Fermi's Famous Question Will Soon Be Answered

It's nearly a certainty we'll answer this for ourselves in a few decades.

Enrico Fermi once asked his Los Alamos colleagues at lunch, “Where is everybody?”

He didn’t mean his other colleagues. By “everybody,” Fermi meant all the alien civilizations we should have heard from by now.

• There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy.

• Many stars have planets. In fact, we’ve found that planets are extremely common.

• Even if intelligent civilizations are rare, there should still have been many over the Milky Way’s history.

• A civilization with modest interstellar travel capabilities could potentially spread throughout the galaxy in a few million to tens of millions of years — a short time compared to the galaxy’s age (~13 billion years).

• Yet we see no clear evidence of alien civilizations.

His lunchtime question has since come to be known as the Fermi Paradox: given the reasoning above, it’s surprising we’ve not yet encountered aliens.

Whereas I think the answer is obvious.

Common Explanations

The Drake Equation, developed by Frank Drake a decade after Fermi’s question, attempts to formalize the locus of our uncertainty around why we haven’t encountered aliens. I’ll here summarize common explanations:

• They don’t exist. Perhaps you don’t believe in evolution. Or you believe intelligent life is so incredibly improbable that it has only happened once.

• They live too far. Did you know there are places in the universe which we will never know about, not because we don’t have the technology but because it’s literally impossible by the laws of physics? Space is expanding faster than the speed of light. So if you believe light speed is insurmountable, there are places in the universe we’ll never be able to know about. Perhaps there’s intelligent life there.

• They’ve chosen to be quiet. Several fun possibilities include:

  • The “zoo hypothesis,” where aliens know about us but are trying to keep us unadulterated like some planet-sized nature preserve.

  • Or, more credibly to me, the “dark forest hypothesis” recently popularized by Three Body Problem. If it’s reasonable to expect that some alien life is hostile and likely much more advanced than your civilization, it’s wise to stay undetectable lest you be destroyed.

  • Or perhaps they live amongst us, quietly blending in as pretend humans or microscopically undetectable beings.

• They’ve all destroyed themselves. This seems to me like the obvious answer, and it’s frankly surprising so few people agree.

Fireside True Story™ Time: The first time I began reading Three Body Problem, I gave up halfway through the first book, much like many give up in The Fellowship of the Ring once Tom Bombadil launches into yet another 5-page song. Things seemed to go nowhere.

Having later finished all three books, I now rank it as one of my favorite sci-fi series. It poses some meaty questions challenging my own beliefs around large-scale questions about the universe. If you can only bear watching TV, know that the first season deviates in some important ways from the book.

Veritably Guaranteed Annihilation

Witness the following:

• There’s an asymmetry to what it takes to create versus destroy. It is far easier to topple someone’s Jenga than build your own.

  • Aircraft carriers, for decades the strongest way to project military might, are now called into question by advancements in drone technologies. Cheap drones now regularly destroy far more expensive equipment.

  • Warships were themselves outmoded by the invention of the aircraft carrier. In the same way that Mongols beat Europeans because their bows shot farther, thus allowing them to remain barely out of reach of their enemys’ arrows, so too did naval warfare used to comprise ever larger cannons. The height of this was the mighty Yamato Cannon during WWII, capable of firing a bullet the weight of a Honda Accord at targets 26 miles away. Yamato class ships seemed impossible to beat prior to the advent of the aircraft carrier, whose planes could fly near and sink huge ships with cheap armaments.

• The capability of unilateral action continues accelerating.

  • A millennia ago, if you didn’t like a village, you could knife some villagers or shoot a few of them with a bow prior to being yourself killed.

  • Once you graduate to revolvers and eventually assault rifles, it’s possible for one deranged person to, say, kill 60 and wound 413 before being stopped.

  • You can now buy DNA synthesis machines at reasonable prices. It won’t be long before someone can create viruses on their own.

  • Even the miniaturization of nukes is a threat. As far back as the 1960’s, the M28/M29 Davy Crockett was invented as a 50-pound nuke. That was 60 years ago.

• The acceleration of urbanization concentrates single points of failure. The world continues urbanizing because of the lifestyle and work benefits that accrue from more efficient human interactions. When you destroy a city nowadays, you’re not just destroying national infrastructure (e.g. datacenters and power stations), you’re destroying high concentrations of intellectual know-how — the same people you may well need to rebuild that city.

If it’s far easier to destroy than to create, and we’ve concentrated our civilization into dense cities, the acceleration of destructive capabilities subject to unilateral action by one deranged person or group is only going to get worse. Take the ability to genetically alter viruses or the fact that smallpox can be re-released into the world today.

I’m not even talking about nations destroying each other. The world has enough nukes to flatten the Earth several times over. I’d remind us of the many times we nearly destroyed the world during the Cold War, when the policy on all sides was “mutually assured destruction”:

• During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Soviet submarine B-59 was being attacked by US depth charges. Their crew believed the war might have already started. Of the three senior officers required to launch a nuke, only one, Vasily Arkhipov, dissented.

• In September 1983, Soviet satellites reported the US had launched first one nuclear missile, then several more. The duty officer Stanislav Petrov thankfully reasoned the US would likely launch far more missiles to start a real war, so reported the alarm as false.

• Just two months later, NATO decided to do a series of military exercises simulating the escalation of war, called Able Archer 83. Given the Soviet Union already feared a surprise NATO attack, these exercises were interpreted by the Soviets as a potential ruse to disguise preparations for a real war. The Soviet 4th Air Army began loading nuclear warheads as units were placed in East Germany and Poland for heightened readiness.

It seems to me obvious that the asymmetry between creation and destruction ultimately favors entropy. It’s a minor miracle we haven’t destroyed ourselves already.

Any sufficiently advanced society would suffer the same fate because the dynamics above are independent of humanity and Earth — they are universal. The answer to Fermi’s question is that unfettered technological advancement inevitably leads civilizations to destroy themselves. Far before you can create a rocket that travels a century near light speed, you would have invented technologies so powerful that a single person or a small group of people could destroy everything unilaterally.

Rage Against the Machine

Ok, well if that’s true, what should we do about it?

I’ll first say it’s not so bad if you believe in the ultimate heat death of the universe. As with the saying, “Everybody dies — it’s just a matter of when and how,” I feel similarly about civilization. We’ll definitely destroy ourselves at some point, but let’s not rush into it.

Or, much better said by Dylan Thomas:

Do not go gentle into that good night
Rage, rage against the dying of the light

Getting to Mars is one step, but insufficient. If someone releases an amped-up version of smallpox on Earth, having a set of people on Mars would at least give us an extra shot at continued life. But even the colony on Mars is subject to the same dynamics we’ve outlined previously, because those dynamics are universal. In fact, I’d speculate the colony on Mars is likely to be far more fragile for many decades than any on Earth.

Going interplanetary is about placing more bets. We could also strengthen our societal defenses by instituting a police state. The premise is this: since individuals are becoming unilaterally more dangerous as technologies advance, the only way to protect us is to strongly spy on and control everyone. This approach has obvious undesirable side effects, but I must admit I like visiting Singapore and would gladly trade individual freedoms for collective safety if I could be assured that central powers wouldn’t be abused. But alas, they always are.

Conflict between nations also seems a likely cause for how we might destroy ourselves. The Earth and its nations is like a playground with no teacher. Might ultimately makes right. The pen is easily destroyed by the sword. This feels to me a distinctly suboptimal way to run the world, but it’s unclear how we’d keep a universal government well-functioning over time… though a brief interlude with a benevolent dictator is imaginable. Ultimately, we may just have to embrace the existential uncertainty which independently sovereign nations guarantee.

Or perhaps we could genetically modify the human race to not allow for the penchant to inflict mass destruction. I’ve not thought about this seriously because it seems impracticable: as soon as some subset of humanity has aggressiveness bred out of them, it seems all too likely the rest of society will just take advantage of them and destroy them entirely.

If the answer to Fermi’s question is that all sufficiently advanced civilizations destroy themselves, there’s a beauty to the resulting epistemologically unanswerable question of whether there exist intelligent civilizations beyond ourselves. We get to choose our preferred answer to this question knowing that the true answer is ultimately unknowable.