#fermi paradox solutions

[ghostsofchernobyl]

My previous favorite solution to the Fermi Paradox was the Junkyard theory, stating that Earth was used by Aliens as a trash planet and life just accidentally evolved from it.

This, though... this "Fool in A Field" hypothesis is pretty damn close to taking that spot as my favorite.

I low-key love the fact that sci-fi has so conditioned us to expect to be hanging out with a bunch of cool space aliens, that legitimate, actual scientists keep proposing the most bizarre, three-blunts-into-the-rotation "theories" to explain the fact we're not.

Some of my favourites include:

Zoo Theory: What if there are loads of aliens out there, but they're not talking to us because of the Prime Directive from Star Trek? (Or because they're doing experiments on us???)

Dark Forest Theory: What if there are loads of aliens out there, but they all hate us and each other so they're all just waiting with a shotgun pointed at the door, ready to open fire on anything that moves?

Planetarium Theory: What if there's at least one alien with mastery over light and matter that's just making it seem to us that the universe is empty to us as, like, a joke?

Berserker Theory: What if there were loads of aliens, but one of them made infinite killer robots that murdered everyone and are coming for us next?!!

Like, the universe is at least 13,700,000,000 years old and 46,000,000,000 light years big. We have had the ability to transmit and receive signals for, what, 100 years, and our signals have so far travelled 200 light years?

The fact is biological life almost certainly has, does, or will develop elsewhere in the universe, and it's not impossible that a tiny amount of it has, does, or will develop in a way that we would understand as "intelligent". But, like, we're realistically never going to know because of the scale of the things involved.

So I'm proposing my own hypothesis. I call it the "Fool in a Field" hypothesis. It goes like this:

Humanity is a guy standing in the middle of a field at midnight. It's pitch black, he can't move, and he's been standing there for ages. He's just had the thought to swing his arms. He swings one of his arms, once, and does not hit another person. "Oh no!" He says. "Robots have killed them all!"

[musing-about-fandom]

Not a perfect metaphor, but I think the fermi paradox and us coming up with solutions for it is kind of the interstellar equivalent of getting nervous because we didn't get a reply to our text within the minute and us therefore playing out and imagining a million different scenarios and solutions for why that is so, one more frightening than the other.

And in the meantime it's just that probably nobody has received our messages yet, because our radio connection is just so unbelievably slow, heck, our earliest radio signals strong enough to be sent to space barely just managed to leave like a bit more than around 100 light years, which is just nothing on a galactic scale?

Like right now I'm imagining some alien civilization that kinda knows about us existing but doesn't really bother much about contacting us yet, because you don't use their still unknown to us quantum or other bizare and unknown physics to us yet based Tumblr.

And additionally you might also count as an "this science we use for insta communication is actually bad for us!" conspiracy weirdo for prefering radio signals and deciphering those over that

[fhear]

New Solution to the Fermi Paradox Found. Scientists Hope They're Wrong

[comicaurora]

If you were a sci-fi writer, how would you solve the Fermi paradox? That being the discrepancy between evidence for alien life, versus the likelihood of their existence? (basically. If alien so likely, why we not see?) The Dead Space series has an amazing cosmic horror solution, but i'm curious what you're brain could come up with!

There's a lot of possibilities, some more interesting than others.

The speed of light and the distance between inhabited stars makes it prohibitively slow to detect, make contact with, or reach any star with alien life. It doesn't matter if we're not alone, our corner of Space Reachable Within A Human Lifetime is so comparatively small that we may as well be. We're all blindly wandering through an infinite desert, calling into the void. Space exploration is a long game, and on that timescale, even whole civilizations blink out very quickly. If we manage to catch a signal and follow it, we might find nothing on the other end but ruins - or an asteroid field where a planet's orbit used to be.

The universe is too young for us to find anyone else out there. We're the first. How will we shape the galaxy to make life better for those who come after us?

The life that formed on Earth is terrifyingly invasive. The atmosphere and ocean is choked with monocellular life, and its surface is coated with a mass of multicellular organisms finding new ways to devour one another. Even extinction events don't keep down the biomass for long. If life on other planets looks anything like us, the problem isn't going to be detecting it. It'll have gotten everywhere. The problem is going to be not immediately getting colonized and eaten alive by it. And if life on other planets DOESN'T look like us, our whole planet is probably a class 1 biohazard and contamination risk. Multicellular earth organisms contain microcosmic ecosystems that proliferate explosively when they die. If anything inside them can find ANYTHING to eat, it's over.

Life evolves frequently, but always in oceans. It is extremely rare for any alien life to leave that ocean and adapt to life on land. Without this step, the jump to space exploration - even space contemplation - becomes infinitely more unlikely.

Monocellular life is seeded on planets from an outside source and allowed to self-cultivate and grow until the biomass reaches a certain volume. Then the farmers return to harvest it.

There is not a single other species on our entire planet that humans can actually reliably communicate with. It takes tremendous amounts of training to make an animal capable of recognizing even a handful of words, and very few of them can use them. Humans can't even communicate with other humans with 100% clarity, even if they're using the same language. When we find alien life, if we even recognize it as anything resembling life as we know it, we have absolutely no way of communicating.

Space colonialism has been disallowed by the space geneva conventions due to massive past tragedies, parasitic exploitation of worlds and senseless loss of life. Human expeditionary efforts are being watched warily through targeting sights.

We've known about radio communication for less than 200 years. We haven't yet figured out the medium through which all advanced civilizations communicate.

Alien life exists in abundance, but the vast majority of it is extremely tiny. We wouldn't spot an anthill on a satellite photo, and none of their ships are large enough to survive passage through our atmosphere.

Earth's oxygen atmosphere is an anomaly, and our first and most enduring extinction event. The explosive proloferation of cyanobacteria and their oxygen photosynthesis irreparably altered the planet's prebiotic atmosphere and wiped out everything that couldn't handle the sudden massive increase in a highly reactive and flammable gas. Earth is considered highly toxic and unstable, though recently detected increases in methane and CO2 might signal that nature is finally beginning to heal.

[everydayarsonist]

“alright, listen up. we haven’t left our home systems in eons, and we only came over here to help you out. we’re all going to pretend like this didn’t happen, okay? set up some system defenses and stop letting signals go outside your system, because if you draw attention to yourselves, then one of us might have to get rid of you. understand? nobody knows about anyone else, because if we knew about eachother we’d have to kill eachother.”

“Three days, August 13th, at 21:31 standard time, Earth was attacked by hostile alien forces. We defended ourselves. We did not expect to win. We also did not expect sixteen other species to show up and kick out of the snot out of the invaders.”

[friendlynieghborhoodmuffinman]

Spoilers for Dandadan, but I find it really funny how Dandadan has two simultaneous solutions for the Fermi paradox:

1. The aliens are already here, but like any other immigrants, they're just trying to live their life and just kinda fade into the background, so nobody really notices that they're even there.

2. Earth's haunted. The planet-conquering aliens are not ready to deal with that shit.

[necromancelena]

solution to the fermi paradox: they're shy because im so pretty and cute and they don't want to embarrass themselves so they're waiting for me to die of old age before coming here

[soup-mother]

new fermi paradox solution: there's no hyperlane connections :(

[futurebird]

In isopod cosmology the world is a giant "whale fall" -- the world is a carcass of a great living beast of the vast sea of space that died long ago… and in the vast desert of the sea floor life blossoms in an orgy of death.

And the first to arrive? The elder gods, the deep ones. The Sea Isopods-- they prepared the carcass of the earth for life.

This is the isopod creation myth-- is it based in truth? We do not know.

The Deep Ones of the Elder Depths

I like to think that for land isopods, giant deep sea isopods are like their elder gods. The Deep Ones-- huge-- unknowable, mysterious… hungry for whale bones!

If isopods have a religion The Deep Ones must be a big part of their lore.

[cappucosmic]

One of the solutions to the Fermi Paradox revolves around the rarity of phosphorus. It is needed for life, and yet it is hard to find in the universe. On Earth, our most common way to get the element is through phosphite-heavy minerals like Phosphophyllite.

In short, wherever Phos lands in the galaxy, new life can bloom.

[eightglass]

do you have any book recommendations? nonfiction or fiction. i'd love to hear what you've enjoyed reading!

!!

Books!!! I love them!!!

Uhh

I'm always a big fan of science fiction! (loong so. under the cut)

I mean. There's always Star Wars, if you're into it. Best of those would be the three Thrawn trilogies (yes three trilogies) by Timothy Zahn. The old one (Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, The Last Command) is literally sequels to the original movies, and they were canon (and awesome) before Disney did their shit. They are very good.

Adrian Tchaikovsky is a fantastic author! His Shards of Earth trilogy and Children of Time trilogy are some of the best scifi I've read! Completely different vibes though, but both are really good!

Uhh... If you want existential dread forever, read The Three-Body Problem trilogy. If you've ever heard of the Dark Forest solution to the Fermi paradox, these books are where it came from. (Or popularised/named it? idk.) They're also pretty good.

Everything by Becky Chambers. Wayfarers tetralogy, Monk and Robot duology, To Be Taught If Fortunate, all really good vibes. LGBTR (Little Gay Books To Read)

the Red Rising series by Pierce Brown.

The Locked Tomb trilogy by Tamsyn Muir! Wow! These are really good. Lesbian necromancers in space, and it makes sense. The narrators don't tell you anything either, because in book 1 the narrator doesn't know jack shit, in book 2 the 'narrator' gave herself a lobotomy, and the narrator in book 3 is six months old.

the MaddAddam trilogy by Margaret Atwood. Post-apocalyptic, but the pre-apocalypse was also a capitalism hellscape, so you don't feel too bad.

the Lilith's Brood trilogy by Octavia Butler is some of the BEST aliens scifi I've read holy shit. Seriously, read this.

The Book of Koli trilogy by M. R. Carey! 300 years after an environmental/war apocalypse. Written language has been forgotten, the bioengineered trees have further evolved to walk around and hunt humans (among other things), and the leaders of the remaining groups of humans have whatever top-of-the-line, self-repairing, and self-refilling infantry weapons from the war to use on each other.

A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine (two books out, dunno if there'll be a third). Ever wondered about a poetry-based interstellar empire? And what if it were gay?

The Andy Weir books. The Martian, Artemis, Project Hail Mary, those are good.

If you're more into YA scifi, then the Lunar Chronicles tetralogy and Renegades trilogy by Marissa Meyer are both fantastic, and the Aurora Rising and Illuminae Files trilogies by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff (collabs) are amazing!

Fantasy is also good! But I don't find myself reading very much of it.

First off: Discworld. I read 25 of 41 over the summer, and they are GOOD. https://www.discworldemporium.com/reading-order/

All of the Greishaverse stuff by Leigh Bardugo is pretty good, but the Six of Crows duology is really amazing.

The Cruel Prince trilogy by Holly Black! If you like fae stuff, but also urban fantasy and romance. Good books!

A Darker Shade of Magic trilogy by V. E. Schwab, those are good! There's also a sequel series coming out atm.

OMG how can I forget the N. K. Jemisin books?? The Broken Earth trilogy is FANTASTIC. What if the Earth hated everyone and there were geology witches that are actually pretty awesome but everyone hates them? The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms trilogy is also really good. What if the gods were actually omnipotent, but sort of hated each other? And the Great Cities duology! What if New York City was a person (six people)?

As for less scifi-fantasy, I've read and really enjoyed:

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, a retelling of David Copperfield, this time with the main character living/growing up in rural Appalachia during the opioid epidemic. Really, really good.

All of the Alice Oseman books of course.

One Two Three by Laurie Frankel

Webcomics! These were really fun and they're still ongoing! My favs are:

Questionable Content (yes, you can start at 2104). Just a bunch of young adults in Massachusetts doing random shit with varying degrees of gayness, eventually the singularity happens and there are robots (they're gay too)

Dumbing of Age Really, really good college story. Fundie girl goes to college and learns about how the world actually works, varying amounts of gayness, horrible very bad parents, and three dramatic character deaths by the end of the first semester.

Gunnerkrigg Court weird scifi fantasy stuff going on all the time, big mysteries, omnipotent trickster god. The art style improves a LOT.

Web serials (if you want to be consumed by a piece of literature that's easily over a dozen normal books in length)

Worm. 1.6 million words. This consumed me from July to September. Good god. Some of the very best superheroes and superpowers, like, ever, beautiful fight scenes, and conflict escalation that does. not. stop. The poor characters never get a break between crises and catastrophes. But by Scion it is one of the best things I've ever read. Don't look up anything about it, the spoilers are insane. And there's a sequel that's even longer.

Uh.. I've started Katalepsis

[bethanythebogwitch]

Every time I see or hear people discussing the Fermi paradox they talk about stuff like the great filter, aliens hiding from us, humans being the first intelligent life, etc, but I almost never hear what I think is the simplest and most probable solution. That the aliens are really far away from us because the universe is fucking huge

[onespacedown]

Honestly, the speed of light, as a concept, sounds amazingly like a bit of pseudoscience from a high-concept hard sci-fi novel trying way too hard to come up with an interesting but wildly implausible solution to the Fermi paradox. Yeah, so it turns out that space and time are secretly the same thing, and you can't get anywhere interesting within your lifetime because if you go too fast through space, your speed through time starts offsetting that. Also, infinite speed through time corresponds to a finite speed through space, so you can't ever go faster than that. Also, light goes that speed, so it exists outside of time, and is everywhere and everywhen it will ever be at once. But it can also slow down. That's a thing it can do.

It would be called Snail Space, and it would be an international bestseller, despite the fact that the premise makes no scientific sense.

[return-of-the-trinidude]

what is dark forest theory

Ok, so back during the 1950s, a physicist named Enrico Fermi came up with what is known as Fermi's Paradox, which asks the following question: If the universe is so large and has so many possible habitable planets, it should be teeming with life. But if that's the case, how come humanity has never made contact with extraterrestrials?

The Dark Forest Theory is one of the possible answers to this paradox. It's name comes from the book The Dark Forest, written by Cixin Liu. Even though he wasn't the first person to suggest it, the common definition aligns with his book. The theory goes like this: Say we detect an alien civilization and we are deciding whether or not to make first contact. They could be a friendly civilization that we could ally with, or a hostile civilization that would seek to destroy us. How do we decide which one they are? Well, we'd have to talk to them.

If we reach out and they are hostile, then we expose ourselves to an enemy that wants to destroy us, so in that scenario, it would have been better for us to not contact them at all. But what if they're friendly? Well, how do you know they're friendly? They are, in every meaning of the word, alien. We can never be 100% sure of what they're saying and how they are interpreting what we are saying, how their culture influences their reasoning etc. Add to the fact that we can only communicate at the speed of light, by the time their communication reaches us, they could have become a hostile civilization, which would lead us back to the first scenario. Even if they are our allies for a period of time, there is no guarantee they wouldn't one day turn against us. So in this scenario, it would also be best to not contact them.

So then the solution would be to just not make contact, right But now we have another problem. If we can detect them, they can also detect us. If not today, sometime in the future they would advance to our level of technology and detection. And they'll have to go through the same kinda of decision making process. And if they are hostile, they may choose to just outright attack us. So what should we do? Well, the best option would be a pre-emptive strike. Destroy them before they can ever become a threat to us.

But that solution also comes with a problem. Say there is a third civilization looking at us, and they see us destroy the second civilization. Civilization 3 would obviously believe us to be hostile and seek to destroy us as well. So the ideal decision for any civilization is to 1) be quiet as possible and 2) quickly and quietly destroy any civilization that reveals itself. As one character in the series says it: "Hide well. Cleanse well."

The book uses the analogy of a a dark forest where there are several hunters stalking around. Any hunter you come across is potential enemy, so you need to be able to hide yourself, as well as kill any other hunter you come across instantly, to prevent them from ever becoming a threat.

The book goes into some deeper reasoning and philosophy behind this theory, but that's the basic premise of it. It's a pretty cool theory, but there are several problems with it, the most notable being that all civilizations would come to the same hostile conclusion. Anyway, I think its fun and makes for good existential dread.

[bitobrain]

What is The Great Filter?

Where is everybody? If you know about the Fermi Paradox you might've already heard about The Great Filter, being one of the solutions to this mind-blowing theory. The Great Filter theory says that somewhere between pre-life and a highly advanced civilization there has to be a wall, a filter that all life has to get through. We don't know what this filter is. However, we know that depending on where it is, there's three possibilities: we're extremely rare, we're first, or we're fucked. (doomed, I mean.) If The Great Filter is behind us and we've managed to survive going through it, that would mean that we're special. It would mean that it's extremely hard for life to make it to our level of intelligence. It would explain why there haven't been any signs of very advanced life out there, since it could mean we're an exception with how far we've made it so far. It could even mean that The Great Filter is at the very, very start of life.

If The Great Filter is not behind us, the only hope we could have is that we're the first. It would be the first time that conditions in the Universe have reached a place that would allow intelligent life to develop and in this case we could be on our way to being one of the first, if not the first, super-intelligent civilization. If The Great Filter is ahead of us, then we're screwed. If it's not true that we as a civilization are rare or first, then The Great Filter has to be in our future. In this case it would mean that life can develop up to a certain point and then something prevents it from developing any further. This is why a lot of philosophers say it's a good sign that we haven't had any signs of other life out there, since that makes the possibility that The Great Filter is behind us bigger.

[phoebelovingcare]

because I know sometimes people love misinterpreting things I would like to state for legal reasons that the "sympathetic" part of Lis being a sympathetic villain is the whole being imprisoned, torn apart and put on display for an unspecified but bonkers amount of time, as well as being very determined to survive at all costs, NOT for their answer to the Fermi Paradox being to obliterate all sapient/sentient lifeforms before they get the chance to do it back. my lawyer advised me to specify that the Dark Forest Solution is unethical