Written by Anya Phillips
It is 1950. Physicist Enrico Fermi is hard at work at Los Alamos National Laboratory. On a lunch break, discussing UFO’s with his colleagues, he starts to wonder… how common is extraterrestrial intelligent life? And if it’s common, why don’t we know about it yet? (Famously, he exclaimed at the lunch table “but where is everybody?”) Later, he performed a calculation which is often misconstrued as estimating how common intelligent civilizations are in our galaxy (if you read Matt’s piece last month, you’ll recognize this as the Drake Equation). Thus, many astronomers think the “Fermi Paradox” says “intelligence should be common, so why haven’t we heard from anyone yet?” In reality, Fermi’s calculation was of how quickly the Milky Way could be colonized by a single civilization. He found, even at modest interstellar travel speeds (think ~5-10% of the speed of light), that thanks to exponential growth, our galaxy could have been colonized hundreds of times over in its lifetime (to first order, of course). So, in reality, the Fermi Paradox asks “intelligence colonizes quickly, so why has it yet to do so on a galactic scale?” I am here to offer you my solution to this “paradox” and to problematize its premise of colonialism.
There have been MANY solutions proposed (click here for the Wikipedia article I’m drawing from, some of them are pretty cool). Here is the non-exhaustive list that will get presented in your intro-to-astrobiology GE, though:
- Intelligent life is actually very rare.
Maybe we’ve been using the Drake Equation too liberally—perhaps humans are actually the only intelligent civilization in the Milky Way. This is a sad thought. I will not dwell on it for too long.
- Intelligence destroys itself
Also known as the “doomsday hypothesis,” this solution posits that intelligent civilizations naturally destroy themselves before expanding from their home worlds. This is not unimaginable from a human standpoint—we are constantly at war with one another and are causing rapid climate change that has brought on a mass extinction event and could eventually make our own world uninhabitable to us.
- Aliens are already on Earth, undetected…or unacknowledged…
It’s possible that either the Aliens are sneakily blending in with humans or that ~the government is hiding them from the general public in Area 51… THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE! >:)
- Intelligence becomes disinterested in the cosmos
Perhaps metaverse-like technology can naturally be developed faster than rapid space travel. In that case, extraterrestrial intelligence might be able to upload its consciousness to virtual worlds before it reaches the physical heavens. Now, obviously, Mark Zuckerberg is evil and the metaverse makes me extremely uneasy, but the way this solution gets framed (as a bunch of lazy young aliens, caught up in the cheap thrills and instant gratification offered by their technology) feels like a boomer take. Maybe it’s the astronomy major in me, but I find myself wondering how an entire civilization could lose interest in outer space.
So those are the main solutions, but what is missing—what is problematic here? I posit that, before Fermi began his calculation, he made the implicit assumption that the natural trajectory of intelligence is to colonize, to dominate others, and that this assumption is solidified in the labeling of his findings as a “paradox.” First of all, as is briefly mentioned in the linked Wikipedia article, maybe COLONIZATION IS NOT THE COSMIC NORM?! Personally, I would think that a civilization with the collective decision-making capabilities necessary to send representatives on interstellar journeys also has the collective understanding that COLONIALISM IS BAD! Our equating intelligence to colonial inclination seems extremely backward to me (not to mention problematic, seeing as we’re explicitly naming the colonized as less intelligent than the colonizers)! I think that a truly intelligent society understands the ethical implications (genocide, slavery, exploitation…) of galactic colonization, and chooses not to execute it.
I can understand “intelligence is rare” being the first solution offered. I can even understand the doomsday hypothesis as a second-most likely solution. However, I am literally baffled at how “colonization is not the cosmic norm” is not at LEAST the third solution on everyone’s list. It incorporates the doomsday hypothesis with a healthy understanding that maybe humans are not the end-all be-all model of intelligent life. Civilizations who evolve out of their aggression quickly enough to keep from destroying themselves realize that they should not destroy others either. Easy. Basically, the Fermi Paradox is CLASSIC western scientific “empiricism.” It gets stuck in its tiny, sanitized bubble, flummoxed over problems in its blind spots that are easily solved if you just step back and touch grass.
Here’s the kicker. Remember Fermi eating lunch at Los Alamos in 1950? He was on his lunch break from the FREAKING MANHATTAN PROJECT. DESIGNING NUCLEAR WEAPONS WITH THE CAPABILITY TO END HUMAN LIFE AS WE KNOW IT. And he thinks to himself. “This is peak intelligence. I wonder why the aliens aren’t doing this to us.”
I have to send out this newsletter soon, and I’m not really sure how to conclude. My blood has boiled during the two lectures I’ve sat through about how it is inconceivable that we have not been colonized by aliens if they exist, but am I overreacting? I can’t tell. On one hand, I’m not here to say astronomy is problematic just because I send out the newsletter and I can write whatever I want in it. On the other hand, though, Astronomers may present as a liberal crowd, but we still put telescopes on Hawaii even when Indigenous Hawaiians asked us not to. Is that not in itself colonialism still attached to our community? Another question I still have: does believing in my solution mean I hope we never meet aliens? Well, do I want to know whether humans are alone in the galaxy? Yes, of course. But do I worry about the societal ramifications about learning that we are not? Also yes. I don’t think we’re mature enough as a species yet for that information, seeing as the idea of not colonizing the aliens is apparently paradoxical to us.
Okay, I’ll end with an anecdote, actually: after hearing a Fermi Paradox lecture for the first time, I asked the professor who delivered it “why do we assume that the trajectory of intelligence is toward violence?” to which he responded something like “well, maybe aggression is not common, but it only takes one civilization, and the galaxy has been here a long time.” I said “…I guess I don’t like that,” and he said, “I don’t either.”