This is not either/or, incidentally. We might theoretically be neither embarrassing nor boring or we might be both. Also, when I say “embarrassing”, I might be better off saying something like “shameful” or “social pariahs”. Please bear with me.
This is the famous “pale blue dot” photograph taken by one of the Voyager spacecraft on Valentine’s Day 1990, at which point it was beyond the orbit of Neptune. There is a minute fleck in this picture which I thought at first was a bit of dust on the screen. I tend to make similar mistakes whenever I see this image. Nonetheless, the “ray” on the right hand side has a tiny dot in it, and that’s Earth. Carl Sagan, the popular science guy, once said the following of this picture:
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Carl Sagan, ‘Pale Blue Dot’, (c) 1994.
This observation has a lot in common with Douglas Adams’s Total Perspective Vortex storyline from the Secondary Phase of ‘The Hitch-Hikers’ Guide To The Galaxy’, where he imagines a machine which drives people insane by showing them how insignificant they are in a vast Universe. This doesn’t succeed in Zaphod’s case, either because his ego is the size of the Universe or because he was actually in a simulated universe set up for his benefit, or strictly speaking his deficit.
The Fermi Paradox, which in case it’s somehow passed you by I will restate here, was voiced by the nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950, although Konstantin Tsiolkovskii had said something similar in 1933 and suggested the Zoo Hypothesis as a solution. Simply stated, it’s the apparent discrepancy between a Universe in which life is possible and the lack of evidence for the existence of aliens. That is, given that there is intelligent life on Earth, as is often claimed, and that Earth and the Sun are both quite unremarkable, why haven’t we had any contact with intelligent life forms from elsewhere in the Universe? Not only is there no apparent evidence today, but nor does there seem to have been any visitation from aliens at any time in the whole 4 600 million years since this planet formed. Since I’ve mentioned the Zoo Hypothesis, I should probably explain what that is. It’s the idea that we are known to aliens but they have chosen not to interfere with us, at least so far, so as to observe us as an interesting species.
This is actually the solution I favoured as a teenager. I liked the idea that there was a Galaxy teeming with intelligent life forms of various species out there with an ethic of non-interference, who were observing our species undetected. This is also very similar to the Prime Directive of the ‘Star Trek’ universe.
Right now, I have a much more depressing front runner as to the solution, although it’s not as much of a downer as the Great Filter, which now I’ve mentioned it I’ll have to outline, but later. At this moment, the most plausible explanation seems to me to be that phosphorus is relatively scarce. This argument goes as follows: non-carbon based life is unlikely because on this planet silicon is more abundant by far than carbon and yet there’s no silicon-based life here. Phosphorus is the rarest core element required for life as we know it, being incorporated in adenosine triphosphate and nucleic acids such as DNA, and it being so rare suggests that it wouldn’t be used unless there was no alternative. Then it turns out that phosphorus is even rare in our own solar system off-Earth. It’s ten times more concentrated in the human body than in the crust, and more than a thousand times as concentrated in the crust than in the matter of the solar system. Phosphorus only seems to form during a particular kind of supernova explosion, as opposed to within the star before it becomes a supernova and distribute the elements, meaning that phosphorus may only be at all common in certain parts of the Galaxy, and that also may prevent intelligent spacefaring civilisations from spreading far because they might have to take all their phosphorus with them or make it in situ. Moreover, it may be that as the Universe ages more phosphorus will accumulate and it will become more hospitable for life, which means we might just be really early.
I hope this is either not true or that another form of life dominates the Universe, such as plasma-based life living in nebulae or the depths of space between the stars. Nonetheless many other explanations have been offered, one of which is primarily interesting for the purposes of this blog post because of its origin: the Dark Forest.
There’s a famous and celebrated trilogy of SF novels by the Chinese author 刘慈欣 (Liu Cixin). I won’t go into the details of the plot, but the overarching idea in it is that the reason we haven’t heard from aliens is that the rational approach to the existence of extraterrestrial life is to regard it as a threat, and therefore that they’re all hiding due to the threat, and making oneself known, as we have if there’s anyone out there, is foolish and suicidal. More generally Liu Cixin believes that we project artificial positivity onto aliens, regarding them as more enlightened and benevolent than it’s reasonable to expect them to be, while simultaneously underestimating the benevolence of humans. I don’t agree with this at all as I think it’s based on how groups of human beings have behaved under patriarchy towards each other and there’s no reason to suppose aliens have the same characteristics and history as our highly contingent tendencies. However, one interesting aspect of the Dark Forest hypothesis, as it’s known, is that it’s an idea from fiction which has turned out to be taken seriously by theorists dealing with the real Fermi Paradox, and the same is true of the two main ideas I want to talk about today.
The first of these is that we’re embarrassing, and for this I’ll go back to Douglas Adams. In ‘Life, The Universe And Everything’, the (obvious spoilers) premise is that the reason aliens are always invading Earth is that they find the game of cricket to be in extreme bad taste due to a devastating war early in Galactic history. Taking this up and running with it, what if the reason we are not in contact with aliens is that there’s something about the way we are which does something like make us a cognitohazard to them, or that our behaviour or values are so reprehensible that we can’t be accepted in polite society? Maybe we are metaphorically wearing our underpants on our heads, or are like the racist uncle who can’t resist making off-colour jokes.
To state this more clearly, there are intelligent life forms elsewhere in the Universe, and they are aware of our existence. The reason they don’t make contact is that there is something about us they find abhorrent, not physically speaking but along the lines of our customs, culture, values or practices. They find us rude or to have crossed a line they would never dream of doing. Alternatively, they can’t contact us safely because our behaviour constitutes something which would infect their psyche and cause severe damage to their civilisation.
There’s a peculiar visual phenomenon which I’m going to suggest you don’t Google (will that verb be dated soon?) called the McCullough Effect (I’ve deliberately spelt this wrong). It’s hazardous to search for this online, and I have reason to suppose it might be more hazardous for me than the average person. It takes the form of two patches of black and white stripes, one set horizontal and the other vertical. If you look at them for a few minutes, black and white horizontal stripes look pink and black and white vertical stripes green, for a period of about three months. The idea isn’t new, but as far as I know this is the only real world example that’s been discovered so far which works on neurotypical people with good colour vision. My hypothesis here is that there is something about us as humans, or possibly our dominant culture, which has a similarly but possibly more severe harmful effect on aliens who come into contact with us, and therefore we have been quarantined to protect the rest of the Galaxy. If this is true, it isn’t clear to us what it is or whether it’s all-pervasive or permanent.
There’s a less morally-neutral version of this possibility. Maybe our selfishness and materialism have led to us being cast out of the Galactic community, but we aren’t permanently bound to it, and if we free ourselves from it as a species they may make contact. This sounds a little like the idea of the “Fall Of Man”, and one shouldn’t underestimate the role mythology or spirituality may play in causing this idea. Or, it could be something we just can’t guess at, as with Douglas Adams’s example that it’s because some humans play cricket. It could be something as arbitrary as that, which will never occur to us because it’s part of being human. Maybe we’re being shunned, in other words.
The other possibility is suggested by Iain M Banks’s story ‘State Of The Art’. Obviously I need to flag up spoilers here too, but I also need to get on. In this novella, a post-scarcity civilisation called the Culture surreptitiously visits Earth in 1977 and decides that it’s so average that it’s not worth making contact with us. I didn’t get this from the story myself but apparently that’s how most people read it.
To state this more clearly, the solution to the Fermi Paradox is this. We are in a vast and life-rich Galaxy, with plenty of advanced technological civilisations, and we just aren’t that interesting. It isn’t that there’s anything particularly wrong with us or that we’re being studied as the Zoo Hypothesis has it, just that we’re really boring and ordinary. In this scenario, there could be numerous planet-bound civilisations like ours which are also wondering where all the aliens are, but the advanced aliens have all been there and done that, and don’t have much interest in a history of a typical primitive but intelligent species living in a boring old ordinary solar system. We’re simply “Mostly Harmless”, to get back to H2G2. The scale of the Galaxy is such that paying any attention to us would be like getting fixated on a bit of mouldy bread accidentally dropped behind something in the kitchen, which might be interesting to a mycologist but unless it really starts to stink or something, they’re not going to pay much attention to it/us.
This explanation has the merit of according with what we already know about our apparent place in the Universe. We’re on a pale blue dot lost in the vastness of the Cosmos. I had to peer at that picture for a while before it registered with me that Earth wasn’t a random fleck of lint or a bit of dandruff. It is feasible that some kind of survey of the Galaxy could have been undertaken which picked us up, but it’s like a huge shoal of fish. There’s a species of fish called the Lanternfish. Actually there isn’t. There are more than thirty genera of this fish, and it’s a good illustration of my point that I didn’t even know that. The remarkable thing about lanternfish is that they are so numerous that there may be up to sixteen billion tonnes of them in the ocean and they may be the most populous vertebrate in the world. They live in the middle depths of the ocean throughour the world, and in that sense they are important. Their average weight is 250 milligrammes, so a low estimate of their global population is a million times that of the total population of humans in the world. But have we heard of them? Do we think much about them? They’re also one of the most diverse families of fish in terms of number of species, but this still doesn’t really matter to anyone apart fom a few specialist experts. Now consider a single lanternfish. Being a living being, of course it’s important and I’m not about to suggest that I consider it disposable or not worth keeping alive, but to the average person, who is going to care about or even think about such a fish? Maybe this is what the planet Earth and its human population is like to the Galactic community. There is maybe someone in an alien university thousands of light years away who has considered our civilisation as part of their PhD thesis, as a footnote somewhere in a book nobody will ever read, or whatever the alien equivalent of that is, but even that’s a pretty long shot. The sheer scale of the Galaxy supports this idea.
Both of these suggestions have in common that the question “where are all the aliens?” is kind of inverted. It’s more like the Biblical quote “Who is man that Thou art mindful of him?” Maybe the real question is why we would consider ourselves worthy of attention. On Earth, we are a big deal, a big fish in a small pond, but in the Galaxy perhaps we’ve either mistaken a fireplace for a urinal in the home of a prospective in-law or we’re like an individual lanternfish swimming a kilometre down in the Southern Ocean and nobody has any reason to care.
A Box Of Chocolates 