The Fermi Paradox Problem

Where is all the life out there? Why hasn't it contacted us? That was the basis of the question asked by Enrico Fermi at Los Alamos in 1950, creating the Fermi Paradox. Since then this seeming paradox has confounded scientists, futurists and writers for over seventy years. There have been an exhaustive number of explanations for why that is. Isaac Arthur does many great videos on them. And we have competing ideas about the plausibility of extraterrestrial life.

However, in a controversial take, I'm declaring there is no paradox.

The reason I'm saying so has a relatively simple premise, we simply don't have the means available to us to determine whether life is out there definitively. For reference, we've only been searching the skies for sign of intelligent life for less than a century, and we've been scanning for habitable plants beyond our solar system for far less than half a century. The tools we're using are not yet advanced enough to make a detailed observation of our closest neighboring star, let alone stars beyond that.

Our information is so limited we can't even say for certain what's on the majority of other planets in our solar system. There could be alien ruins on Mars right now and we could just be missing them.

Heck, alien probes could have visited us recently and we would have no idea. They could remain beyond our detection if they so chose, or we simply wouldn't be able to properly identify them. Or they could have visited us one thousand, ten thousand, or ten million years ago and we wouldn't know at all.

From our very Earthbound perspective we have limited data enough on our own solar system, to be then extrapolating from that limited data to try and make sweeping proclamations of the billions of stars in our own local galaxy is the height of folly, or at least an Earth-centric logical fallacy. To assume that our planet, which has had organized civilized life on it for just over 10,000 years, is so interesting or important among many billions of others is almost as silly as the geocentric ideas that the Sun rotated around the Earth. This in turn simply assumes alien life would be rotating around the Earth.

The above is very oversimplified to be sure, but let me address a few other problems with issues of timescale. According to our own understanding of physics, it would take even a civilization with sub-light capabilities (that is, unable to go beyond the speed of light) only a few million years to reliably visit/colonize the entire galaxy. This idea has problems because firstly it assumes civilizations unifying or staying homogeneous enough to carry out such a long term project. Our own science fiction writers and theorists have already posited a few practical problems with humans undergoing such projects (the book Aurora is a great look at that) but we would have no idea of the problems faced by an alien species in undertaking such a project. Secondly there's an implicit statement of intent, which as noted above may not be practical and simply may not exist. Any given alien species might not even see the need to expand beyond its own solar system, or just the next few neighboring solar systems. Even then, as I've said before, space is vast and going beyond a few thousand light years may just exceed the ability or interest of any given species.

Even for the moment accepting that the proposition is true and some species has perhaps colonized the entire galaxy at some point, that possibility isn't even out of the realm of feasibility. It may have happened a billion years ago, but then Earth might have not looked appealing to these alien colonizers. They might not have found any planets in our solar system to be appealing and simply categorized this system and moved on for greener pastures as it were. We quite simply can't say for sure.

Then of course we have the explanation for this 'paradox' that the aliens themselves might be too, well, alien for us to identify. We might be looking for the interplanetary equivalent of the Klingons when our closest intelligent neighbors might look more like the Hanar. We might just be searching for the wrong aliens. Even then, we could be looking for megastructures like the Dyson Sphere, when the aliens themselves might just prefer colonizing their own solar system and building artificial orbital rings around these planets. We can't say for sure.

These of course are just a few points in favor of throwing out the idea of the so-called Fermi Paradox. There are far too many assumptions and potential projections of our own assumed behaviors onto other alien species, which might blind us to very real signs of interstellar life. All these assumptions, and then reasonable objections to the premise, really push the Fermi Paradox from a true paradoxical question about the great silence of the universe, to something more like a trivially interesting thought experiment with no actual bearing on the nature of life among the stars.

It is that latter option which sums up the so-called paradox far better than any of the serious thought given to it by the scientific community, in my own humble opinion.