Paradigm Shift: Thoughts on Politics and Aliens

Posted by Greg Allen on 07.24.2007

Do you remember that classic scene in the first Matrix movie when Agent Smith explains to Neo his conclusion on human nature? "Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet."

If you've got a dime on you go ahead and take it out. Look at FDR's eye. See how small it is? Okay now take the dime and hold it at arm's length. Look at the eye again. Now it's really tiny right? The size of Roosevelt's eye at arm's length is roughly the same area as a spot the Hubble Space Telescope spent looking at for ten days back in 1998. In that small, small area, the Hubble discovered hundreds of galaxies. So think about the night sky. How many of Roosevelt's eyes do you think would fit in it? (And not just the sky you see, the whole world's sky). An absolute crap load is correct but the people who run the Hubble currently estimate around 125 billion galaxies.

Each galaxy holds tens of billions or hundreds of billions of stars, bringing the total estimate for the number of stars in the universe to about 70-sextillion, or a seven with twenty-two zeros after it. That's a number bigger than the human brain is able to comprehend, but try anyway.

Out of all those billions of galaxies, with all their billions of stars, there is life that we know of only on Earth. Why? Or as the great physicist, Enrico Fermi, phrased the paradox, Where is Everybody? Everybody else that is. Even if the probability of life on a planet was thousands of times worse than your odds of winning the lottery (and Darwinian evolution gives us reason to suspect the odds are far better than that), the universe should be friggen' chock full of aliens. Furthermore, they should be blatantly obvious. If they're not walking around, chatting us up themselves, at least their robots should be.

But they aren't… so, why?

Okay so imagine future earth people send out some really kick ass space probe that travels pretty slow around 10% the speed of light (a speed theoretically achievable with existing earth technology). It would take such a probe about forty years to get to the nearest star besides our sun at that rate. Once it gets to the next star it finds a planet or a comet or something like that and lands and starts building a new probe identical to it. Then the new probe goes out and starts the process all over again. If all went well, it could take as little as half a million years for this probe to have a descendant in every solar system in a galaxy. Even if the probes just waited around for a thousand years after reaching a new star before building a new probe, the timeline would only change to tens of millions of years—quite a bit longer to colonize the whole universe but not too much longer. After all, the universe is 15 billion years old, but in all those billions of years and in all those half-a-million segments, no alien robot ever showed up on earth. For a person learned in statistics, this is highly suspect.

Where is Everybody?

There's oodles of solutions that have been put forth to solve the paradox (you can read all the big ones in the Wikipedia article), but I'm only going to talk about one: The Doomsday Hypothesis, which holds that given enough time, any intelligent species will end up getting itself killed. The very evolutionary pressures that lead to intelligence may also guarantee a species whose nature will guarantee its destruction. Personally, I think this is the most likely solution to the Fermi Paradox, and its repercussions are huge.

Every intelligent species in the universe that existed before us has gone extinct by its own hand (or tentacle, who am I to judge). Honestly, I think humans are on a road to do the exact same thing. Do you remember that classic scene in the first Matrix movie when Agent Smith explains to Neo his conclusion on human nature?

Agent Smith: I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure.

That's great script writing, but there's also some truth to it. If you were an alien looking down at Earth and you saw New York City or London or Tokyo some city that has degraded all the environment around it, ruined the surrounding areas ability to process water and minerals, belched toxic smog everywhere, you would look at that spot on the earth's surface as some kind of festering sore, some kind of infected wound. Hell, even Global Warming fits into the metaphor. Humans have given Mother Earth a fever.

That's without even getting into things like nuclear weapons or other technologies with the potential to kill everything on this planet but Keith Richards and cockroaches. Life is either very, very rare or very, very fragile. Either way we shouldn't sneer at those who are paranoid about every little way we can prevent ourselves from ending up like every other intelligent species in the universe. If they succeed, if global warming can be reversed or mitigated, if nuclear weapons can be controlled or destroyed, if humanity can just get its God damn act together, maybe in half a million years, there won't ever be somebody else looking up at the sky wondering "Where is Everybody?" because humanity (or our robots) will be able to point to a pale blue dot at the end of a telescope and say "There we are."