Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Fermi Paradox

Episode Date: September 4, 2021

In a previous episode, I spoke about the Drake equation and the odds of there being intelligent extraterrestrial life. Many people have used the Drake equation to argue that it is almost impossible for there not to be intelligent life in our galaxy. However, in the summer of 1950, physicist Enrico Fermi pushed back against this by asking a very simple question: if there are so many intelligent civilizations, where are they? Learn more about the Fermi Paradox Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In a previous episode, I spoke about the Drake equation and the odds of there being intelligent extraterrestrial life. Many people have used the Drake equation to argue that it's almost impossible for there not to be intelligent life in our galaxy. However, in the summer of 1950, physicist Enrico Fermi pushed back against this by asking a very simple question. If there are so many intelligent civilizations, where are they? Learn more about the Fermi paradox and some possible answers to the question on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Do you ever climb into bed ready to sleep only to have your mind start racing the moment your head hits the pillow? Thoughts bouncing around, replaying the day, or jumping ahead to tomorrow?

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Episodes are every Monday and Thursday. This episode is sponsored by Scotty Vest. If you've ever watched a science fiction movie, you know the one thing that aliens never have? Pockets. Yeah, think about it. You never see aliens with pockets. In fact, you never really see pockets through much of human history either. Atsy the Iceman, 5,300 years old, no pockets. Roman Togas, no pockets. In fact, you don't really see pockets as we know them until the 18th century.

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Once again, that's scottievest.com coupon code Everything Everywhere. The first thing you should know about the Fermi paradox is that Fermi wasn't the first person to ask the question, and it really isn't a paradox. A paradox is a statement that is self-contradictory. For example, if I said, this statement is false, that would be a paradox.

The Fermi paradox is really just an unanswered question. Likewise, the association with Enrico Fermi came from an informal conversation he had in the summer of 1950 at Los Alamos Labs in New Mexico. According to legend, he was having lunch with physicists Emil Kahnepinski, Edward Teller, and Herbert York, when the subject of a cartoon in the New Yorker magazine came up. The cartoon showed aliens coming out of a flying saucer, taking garbage cans away. Fermi simply blurted out, Where is everybody? Everyone present had a slightly different account of what happened, but they all recall laughing. at the way he said it. The first use of the phrase, Fermi paradox, occurred in 1977 in a paper written by physicist David G. Stevenson. One of the earliest discussions of the question of where

the aliens were was made by Russian rocket scientist Konstantin Seilkovsky in 1933. However, because everyone calls out the Fermi paradox, that's what I'm going to stick with and use for the rest of the episode. So, with that in mind, what are some possible answers to the Fermi paradox? Where are the aliens? To quickly recap the Drake equation, episode, there are several hundred billion stars just in our galaxy, and possibly like 300 sextillion of them in the observable universe. Based on our current knowledge of exoplanets, each star probably has many planets orbiting around it, and many of those planets might have moons. Given all the bodies out there, the odds are that some percentage of them must have life,

and some percentage of those might have intelligent life. Basically, because the number of stars and planets is so great, even if the odds are small, they still still. shouldn't be zero. If aliens do exist, then the math would suggest that they should be here by now. For example, let's assume we built a big ship to take colonists to the star closest to our solar system, Proxima Centuri, which is 4.2 light years away. Perhaps the journey takes a century or two. Once they arrive, they take a few hundred years of their own to grow their population and create a civilization, and then they do the same thing, sending colonists to another star. Even at this relatively slow rate of colonization, using something near our current levels of technology, the entire

galaxy should be colonized by a single species in about 5 to 50 million years. That may seem like a long time, but on geological or cosmological timescales, it's nothing. So based on these assumptions, we should have been visited or at least seen evidence of aliens by now. So what explains the discrepancy? There are a whole lot of answers which people have put forward. None of them can be proven right or wrong, they're all just speculation. Here are some of the common theories that attempt to resolve the Fermi paradox. The first is that interstellar spaceflight just might not be possible. One of the reasons we think it's possible is because it's such a cornerstone to much of our science fiction. However, in all those cases, it involves some magical technical advancement

like wormholes, warp drive, or faster than light travel. The true answer might be that the distances are just too vast and we're stuck here on our planet. Another theory, which was more popular during the Cold War, was that advanced civilizations will destroy themselves before they can get to a point where they can communicate with anyone else. Perhaps they have some sort of cataclysmic war, exhaust their resources, or their star goes extinct. One of the assumptions, which is often used is called the mediocrity principle. This assumes that without any other knowledge, statistically, the Earth must be an average

planet. The rare Earth hypothesis suggests that this might not be true, and that our planet might be very unusual. The rare earth hypothesis holds that simple life might very well be abundant in the universe. If we were to find evidence of simple life on Mars or another world, this would lend credibility to this view. However, a series of events had to take place to create humans. As evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould suggested, if you rolled back the tape of life and re-ran it, there's a good chance that humans wouldn't exist. Almost all multicellular life that we know of has evolved since the Cambrian explosion about 540 million years ago.

However, our best estimate is that simple life began on Earth perhaps as late as 3.77 billion years ago and possibly as early as 4.28 billion years ago. Basically, simple life appeared almost as soon as it could have after the formation of the planet, yet very little happened on Earth for about 3 billion years. Then, something happened which allowed for the rise of complex multicellular life. And whatever that was, most other planets never go through it. A more generalized version of this is called the Great Filter. The Great Filter suggests that there's something that holds most planets or civilizations back.

It could be the creation of complex life, as the rare earth hypothesis suggests. Or it could be something in our future that we haven't figured out yet. If there is a filter, we don't know if it's behind us or in front of us. A good example of this would be from Star Trek. Once humans figured out warp drive, we were contacted by Vulcans. Prior to that, it wasn't worth their time to get in touch with a pre-warp civilization. There might be a technology that we aren't even aware of yet that hasn't been discovered. In other words, we can't phone ET until we discover the interstellar telephone.

Other explanations are much more simple. One is that aliens have been here, but we weren't around to greet them. They might have come millions of years ago and might not be back again for millions more. This was sort of the basis for Arthur C. Clark's 2001 Space Odyssey. Another is that we're first. The reason why no one has shown up to the party is that we were the first ones to arrive. This seems improbable given what we know of cosmic timescales, but we can't rule it out. Another theory is that we haven't been looking long enough, or in the right places. Our ability to travel into space and do advanced astronomy is actually pretty short, and maybe we just need to look harder and longer.

Yet another theory holds that maybe everyone is like us. Everyone's listening, but no one's broadcasting. Finally, some theories border on the conspiratorial. Maybe we are an intergalactic zoo or wildlife preserve, and no one's allowed to contact us. Or maybe the aliens are already here, and we are secretly ruled by lizard people. And that is an actual thing that people believe. There is almost no limit to the number of theoretical answers to the Fermi paradox. You can improbably invent your own, and the...

there would be no way to disprove whatever you came up with. However, what did Enrico Fermi himself think the answer to the question was? Herbert York, who was at the infamous luncheon, later recalled, quote, he went on to conclude that the reason that we hadn't been visited might be that interstellar flight is impossible, or, if it is possible, always judged not to be worth the effort, or technological civilization doesn't last long enough for it to happen, end quote. So, your guess to the resolution of the Fermi paradox is just as good as any. anyone else's. And there's a good chance that we will never know. Unless, of course, aliens land

on the front lawn of the White House, in which case, our first question should be, what took you so long? The associate producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Thor Thompson. If you'd like to support the show, please donate over at patreon.com. There is content only available to supporters, merchandise, and even opportunities for a show producer credit. If you know someone you think would enjoy the show, please share it with them. Also remember, if you leave a a five-star review, I'll read your review on the show.