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

Starting point is 00:00:00 The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily. 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 in Rico Fermi pushed back against this by asking a very simple question. If there are so many intelligent civilizations, where are they?

Starting point is 00:00:30 Learn more about the Fermi paradox, and some possible answers to the question. 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? That is exactly why Catherine Nikolai created Nothing Much Happens. Each episode is a gentle, cozy bedtime story where, well, nothing much happens. No drama, no tension, nothing you need to follow closely.

Starting point is 00:01:09 Just soft narration, calming repetition, and soothing sensory details designed to help your mind slow down and your body relax. It's not about entertainment, it's about rest. And millions of listeners around the world use it every night to quiet their thoughts and finally fall asleep. If you've ever struggled to shut your brain off at night, this might be exactly what you've been missing. You can listen to Nothing Much Happens wherever you get your podcasts. Episodes are every Monday and Thursday. 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.

Starting point is 00:01:55 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. Firmie 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

Starting point is 00:02:38 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

Starting point is 00:03:20 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 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

Starting point is 00:04:03 species in about five to 50 million years. That may seem like a long time, but on geological or cosmological time scales, 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

Starting point is 00:04:48 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.

Starting point is 00:05:30 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 J. 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

Starting point is 00:06:20 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.

Starting point is 00:06:54 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.

Starting point is 00:07:26 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.

Starting point is 00:07:55 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 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,

Starting point is 00:08:27 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 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?

Starting point is 00:09:00 The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. I just want to thank everyone, including the show's producers, who support the show over on Patreon. If you'd like to support the show, just head over to patreon.com, which is currently the only place where you can get show merchandise. Also, if you want to talk to other listeners about the show, head over to our Facebook group or Discord server, both of which have links in the show notes.

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

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