I like Brian Cox. He’s a professor of particle physics at some university in England. Manchester I think, but I’ve never been to England, and so I haven’t met the man, or been fortunate enough to attend one of his lectures. The good news is that you don’t have to travel to England to get some exposure to Brian, because he hosts a television series on BBC, and in my opinion the entirety of the series is worth watching.
I haven’t watched an episode where I understood everything he was talking about, but he’s engaging enough that it causes me to at least make an attempt to do some more reading and grasp what I’m capable of fathoming.
I just finished listening to Brian explaining the Fermi paradox, and I think that my negativity regarding the human race has caused me to discount some of the options for this paradox, and focus on one possibility as the most probable.
So what’s the paradox?
Basically the concept is that given the number of stars and solar systems in relative proximity to us, the probability of extraterrestrial civilizations is high. The paradox is that given that high probability, then why haven’t we found any evidence of those civilizations?
Depending on how you interpret what Brian has to say there are somewhere around ten possible explanations for the lack of evidence.
- We’re not listening correctly
- . We’re too far away.
- . Interstellar travel is too difficult.
- They might be avoiding us.
- Life is actually pretty rare.
- Intelligent life is even rarer.
- We haven’t been looking long enough.
- We might be too early.
That’s eight, and to understand the logic I think it’s best to let Brian explain. But basically you have to wrap your head around a cosmic sense of time and distance, where a million light years and a billion years of planetary existence are basic tools of measurement. Consider that our galaxy is 13.6 billion years old and we’ve only had the tools to look for aliens for at best a few hundred years. Plus there’s lots to look at and it’s pretty far away.
There are two more possible answers that I found the most interesting. Actually it seems to me that one of those reasons is contained in the second reason.
So maybe there’s only nine reasons.
Anyway.
The two remaining reasons are the great filter and stupidity.
Apparently there’s a possibility that we may have passed the great filter. On the other hand we may not, and the explanation goes something like this.
If the filter is rarity then we’ve already jumped that hurdle. Basically we’re talking about microorganisms evolving to multicell, and eventually to more complex life, and finally to us. Assuming that humans are in fact deserving of being described as complex this evolution of life is still evidently a crap shoot. You need an atmosphere, a stable sun, and lots of time. So a stable sun is only the first part of a combination of occurrences. You also need all of the nearby stars to not decide to fucking explode, and giant space rocks to keep their distance. Basically you need long term stability. Extremely long term.
That leaves reason ten, or if I’m understanding it correctly the second half of the great filter. Risk from rocks and explosions aside, another existential risk remains in place, and that’s the probability of some sort of human created extinction event. Big bombs or bad biological’s. Something of that order of stupidity.
If you look around the planet at the moment, the possibility that our technology has outpaced our morality is in abundant supply, so it’s plausible that other civilizations have already travelled this path. Which explains why we haven’t seen or heard from them.
It makes me wonder if some other star has a planet in orbit, with ruins of a civilization that used to have a lizard Trump or some skinny big head Putin? Did they have weapons that could destroy their planet in the hands of beings that fought over who had the correct god? Did the lizards pollute their atmosphere and poison their water, or did the orthodox skinny big heads unleash biological weapons on the godless big heads?
There are other possibilities for self destruction and I’m pretty sure humanity has or is going to find a way to flirt with all of them, unless we miraculously have some sort of a planetary attitude adjustment. But we’re not very good at proactive, and tend to adjust ourselves only when absolutely necessary. The risk we’re taking is assuming that we’re not going to fuck up so badly that there’s no coming back, and we’ve effectively been great filtered.
Also, it’s possible the lizards fucked like crazy and the ensuing hordes of lizards ate all the food and drank all the water. Then all the lizards fought over what was left until there were no more lizards.
So, I see two possibilities for humanity. Either we get our shit together and co-operate with some sort of evolutionally elevated morality, or an elite group of humanity finds a way to sterilize the masses, or exterminate them as necessary. That would mean a system would have to be put in place to keep enough grunts to farm and do maintenance. Slaves basically, and so that cancels any indication of a moral evolution. Which means the risk would still be there because the overlords are probably still high end psychotics with slaves, and killer robots to manage the slaves.
Because slaves tend to be problematic, so robots I guess. Unless we get carried away with robots and AI and Skynet takes care of the extermination part of things. Which makes me wonder if one of the lizard planets got nuked by their own computers? Because if that were the case then it would seem that a sentient machine would be much more capable of interstellar travel than a biological life form. But we haven’t heard from a malevolent computer either. Maybe the machine advanced into superintelligence and decided we weren’t worth the effort.
See item four in the above list of paradox possibilities.
So it seems to me that the James Webb is a fine idea. It’s wise to have a look around and expand our knowledge. But all of that data isn’t going to be of any value if no one’s around to use it, and so we need a fucking adjustment. We have to find a way to control our primal urges and not use our technology to expand our breeding and slaughter capabilities.
Which is a tough ask, because those are two of our favorite things.
In days of yore our favorite things was sort of acceptable when being better at breeding and butchery involved understanding a Caesarean, and how to make a good sword. But when we can pump out more people than we can feed and launch planetary nukes, then the end result should strike us as having potential to be somewhat more dire.
With a strong possibility of permanent.
But Putin is still in the Kremlin. The Americans elected orange again, and the middle east is on fire one more time. We’re still burning coal, and our leaders like sexually abusing kids, fighting over land and hoarding all the wealth. We’re going to run out of water at some point and we’re still arguing about weather changes on the planet even happening. Never mind if we’re responsible for those changes.
So I don’t know people.
Maybe we should build some sort of a vault with memorabilia, so that if aliens come looking in a few thousand years we can let them know we used to be here.