is on it's last legs and given the first postulate that may be a problem that no one has had so far.
 
Mistborn said:
We're pretty early in the grand scheme of things. 13 and change billion years sounds like a lot but in the scope of the 100 trillion years the era of star formation is expected to last it's hardly any time at all, less than than one percent of one percent of the age of light before the long dark. Of that small amount of time that has passed there's good reason to suspect that neither life nor technology as we know it could not have arisen in a fair chunk of it. There couldn't have been any rocky planets around the first generation of stars, there were no rocks because the elements that make them up are only forged in the cores of stars. Heck life as we know it needs iodine and that stuff is only made by neutron star collisions. Our technology is even more reliant on the of such rare calamities. As you go back in time the necessary elements for life and technology get scarcer. It's imaginable that the universe and/or our portion of the galaxy passed a sort of critical mass threshold around the time or shortly before earth formed.
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That could be it, but while 13.8 billion years is short compared to the probable lifetime of the universe (assuming the Big Rip doesn't destroy it long before that deep future slow cooling and dimming of the cosmos can play out, which IIRC is a possibility), it's still a very long time. If the earliest aliens evolved just 1% of the universe's age earlier than us that's still 138 million years. So either we evolved in a relatively very tight window between the time intelligent species could evolve and the time it takes for the galaxy to be filled up, or there must be other filters at work (like sapience being a very improbable evolutionary development).

And I think there's some arguable circumstantial evidence against the very tight window hypothesis. A planet could be less than half Earth's mass and still satisfy all the habitability criteria Earth does (oceans, atmosphere, still has an active geology after 4.6 billion years). Superterrestrial planets exist around Kapteyn's Star, a very old red dwarf with less than 10% Sol's heavy element abundance. In general, superterrestrial planets seem pretty cosmically abundant. There's no obvious tipping point where the universe would go quickly from being unable to form Earth-like planets to being able to form lots of Earth-like and superterrestrial planets; appropriate mass planets would have just gradually increased in number over time. Earth spend its first 4 billion years with not much more complex than bacteria on it, and it's not obvious that was inevitable; a few different climate changes and something like the Cambrian Explosion might have happened when Earth was 2.7 billion years old instead of 4 billion years old. Earth spent hundreds of millions of years with lots of large warm-blooded energetic animals but nothing sapient, and it's not obvious it had to take so long for a sapient species to arise; maybe if things had gone a little bit differently some intelligent dinosaur species would have been exploring the galaxy by the late Jurassic.

We're already passed some filters that might be a lot greater than we think. The Earth has been around for 4.5 Billion years and while life has existed for most of that time complicated multicellular life has only been around for 500 million years. The sort of life that I can imagine evolving into a technological species has been around for 300-250 million years and it only ever evolved into a technological species once. While in scope of the universe we're unexpectedly early that's not the case for the planet which might be a lifeless desolation in only 300 million more years by some estimates. Given those numbers our case need not be that much of an outlier for technological civilizations to be extremely rare. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of "earthlike" planets never develop complex multi-cellular life of those that do less than one percent of one percent give rise to a technological civilization. We tend to think of evolution as a directional process with us as it's ultimate goal and that colors what we expect other worlds to look like.
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Yeah, I think this is likely. Earth has a noticeable cluster of unusual features that might make it an unusually good environment IIRC; big moon, sun's orbit around the galactic center keeps it relatively clear of hazardous regions, sun is an unusually quiet star, solar system has a higher than average heavy element abundance, big gas giant keeps icy debris out of the inner solar system, probably some other things I'm missing. I also suspect that sapience may be a very low probability development; that big human brain uses up a lot of metabolic resources, and we probably didn't need it to survive and even thrive as a species; a much dumber version of humans just smart enough to make fire and spears would probably still have been a very successful species (and I suspect that's about what human intelligence would have topped out at if we didn't also experience strong social and sexual selection for intelligence).

We're vastly overestimating the expansion rate of technological civilizations.
As dire of a picture as I'm painting many would say it's too optimistic if you punch my assumptions into the Drake equation you'd expect tens if not hundreds of thousands of civilization in the milky way. For a lot of thinkers that ought to mean we should be ass deep in aliens, with one of the early civilizations setting up shop on Earth long before we had a chance to come about. Even if we assume Einstein's law is inviolate the speed of light is not so slow nor the Galaxy too large to prevent a single determined species for colonizing it in what is an eyeblink in geologic time. The thing is that while any species would benefit form such an endeavor in some brute Darwinian sense I don't see how any civilization would. If any civilization were too pack off some number of would-be Adams and Eves into a generation ship to colonize a distant star it would gain nothing but whatever halting delayed transmissions they were able to beam back and it would irrevocably lose all the rocks, metals, and rare elements they invested in the endeavor.
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Well, part of the issue is the "it only takes one match to light a fire" principle. Even if most sapient species don't see expansion as worthwhile, all it takes is one sapient species with a strong natural predilection for expansion to fill up the galaxy. So this sort of explanation works best in combination with intelligent life being rare. But yeah, I think "interstellar travel/colonization is just super-hard, maybe impossible, and totally materially unrewarding" is a depressing but plausible potential explanation of the Fermi Paradox.

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Personally, my suspicion is the Fermi Paradox is down to a combination of "sapience is a low probability development" and a bunch of smaller filters that add up. But that's not very entertaining for science fiction; at best it gets you Foundation or Dune.
 
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Memphet'ran said:
And I think there's some arguable circumstantial evidence against the very tight window hypothesis. A planet could be less than half Earth's mass and still satisfy all the habitability criteria Earth does (oceans, atmosphere, still has an active geology after 4.6 billion years). Superterrestrial planets exist around Kapteyn's Star, a very old red dwarf with less than 10% Sol's heavy element abundance.
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Part of that postulate is that sort of thing matters, heavy elements are essential for life as we know it. It could be that before the time earth was formed most planets did not have enough heavy elements to support a meaningful biosphere even if the other conditions for life were perfect.
 
Mistborn said:
Part of that postulate is that sort of thing matters, heavy elements are essential for life as we know it. It could be that before the time earth was formed most planets did not have enough heavy elements to support a meaningful biosphere even if the other conditions for life were perfect.
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That was what that point was about. The most obvious way for that to happen is in the early universe there just wasn't enough silicates and metals around to form large terrestrial planets. In that case I'd expect Kapteyn's Star to have inner planets that look kind of like Luna or Mars (and would probably be undetectable with present planet-finding methods), or to just have no terrestrial planets at all. The large Kapteyn's Star planets show even very old stars with low heavy element abundance can have large planets (bigger than Earth) in close orbits. Admittedly, the Kapteyn's Star planets are likely ice planets that formed in the outer system and migrated inward, so "stars with low heavy element abundance rarely have large terrestrial planets because there wasn't much silicon and iron in their progenitor nebula" might still be true.

I guess a terrestrial planet could be big enough but deficient in elements life specifically needs, but the most basic elements of life are fairly common ones; any progenitor nebula that has enough silicon to form an Earth-sized terrestrial planet is probably going to have a good amount of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, iron, etc. in it. I guess subtler deficiencies could be an issue. I remember reading somewhere that planets that formed early in the universe's history might not have plate tectonics because of differences in rock composition. And a composition more skewed toward light rocks might mean less radioactive elements and hence less internal heat to drive a carbon cycle.
 
it's not an issue of silicon or iron it's stuff like Iodine, elements critical for life that are only formed by neutron star collision.
 
Memphet'ran said:
Personally, my suspicion is the Fermi Paradox is down to a combination of "sapience is a low probability development" and a bunch of smaller filters that add up. But that's not very entertaining for science fiction; at best it gets you Foundation or Dune.
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I also personally consider that, quite bluntly, we have not made it out of our home planet yet, and as much as people hate to admit it, may ever make it off planet, a significant component. I would expect that life itself is not uncommon, since life on Earth popped out just as soon as it became half-way habitable, but that sapient life is exceedingly rare, and sapient life that manages to become interstellar is even more rare. Even if that view point is too negative, I most certainly don't buy any argument that tries to say that life itself is rare in the universe. If that were the case, the supporters of that viewpoint would say that current life living deep in Earth's crust is an impossibility, or that life popped out between 3.9 to 4.2 billion years ago.
 
Mistborn said:
We're vastly overestimating the expansion rate of technological civilizations. As dire of a picture as I'm painting many would say it's too optimistic if you punch my assumptions into the Drake equation you'd expect tens if not hundreds of thousands of civilization in the milky way. For a lot of thinkers that ought to mean we should be ass deep in aliens, with one of the early civilizations setting up shop on Earth long before we had a chance to come about. Even if we assume Einstein's law is inviolate the speed of light is not so slow nor the Galaxy too large to prevent a single determined species for colonizing it in what is an eyeblink in geologic time. The thing is that while any species would benefit form such an endeavor in some brute Darwinian sense I don't see how any civilization would. If any civilization were too pack off some number of would-be Adams and Eves into a generation ship to colonize a distant star it would gain nothing but whatever halting delayed transmissions they were able to beam back and it would irrevocably lose all the rocks, metals, and rare elements they invested in the endeavor.

Not only that but the technology needed for such a generation ship could instead with much greater ease build a space habitat. Once you're building those the resources of just the asteroid belt and Ort cloud and so on could likely amount hundreds if not thousands of earths of living space, more than enough to keep pace with the very much not exponential growth our civilization is currently experiencing. (I think this postulate is pretty deflating to the "dark forest" theory, if the other civilization lives in a fragile biosphere clinging to a big honking rock sure one RKV is gonna ruin their day, not some much if the live in millions of tiny stations zipping around their star.) The only real reason for a civilization to leave their star is if that star is on it's last legs and given the first postulate that may be a problem that no one has had so far.
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Here you're implicitly imagining a very short-sighted civilization, one that basically doesn't plan for the future and only reacts to problems once they've already happened. Now, fair enough, human civilization does seem to act that way so far, but it's hard for me to imagine someone technologically capable of an interstellar mission falling down on that step. This could make some temporary sense if they expect planning for the far-future to just fail automatically (say, because their civilization will blow itself up some other way first), but any such group either has their prediction come true or sees it become false in astronomically-short time periods. To a first approximation, the universe consists of dead civilizations, and stable civilizations.

What do you do once you realize you actually can expect to live (long) past the era of star formation? Obviously, you start collecting and preserving resources that will be useful then. This doesn't need to involve biological organisms (and almost certainly won't), but it would be very visible from stars being disassembled and such, and there's no reason to proceed at anything less then full speed here because natural resources are being constantly destroyed if you don't get to them in time. The available negentropy is limited, who would want to waste any of it?

Would they perhaps want to avoid inhabiting the whole galaxy because of light-speed lag? Actually, probably not. It turns out that the cost of running a computer is linearly proportional to it's temperature, so unless there's some external force you need to keep up with, the best use of resources is running yourself very, very slow, and very, very cold. This makes a few hundred thousand light years no big deal. There's a brief fictional examination of this idea here, which you might find interesting. (This doesn't contradict what I said about resource collection because there is some urgency in collecting it before natural processes destroy it).

There is some question as to whether you would want to send colonists to other galaxy clusters, as past ~150 billion years in the future they will be permanently inaccessible, which is long before the vast majority of resources would be used under the above plan. If you're okay with permanently forking your civilization it probably happens, if not then not.
 
I'd argue that the Fermi Paradox and Drake Equation are both way too anthropocentric to be of any use. It's entirely possible for intelligent life to be common, but civilization to be exceedingly rare, industrial/post-industrial civilization even rarer. I think the assumption that intelligence inevitably leads to civilization (that we would recognize as such, anyway) is a very, very big one. Big enough that the rest of the paradox itself is pretty much useless, IMO.
 
Skelm said:
Here you're implicitly imagining a very short-sighted civilization, one that basically doesn't plan for the future and only reacts to problems once they've already happened. Now, fair enough, human civilization does seem to act that way so far, but it's hard for me to imagine someone technologically capable of an interstellar mission falling down on that step. This could make some temporary sense if they expect planning for the far-future to just fail automatically (say, because their civilization will blow itself up some other way first), but any such group either has their prediction come true or sees it become false in astronomically-short time periods. To a first approximation, the universe consists of dead civilizations, and stable civilizations.

What do you do once you realize you actually can expect to live (long) past the era of star formation? Obviously, you start collecting and preserving resources that will be useful then. This doesn't need to involve biological organisms (and almost certainly won't), but it would be very visible from stars being disassembled and such, and there's no reason to proceed at anything less then full speed here because natural resources are being constantly destroyed if you don't get to them in time. The available negentropy is limited, who would want to waste any of it?

Would they perhaps want to avoid inhabiting the whole galaxy because of light-speed lag? Actually, probably not. It turns out that the cost of running a computer is linearly proportional to it's temperature, so unless there's some external force you need to keep up with, the best use of resources is running yourself very, very slow, and very, very cold. This makes a few hundred thousand light years no big deal. There's a brief fictional examination of this idea here, which you might find interesting. (This doesn't contradict what I said about resource collection because there is some urgency in collecting it before natural processes destroy it).

There is some question as to whether you would want to send colonists to other galaxy clusters, as past ~150 billion years in the future they will be permanently inaccessible, which is long before the vast majority of resources would be used under the above plan. If you're okay with permanently forking your civilization it probably happens, if not then not.
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Not expanding also potentially means you risk one day finding yourself dealing with a civilization that did expand and so has billions of times your resources. That's another consideration that might influence the behavior of very long term thinkers.
 
Graviator said:
ended up as a technological civilization well enough to make generalizations.
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Let's look at a specific scaled-down mimicry of interstellar travel: wooden boats navigating Oceania back in the day.

We just need to expand ship empty weight, engine rating, crew accommodations and the relative palatability of the umpteenth food waste recycled back into 'sea creatures' themed tenders plus how well the passengers handle cryogenically induced stasis, and we can draw some conjectures about 900 years of nautical tradition over, say, a larger hurdle of 93 kiloparsecs.
 
Memphet'ran said:
Not expanding also potentially means you risk one day finding yourself dealing with a civilization that did expand and so has billions of times your resources. That's another consideration that might influence the behavior of very long term thinkers.
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Sure, but it also means one of your own colonies might decide to attack you because their culture has inevitably diverged due to a communication lag of hundreds of years between them and you. If there is no FTL, then planets you've sent generation ships to aren't part of your civilization in any meaningful way.
 
Memphet'ran said:
Not expanding also potentially means you risk one day finding yourself dealing with a civilization that did expand and so has billions of times your resources. That's another consideration that might influence the behavior of very long term thinkers.
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Yep, that's why it might not be a happy thought but its probably for the best that we meet Aliens as far into the future as possible because we will gradually be in a progressively better situation to meet another culture that will likely be strikingly different to us and historically that hasn't usually ended well for the party with less resources.
EDIT: This is admittedly the best time in current history to have been born in but I kinda wish I'd been born in a few hundred more years when spacetravel will be more common.
EDIT2: This also assume that all those UFO reports haven't just been an Alien species buzzing us to gradually introduce to the idea that we aren't alone and they don't want to conquer and enslave/kill the human species.
 
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tbh, I tend to subscribe to the more depressing interpretations.

-Maybe we're incapable of building technology to actually fill up the universe with much of anything.
Like, remember when Venus was full of jungles, before we realized every planet in the solar system was a barren rock?
Remember when every nearby star system was surely full of life, but now it mostly looks like more barren rocks except so far away the human mind can't conceive it?
Remember when we were gonna have Warp Drives by 2070?
Seems like every time we learn something, Star Trek gets a little further away.

-If we can, that tech level could be insanely destructive.
Pretty much every interesting sci-fi setting has gadgetry that can wipe out a population center with the equivalent of a backfiring winnebago.
How do we live in a world where anyone can kill everyone?
Probably: We don't, and trying to spread out won't help because there's even more energy being thrown around at even more vulnerable targets.
 
IMO there is no one single reason. It is a combination of every reason at a low level.
Every step along the way to an interstellar empire is a bit unlikely. From protozoa to interstellar spaceflight.
 
Nexica said:
I'd argue that the Fermi Paradox and Drake Equation are both way too anthropocentric to be of any use. It's entirely possible for intelligent life to be common, but civilization to be exceedingly rare, industrial/post-industrial civilization even rarer. I think the assumption that intelligence inevitably leads to civilization (that we would recognize as such, anyway) is a very, very big one. Big enough that the rest of the paradox itself is pretty much useless, IMO.
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Yeah, as an example consider, consider something like dragons. Intelligent… and absolutely no motivation to develop technology and largely solitary lives means they'll never develop anything like we would consider a civilization, and even if they somehow did they still wouldn't have any reason to actually try developing technology.

humans are probably pretty odd.
 
I'm writing a draft of a hard sci-fi book right now about an interstellar colonization mission. Being realistic about things...this is incredibly expensive, dangerous and generally uneconomical. I have some plausible technological cheats - and major ethical violations - to make the story what it is. And this is going to a nearby star, reachable in a couple centuries.

There may not be any reason IRL to go to our nearby systems, of course. Centauri, which we know the most about, is likely uninhabitable. We would never send humans there and it is questionable at best if sending a probe is worthwhile.

So if it's not common for advanced life to have the right mix to explore space and it is extremely difficult to do STL and FTL doesn't exist...it's not that much of a paradox. We humans probably don't have the right mix for it, at least as we are now. We would have to use generation ships, and we aren't well suited to those because of how we breed.
 
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Kodiak said:
So if it's not common for advanced life to have the right mix to explore space and it is extremely difficult to do STL and FTL doesn't exist...it's not that much of a paradox. We humans probably don't have the right mix for it, at least as we are now. We would have to use generation ships, and we aren't well suited to those because of how we breed.
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And part of the issue is that some of the traits that would be best for a STL generation ship are also ones that make it very unlikely to ever develop space travel.
 
Memphet'ran said:
Yeah, I think this is likely. Earth has a noticeable cluster of unusual features that might make it an unusually good environment IIRC; big moon, sun's orbit around the galactic center keeps it relatively clear of hazardous regions, sun is an unusually quiet star, solar system has a higher than average heavy element abundance, big gas giant keeps icy debris out of the inner solar system, probably some other things I'm missing.
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One that comes to mind is the water issue. Earth has an unusual amount of water for its mass - look at all those ice balls and rock balls out there for more normal examples of rocky planets. We've got just enough water that we aren't a desert planet, but not enough to be an ocean planet.

A little more water and Earth would have no land masses, which makes technological civilization unlikely; not too much more than that and life itself starts becoming impoverished because the sea bottom is so far from the surface that not much in the way of nutrients reaches the level where there's sunlight. And in the other direction if Earth was drier it's be either dead or a desert world where it'd be hard to support enough people for a civilization.
 
Ciber said:
I want to thank you for this link. This stuff is some of the best stuff I have read lately. Pure brain crack.
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Huh. Doesn't that system have a horrible fault that anything capable of turning one hotbox bad is probably capable of doing the same to every other hotbox too, and since communication is faster than travel it would effectively mean that sure, they would get an early-warning. But what good does that do when their newly-spun hotbox turns on them?

Not to mention the hotbox has nearly infinitely more time to think of ways to break through each and every safeguard they have.

(also spinning yourself down is effectively decreasing your lifespan, in these circumstances.)

it's a neat idea but is hyper vulnerable to something that can turn hotboxes against the glacial minds.
 
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Byzantine said:
Huh. Doesn't that system have a horrible fault that anything capable of turning one hotbox bad is probably capable of doing the same to every other hotbox too, and since communication is faster than travel it would effectively mean that sure, they would get an early-warning. But what good does that do when their newly-spun hotbox turns on them?

Not to mention the hotbox has nearly infinitely more time to think of ways to break through each and every safeguard they have.

(also spinning yourself down is effectively decreasing your lifespan, in these circumstances.)

it's a neat idea but is hyper vulnerable to something that can turn hotboxes against the glacial minds.
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I think a more likely equilibrium is economic allocation of processing power. Poor minds slow down. Rich minds speed up. Likely with market regulations not necessarily to minimize "wealth" inequality, but to ensure that allocation is roughly in line with each entities contribution to the public good.
 
Memphet'ran said:
Not expanding also potentially means you risk one day finding yourself dealing with a civilization that did expand and so has billions of times your resources. That's another consideration that might influence the behavior of very long term thinkers.
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Of course it could also be that the kind of mindset that would lead a species to that kind of expansion would also lead to thier own self destruction by tearing through their planetary resources before even regular interplanetary travel was possible. You know the thing that has a good chance of doing our species in.
 
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