The Fermi Paradox holds that there is a high probability of extraterrestrial civilisations, yet there is no evidence of this.
It was far from coincidence that the Fermi Paradox evolved during the Cold War. The Mexican stand-off between ideologically opposed nuclear-armed superpowers to deep-fry the planet faster than baking bread favouring one answer to the existential question: “So where is everybody (extraterrestrial beings)?”
Italian-American scientist Enrico Fermi’s 1950 cafeteria banter with colleagues at the atomic age’s birthplace, New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory, crystallised the quandary of advanced “alien” lifeforms’ “high-likelihood” but any conclusive evidence testifying to their existence was absent.
Nasa moon-landing consultant, astronomer, planetary scientist and sage Carl Sagan gave the dichotomy perspective: “The universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us, seems like an awful waste of space.”
The home-base Milky Way galaxy has about 300 billion stars and there are an estimated 70 sextillion others in the observable universe, while associated planets and moons flirt with infinity numbers, where possibility and probability collide. One calculation making the maths make sense was each grain of sand from all Earth’s beaches represents 10 000 stars.
The human body’s raw material construction, and that of other species, is among the universe’s most common and recurring elements contained by the incomprehensible scale that’s yet hinted at hosting other intelligent beings.
Sliding doors
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence’s radio telescopes’ scanning for advanced life’s breath, such as “alien” telecommunications, has met silence after 65 years of listening — a span not registering a nanosecond on the universe timeline. Like politics and comedy, a simple Fermi Paradox explanation for the 13,8 billion-year-old universe’s apparent sparse population was timing.
An interstellar civilisation’s Earth safari during the Silurian Period 420 million years ago would have spotted ocean plants migrating to emerging land masses and abundant 2,5m sea scorpion apex predators. It suggests technologically advanced cultures were rare apparitions out of sync with similarly evolved species, and if simultaneous, separated by sheer vastness.
Another rational interpretation was that intelligent extraterrestrials avoid contact with a crude civilisation’s violence addiction and opt to watch the shit-show at arm’s length — for entertainment or anthropological purposes. This is termed the “zoo hypothesis” or “dark forest theory”.
Rolling the dice
Conditions considered the basic ingredients for complex intelligent organisms to be a contender include an atmospheric planet orbiting a star in the “goldilocks zone”. A moon for ocean tidal shifts, tectonic plates, magnetosphere shielding biological life from solar and cosmic radiation and a lithosphere, or rigid crust.
Even then, cosmos-wandering intelligent life is never a “gimme”. Chance tilts the outcome with a coin toss or body-design sabotages gravity-defying aspirations.
“Dolphins have had 20 million years to build a radio telescope and not done so,” astrophysicist Dr Charles Lineweaver, an Australian National Science Institute associate professor, reportedly noted.
Catastrophic asteroid strikes on Earth average once every 100 million years, from crater evidence, and the paradox deems the eventuality a low threat to advanced lifeforms expected to have implemented counter-measures.
The Chicxulub Impactor’s hit 66 million years ago, terminating dinosaurs’ 160 million year dominion, allowed intelligent life’s chances a foothold. The fall-out eclipsing the sun, ushering a decades-long sub-zero winter in the wake of mountainous tsunamis and, briefly by geological measures, landscapes sprouting fungal paradises feasting on decay.
Starvation, drowning and evisceration aside, surviving cold-blooded reptiles’ staging an encore were muted by fungal infection susceptibilities that warm-blooded mammals nibbling psilocybin’s ancestors escaped largely unscathed, stumbling towards the technological age and its monsters.
Sagan added another Fermi Paradox choke-point in 1966 — advanced societies’ penchant for self-annihilation.
Nuclear holocaust for beginners
The “Great Filter” premise identifies nine steps for intergalactic roaming species including polymeric ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules’ seismic leap to single and multi-cell organisms, tool-making capacity and the penultimate technological stage; intelligent life’s nemesis — as arduous as threading an oligarch through the eye of a needle — before interstellar nomad rankings.
A childhood trawling through Cold War military garrisons in Cyprus, Singapore, West Germany and England’s Yorkshire Moors and Salisbury Plain was at times spent eavesdropping on adults’ nuclear war musings, an occasion only slightly less common than a Karoo farmer’s pre-occupation with rain.
There was one gear for the West’s nuclear weapon’s armoury. Unleash it all and leave nothing in the silos or submarines. Similar strategies adopted by Soviet Warsaw Pact’s forces having locked in every “gypsy” home coordinate for first or retaliatory strikes.
US Air Force pilot and family friend Ted Lindsay presented a then-unknown comic on a 1973 social visit to a pre-fabricated Akrotiri residence, a sovereign British airforce base on the eastern Mediterranean island and launchpad for the Royal Air Force’s reconnaissance flights assisting Israel’s Gaza genocide.
A decade old, I asked if the comic’s title was “short for” (an acronym for) Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) — the Faustian Pact’s sanity balm keeping cantankerous foes at bay, reasoning only a self-obsessed lunatic would play the thermo-nuclear war trump card.
The lieutenant’s reply was the first, but not the last, time those regularly drilled clambering into “Noddy Suits” (nuclear, biological and chemical personal protection equipment) advised close proximity to the device’s detonation was the Ideal.
Instantly vapourised like deep-sea diving bell billionaires. Excused oblivion’s grief, radiation sickness, nuclear winter and cannibalism. Childhood innocence thought there was one way to skin a cat and expected an ending with a bang, rather than a whimper.
Step aside Schopenhauer
Technology’s bear traps changed both the numbers and nuances, condemning Earthlings to be the quintessential intergalactic hosts but never the guests.
Curtis Yarvin, California’s Silicon Valley totem and low-grade Jim Jones cultist with cashflow, preaches “dark enlightenment” and “accelerationalism” to extreme wealth’s navel-gazing gullibility.
The far-right “philosophising” blogger, and US Vice President JD Vance’s guru, promotes anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian creeds, accelerating societies’ disintegration and, substituted by technological plutocracy rising phoenix-like. The deepest pocket is crowned king. So far, it’s going swimmingly.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robots dominating or liquidating the inventors, and eight billion distracted bystanders, was a risk assessed once a creation without empathy was confident, slicing the technician’s “umbilical cord” for autonomy.
Cult sci-fi or documentary?
The Fermi Paradox presumptions view extraterrestrial intelligent life tracing similar contours from stone axe to a species ending its 300 000 year tenure as the mother of invention after AI’s inception and a poisoned planet the receipt.
Profit’s plagues are wrapped in fossil fuel’s micro and nano plastics and industry’s “forever chemicals” — ingested from non-stick pans, sparkling spring water and other popular consumer items. Both infestations strongly suspected of, and some links clinically confirmed, tripping a variety of cancers, neurological and reproductive disorders. Since the 2006 release Children of Men, adapted from PD James’s 1992 dystopian novel of the same name, the sci-fi movie’s hue has morphed into an Age of Consequences reality show.
The 2027 dateline’s backstory was metastasising authoritarian corporate security states usurping democracies after a worldwide pandemic and global economic meltdown as humanity wilts from infertility — fomenting extinction’s malaise under the one percent’s watch.
Pinpointing the epoch, humans strayed from an intergalactic species’ “manifest destiny” is precise. Ground zero was corporatised religion’s mythologies and superstitions accorded equality to evidence-based facts — challenging the “intelligent life” label from the outset.
The fall
The apocalypse desert religions — Christianity, Islam and Judaism with pedigrees reaching from the Pharaoh’s sun god Ra — were the original fake news purveyors and its medieval mindset oils this century’s debilitating post-truth’s dumbed-down and vicious voting fodder.
The far-right reincarnation’s distinct lilt from last century’s European inspirations leans on peddling monotheism’s sophiaphobia — fear of wisdom.
Writers Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor decipher Silicon Valley’s bond between US President Donald Trump’s nationalist Christian fundamentalist disciples as the twin embrace of fascism’s “armageddon complex”, despite pursuing divergent wastelands.
The Jesus death cult apparently swept into the heavens by dodgy biblical Rapture “evidence” and solving ostracised film director Woody Allen’s conundrum: “I’m not afraid of death. I just don’t want to be around when it happens.”
The billionaire classes and their bland hand-picked associates’ dreamscape was savaging democracies. Carving CEO-governing fiefdoms from the chaos; serviced by non-unionised labour, AI robots and former US special forces Erik “Blackwater” Prince’s mercenary-multitudes patrolling privatised frontiers against feral masses’ drones for pitchforks.
“End times fascism is a darkly festive fatalism — a final refuge for those who find it easier to celebrate destruction than imagine living without supremacy,” Klein and Taylor write.
In memoriam
Anticipating intelligent life traversing immense voids possessed of state-of-the-art scanners, human-extinction pessimists propose burying a titanium sarcophagus on the Moon. A courtesy for future Socialist cosmic travellers seeking “are we alone” answers.
The sarcophagus’ contents recalling Earth’s once majestic vistas, oceans, flora and fauna before climate change’s ravages; joined by Homo sapiens’ arts, culture, sport and other feats eked from a barbarous history trolled by “greed is good and tax is bad” mantras.
Our species’ epitaph, borrowed from quantum physicist Albert Einstein: “Two things are infinite; the universe and stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”
Guy Oliver is Johannesburg-based writer, photographer and permaculture consultant.