#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

[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.”

[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.

[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

[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.

[sickletadist]

Absolutely not a solution to the Fermi Paradox 🤣

[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.

[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

[mulherergativa]

Every solution to the fermi paradox actually shows more insight to the person's ideologies than it is to knowing the true nature of the universe.

[disgruntledexplainer]

easy answers to the "fERmI PAroDoX"

the fermi paradox is fucking stupid, and this is why:

IT'S NOT A PARADOX.

there are SO MANY possible solutions to this "paradox" its maddening to think that so many people think it IS one.

(btw i'm not saying that alien life, or even intelligent alien life, doesn't exist. i'm just saying that all this hullabaloo about "not finding it yet" is ridiculous. we'll find it when we find it.)

the most basic solution to the paradox is a variation on the "great filter": that we are just seriously, completely, hillariously overestimating the chances of life coming into existence in the first place. The fact of the matter is that we still don't know for sure what the circumstances were that led to it's emergence; some likely answers might include the emergence of proto-cells from a kind of primordial soul of organic molecules stimulated by lightning. if this is the case, the circumstances on earth would have to be PERFECT for life to emerge at all. Earth is vast, and it's climate varied, but it was still a long shot. this life would have also needed to survive long enough to evolve and adapt to it's surroundings well enough to survive changes in it's environment.

lot's of fuss is put out about how many "earth-like" planets we have found, but in order for life to emerge in the first place on those worlds it would have to have already had centuries of evolution under it's belt. worlds that are baking on one side and frozen on the other are NOT good candidates for life, nor are ones that are covered in magma, nor are ones that are gigantic oceans with little in the way of organic molecules to feed on, nor are worlds that have no liquid water whatsoever. most of the "earth-like" planets that have been touted about would NEVER have been suited for the emergence of life, though life could conceivably evolve to live on them. People always forget that the evolutionary process takes time, and that in order for it to occur at all some members of the original forms of life have to survive the conditions that killed everything else.

the "natural" assumption that evolution has an arrow that points to the emergence of intelligence, and further, civilization. if biodiversity on a planet is low, the chance that any biological lineage would need to evolve a survival strategy as convoluted as intelligence is also low. why evolve a big brain when you can evolve a big mouth with lots of pointy teeth? a form of intelligent life might emerge that is a solitary predator, like an octopus, unwilling to work with others of its kind for any reason. they could fail to develop a complex language or the means of expressing it. they could have short lifespans that curtails the accumulation of experience and the ability to pass it to the next generation. they could completely lack hands or tentacles, and thus be unable to build technology. or they could develop beaks for manipulating objects, but as a result be completely unable to manipulate radioactive, poisonous, or explosive materials without killing themselves. they could evolve as an aquatic-only species, and thus be unable to develop fire or metallurgy, barring them from developing aircraft or spacecraft entirely.

at the next level up, low biodiversity could actually curtail scientific development. numerous technologies on earth have been inspired by, or even copied directly from, other living organisms. we copied the battery from the electric eel's physiology, and we were inspired to learn to fly by birds and bats, even if the methods of flight we eventually developed turned out to be vastly different. without these inspirations, i believe technology would develop much slower.

at the modern level, we got nukes. if the cold war had gone differently, it would have sent us back to the stone age, or worse. imagine a species that just keeps doing that, over and over again; they reach 20th century tech, nuke their respective civilizations to bits, start all over, get back to the 20th century, and nuke themselves all over again. Why do we imagine that alien life would be any more enlightened, any less warlike, any less xenophobic or self-destructive than we are? perhaps we haven't seen radio signals from them because the window of time where they knew how to transmit radio signals was so short.

how about space travel? a couple of decades ago space colonization seemed inevitable, but now? it honestly seems more likely that we will achieve world peace than reach mars with a manned expedition. there are just so many reasons why NOT to do it, from money to politics to sheer indifference. without the rabid patriotism of the cold wars to drive us, it seems the entire world has settled into comfortable inactivity. sure, some billionaire might start space tourism, but that's unlikely to take anyone out of orbiting hotels. it would take about seven months to get to mars from earth with our current tech, and unlike in previous generations of exploration support from the "mainland" would not likely be forthcoming. fuck, even if we DID manage it, the supply lines could be cut a couple months into the mission due to political infighting or a war. again, if this is our reality, why do we assume the aliens have it any better than us?

ftl travel. what will it take to get it through people's heads that it's NEVER GONNA HAPPEN. on that note, without ftl how many people do you think are actually going to volunteer for an expedition to proxima centauri, all to settle on a world that just looks like the moon, but bigger than earth. again, WHY SHOULD WE EXPECT ALIENS TO ACT MORE ALTRUISTICALLY THAN WE WOULD? WHICH AMONG YOU WOULD TRADE THE BEAUTY AND BIODIVERSITY OF EARTH FOR A DEAD ROCK?

that would take 6300 years BTW, and that's our closest neighbor. discounting the fact that all the original crew will die in that time if we don't develop actual functional cryogenics, SO MUCH can go wrong during that time. consider, for example, if the ship is diverted EVEN A LITTLE BIT from it's course. we could end up with the ship running out of fuel and power light years away from it's destination, and then everyone dies. or a disease could spring up. or the ship could be hit by a micrometeorite and completely decompress. all that before anyone knows if terraforming proxima centauri b is even an option. WHY SHOULD WE EXPECT ALIENS TO TAKE THIS RISK?

terraforming. a pipe dream. preparing a world in our own solar system for habitation would take multiple lifetimes, and that's a generous estimation. it would also be prohibitively expensive and would require resources from other worlds to do properly. do you think this is something a government or a corporation would try to accomplish? to please who? the shareholders would fire any CEO who tried, and just imagine a politician trying to explain to his voting base that all their tax money went to terraforming a distant rock instead of social services or national defense? it wouldn't benefit anyone for so long, and would likely be abandoned part-way through. WHY SHOULD WE EXPECT MORE OF ALIEN PEOPLES?

honestly, the fermi paradox strikes me as less an actual "paradox", and more of a way to cope with the utter loneliness of the human race in a purely rationalistic universe. it's a case of us expecting evidence, not finding it, and forming convoluted theoretical conspiracies to explain why the evidence we expected was erased, like how 7-day creationists try to explain away prehistoric fossil evidence with "the devil did it".

we'll find life when we find it, if we find it, and in such a case we will probably just find some parallel to archaebacteria or, if we're lucky, protists. sentient life almost certainly exists. the universe is just too vast for it NOT to exist. but that vastness includes galaxies we will never explore or send probes to, in clusters far outside the scope of our imaginations.

so no, the fermi paradox isn't a paradox. it is pure copium.