Do You Need to Explain the Fermi Paradox?

[Blackrook]

I just finished reading The Old Man's War, which is premised on the notion that our galaxy is crowded with hundreds of extraterrestrial civilizations engaged in a ruthless war for limited space on rare suitable planets desired by all.

I talked to my father, the professor, about this story and it got him talking about the Fermi Paradox. The Fermi Paradox is based on Fermi's question "Where is everybody?"

Our universe is vast in size. Our galaxy alone may contain 500 million planets capable of sustaining life. Even if there is a small probability that a star-faring civilization develops, there still should be some in our neck of the woods and they should have visited us long ago and many times.

But so far, we have absolutely no evidence that there's any intelligent race in the universe other than homo sapiens.

This presents a problem for science fiction writers. In your typical space opera, humans and aliens work side-by-side and fight wars against each other in a crowded galaxy. But if that is the case, why do we appear to be alone now?

It turns out there are numerous theories, each more fantastic than the last. My favorite is the "Zoo Theory" -- the theory that alien races are deliberately avoiding contact with us in order to avoid affecting our development. This is the "Prime Directive" as seen in Star Trek.

I think the Fermi Paradox is the reason why aliens have been dwindling in importance in modern science fiction. But in stories where aliens do appear, do writers need to deal with the Fermi Paradox?

In The Old Man's War, the author simply ignored the Fermi Paradox, portraying a universe that is probably impossible given what we know now.

In my own universe, I deal with the Fermi Paradox with the explanation that all intelligent races encountered by humans are pre-industrial. Humans easily conquer and/or enslave them, leading to ethical dilemnas which are the main theme of my saga.

So opening this up to the floor, does a modern science fiction writer need to deal with the Fermi Paradox in order for his universe to remain credible?

Why or why not?

 

[J Riff]

Well... Fermi and Drake and all them, could easily be completely wrong, or half-right. A guess really, and just as easy to make it go either way.
The Universe is jam-packed with life. It's almost empty. Prove either statement.
There is no evidence of aliens. There is lots of evidence of aliens.
There's only a few decent planets. There's too many bloody nice planets to count.
What seems to make the most sense is - there are some advanced races, somewhere on the trillions of planets. Should be.
Yea.... that's it - The Riff Theorem- there is advanced life - because of the trillions of planets. I'm betting life advancing on, say, one of them...
- could be even better than Earth. Thicker ozone, better atmosphere, bigger dinosaurs and smarter people living together in harmony.
The Earth 'zoo' is believable. What else could it have been?- teeming with mindless life like it was for millions o' years. Primitive humans made structures, but so do insects.
The theory sez- Earth was a zoo until only recently, when we became 'protected' because we showed signs of true intelligence.(atom bomb)
As of today, the white ball aliens keep the reptile clone aliens from loading up w/ specimens every 100 yrs. like they've been doing since ancient times.
Seems a reasonable theory. But how dreadfully boring if it's true.
They are watching us. They aren't particularly interested, or interesting.. but they're watching.
The reptile aliens aren't interested at all anymore - if they can't pressgang specimens into slavery - and they won't ever be back.
Now this story has been around since... who knows?
My problem is this - the Watchers... are boring. They aren't going to do anything, for decades or centuries, except watch.
Dull. I say, bring back the lizards... we are ready for them this time! Let them swoop down from the sky and attempt to scoop up thousands of people and animals and take them back to MK1399 for barter.
There was no such thing as a stealth fighter, the last time the aliens visited. Bring it on, Lizard-aliens!
But no. Nothing... just vague flitting white balls that may not even be alien ships.
Just finished a story that ended with an alien asking:
"How did you know they were intelligent beings?"
The answer was: "Only intelligent beings keep others in cages."

To conclude: I say- Attack the White Ball aliens! Earth has lots super-weapons going to waste_ chase off the Watchers so that we can bring back the Lizards, and kick their scaly butts- or die trying - or we will never gain the respect of th' Milky Way, let alone the Universe.
Oh, Earth? Yes... they are still incubating. The White nurse-balls will keep an eye on them for another few centuries before BlahBlahWooFetC.
Attack all UFOs on sight. Conclude rant.

 

[iansales]

Stephen Baxter's Manifold trilogy attempted to provide a solution to the Fermi Paradox. But it's been mostly ignored by science fiction. Space opera, for example, typically requires interstellar empires of aliens, and the fact that we have yet to find any such evidence of any is conveniently ignored. But then space operas are not intended to be true depictions of either the real universe or of the real future of humanity. They're made-up ****, they're glorified adventures in outer space.

 

[Boneman]

No. Although there is some 'you-must-give-credibility-to-your-SF-story' that permeates more strongly than in Fantasy, they are both FICTION. Made up. Basing it on the most relevant thepory is all fine and dandy, but it is just a theory.

And the surest sign that there's intelligent life in the Universe is that none of it has visited here... Calvin and Hobbes rule!

 

[alchemist]

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[J-WO]

If a writer wants to take the Fermi Paradox on, then that's great. I think as time goes on more and more SF authors will do until it becomes a subgenre in itself (Indeed, it probably already is!).

But one can just as easily ignore it. Shakespere, afterall, never felt inclined to explain why no one had bumped into Prospero's island.

 

[Ursa major]

Q: Do You Need to Explain the Fermi Paradox?

A: No (unless you really, really want to).

 

[J-WO]

I always think the term 'paradox' is not quite right. Its more 'Fermi enigma' or 'Fermi mystery'.

Afterall, if you owned a jewellery shop that should be full of gold and one morning isn't you wouldn't call 'Paradox'. You'd call the police.

 

[HareBrain]

Afterall, if you owned a jewellery shop that should be full of gold and one morning isn't you wouldn't call 'Paradox'. You'd call the police.

Hmm, you think another universe might be stealing our aliens?

 

[J-WO]

And selling them out of plastic bags in dodgy pubs.

 

[HareBrain]

They were aliens?! I thought they were pork scratchings.

 

[Nik]

Based on the latest Kepler findings...
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-05-kepler-astounding-haul-multiple-planet.html
... planets are *common* but our tidy solar-system is the odd one out...

My slightly tongue-in-cheek take would be that face-locked worlds around red-M-dwarfs plus mega-moons around gas-giants around K & G & F5+ stars are the main repositories of life out there...

We're the statistical fluke, the 'black swan'...

Our Moon stabilises our seasons, has taken enough crustal material to allow us plate tectonics, has taken a bunch of hits for us, may contribute to sustaining Earth's magnetic field etc etc.

Other systems' 'Earth-like' worlds in 'goldilocks zone' are likely to be water worlds, perhaps topped with ice, else Mars-dry, have topsy-turvy axis and/or high-gravity, have only hot-spot vulcanism, are subject to periodic global 'overturn' as suspected for Venus or be otherwise challenging for multicellular life that wants to crawl out of the pond and reach for the stars...

Then, even with plate tectonics, there's been times in our geological history when life as we know it was essentially confined to the edges of super-continents and the surrounding seas. The dead centre was glaciated or desert...

A rising coastal civilisation would be hard-pressed to access mid-continental resources...

Uh, back to the original question: Sure, mention the Fermi Paradox, but-- Having decided on what aliens will or won't star in your tale, tilt the arguments to suit.
===

Slightly OT: Could be that the 'c' limit holds, and the only way between stars is Newtonian. Following the above logic, ET could identify candidate planets and reach them by 'Starwisp' or 'Daedalus' craft, both comparatively near-term tech. Around here, we have the low-density 'Local Bubble', where in 'Bussard' ram-scoop fusion drives *will not work*. Bit like sailing ships & Doldrums. Beyond the bubble, who knows ?? Could be that we will develop the tech to settle the bubble and go beyond, where we will encounter astonished ETs: 'But the Bubble can't be crossed ! But your Earth is so rare !'

 

[Vertigo]

The abundance of aliens in books like The Old Man's War and others like Tanya Huff's Valor Confederation books is something that has always given me a little difficulty. I am of the opinion that alien life is much much less common than some of us like to believe.

There are many factors that make life on our little planet viable. It is in the Goldilocks Zone but so is Mars according to some and possibly Venus. Are you aware there is a Galactic Habitable Zone as well; too close to the centre and radiation becomes an enormous problem, too far out and lack of heavier elements becomes a problem. For it's star type our sun is unusually stable with little variation in brightness, solar flares etc. and has an around 50% more heavy elements than most other stars of its type. Also, of course, our sun is not too big (burns out too quickly) and not too small (Goldilocks zone too close resulting in likely tidal locking and other problems like flares etc.). I'm not expert in this but other factors that are important to our environment include; the moon (just the right size and orbital distance to stabilise any axial wobble and the other planets also contribute to this), tectonic activity refreshes our atmosphere and locks up vast amounts of CO2, a magnetosphere that protects our atmosphere from being stripped by the solar wind (Mars only has a very weak one).

It seems to me that the aspects necessary for stable life evolution are many and complex making them statistically less common. Please don't tell me other life might be so alien that it requirements are totally different. I think that is unlikely; we have many different environments here on Earth and in the solar system and yet no other life forms other than carbon based or any reliable evidence for them have yet been found. I'm not saying they never will be - I'm just looking at probabilities here.

Then consider that if, as is probably likely if we are honest, interstellar travel is unlikely to ever be a practical proposition then just how long is a technological civilisation, restricted to a single star system, likely to survive without imploding? 1000, 10,000, 100,000 years? Each of those are a mere blink in cosmological terms and not much more than that in evolutionary terms, which would make the chances of technological civilisations overlapping pretty slim.

Because of all that I am far more comfortable with SF that has futures with only traces of past alien civilisations but none still alive, or maybe just one or two. Examples would be authors like Reynolds, Simmons, Morgan, maybe even Asher. Whenever there are loads of different aliens around I tend to feel the book is drifting towards fantasy, not a problem as such, I still enjoy such books, I just don't find them to be credible visions of the future.

Edit: and whilst I was typing that lot out, Nik came in and posted some very similar points!

 

[Nik]

Thanks, Vertigo !

I certainly forgot about the 'Galactic' comfort zone, and I didn't mention our Sun's a 'Population 1' type, ie 3-rd generation star with enhanced metallicity...

 

[Vertigo]

And I lacked the techie terms for it

 

[Sapheron]

I don't see why you should have to talk about why there can't be aliens in a science fiction story. That sounds rather alike to discussing why magic doesn't exist in the middle of your fantasy epic- a rather offputting moment in a book at best.

Fermi Paradox is one of those bits of science that's talking about things we don't really know about. Rather like the Earth's core, the Big Bang and similar things. We make observations based on very limited evidence and then propose a theory that attempts, in many cases, to explain things we don't really have a clue about that are related to the original evidence, sometimes only vaguely.

We do not know the chances of life developing. There may be a creator (god, other sentient race, whatever else). There may be far more or less habitable planets than we predict at the moment. As such, the Fermi Paradox is a shaky piece of science at best, and I don't think an author really need worry about it. You want aliens? Fine. You don't want any? Fine.

 

[J-WO]

Then there's the cultural reasons for the Paradox. Perhaps industrial societies blow their resources away in a couple of centuries (mentioned elsewhere recently) and are reduced to pre-industrial living for ever.

Or, perfect virtual reality is far easier to achieve than becoming an interstellar civilisation (seems likely judging by the way humanity's technology is going) and most cultures in our galaxy have become swallowed up by their constructed paradises.

Or, only artificial intelligences can survive their biological maker's apocalypses and all those centuries in space if they should choose to do so. Armed with this knowledge, AI 'children' of several extinct species have got together and silently monitor worlds where intelligent life is emerging. Once these planetary cultures (ourselves being one) develop their own AI, the big-space-AI's come along, sterilize the planet of its biological life and adopt the nascent AI into the galactic fold.

Just a thought. To be honest, I find the last of these three possibilities the least depressing.

 

[Vertigo]

I don't see why you should have to talk about why there can't be aliens in a science fiction story. That sounds rather alike to discussing why magic doesn't exist in the middle of your fantasy epic- a rather offputting moment in a book at best.

Whilst I do have doubts about the likelihood of there being loads of aliens out there, I certainly don't reject it and I absolutely don't reject having aliens in my SF books, I just find that feels like a less likely future scenario, unless they come up with good reasons for it. However even if they don't, it doesn't mean I won't like the book, I certainly don't read exclusively hard SF and so am quite prepared to suspend belief and enjoy the story.

Then there's the cultural reasons for the Paradox. Perhaps industrial societies blow their resources away in a couple of centuries (mentioned elsewhere recently) and are reduced to pre-industrial living for ever.

Or, perfect virtual reality is far easier to achieve than becoming an interstellar civilisation (seems likely judging by the way humanity's technology is going) and most cultures in our galaxy have become swallowed up by their constructed paradises.

Or, only artificial intelligences can survive their biological maker's apocalypses and all those centuries in space if they should choose to do so. Armed with this knowledge, AI 'children' of several extinct species have got together and silently monitor worlds where intelligent life is emerging. Once these planetary cultures (ourselves being one) develop their own AI, the big-space-AI's come along, sterilize the planet of its biological life and adopt the nascent AI into the galactic fold.

Just a thought. To be honest, I find the last of these three possibilities the least depressing.

J-WO, your second point there is almost exactly the foundation for Stross' Accelerando. He had vast unknowable AI intelligences effectively turning all the matter in the solar system to raw computing power but not making any attempt at interstellar travel because they could not bear the thought of putting up with the low bandwidth that such a journey would entail.

On your first point I rather like the civilisation that appeared in one of Peter Hamilton's Night's Dawn books (can't remember which) where there had been a previous civilisation that had arisen and fallen but in the process had used up all the planet's fossil fuels leaving the "next" civilisation a much harder task to achieve an advanced technological civilisation.

 

[Yog-Sothoth]

What a waste it would be, if there is nothing else in the universe but us. I would still enjoy space-opera classics like Stars Wars though, but in the back of my mind, the likes of Firefly will feel much more realistic.

 

[Interference]

Maybe there is other life in the Universe. Maybe some of it is more advanced. And maybe we're a village they visit infrequently but they have homes to go to. I doubt many aliens would consider Earth a good place for a holiday and, given how difficult we're finding it ourselves, I suspect our resources are too meagre to interest many of them.

****

There could just conceivably be a solar system where more than one planet sustains intelligent life and, if they have similar goals to us, they may be warring with each other right now. There may be more civilisations within a galaxy (far, far away) who are warring with each other and not even giving a thought to the prospect of us existing at all.

And, yes, there may be a party going on out there somewhere that we haven't been invited to.

Drake's equation evapourates if any one of the values is close to zero, but it's more exhilarating to think each value is a positive integer no lower than 5. That's pretty much all it would take to allow our Science Fiction to become someone else's near-reality.

****

The Universe is big and, as I'm sure some are getting tired of hearing me say, multi-dimensional. Perhaps the abundance of life that this Universe contains is not merely "advanced", but possibly at a complete tangent to our sphere of perception. They may conceivably know we exist, but really our society is of little value to them as either an intellectual study or as a resource worthy of their attention.

****

Part of the realism of Firefly is, I think, in describing a galaxy-wide colonisation from Old Earth, very much a "final frontier" in Wild West terms. In his infinite and worshipful wisdom, Mr Whedon chose not to address the prospect of alien life, as such.