The Fermi Paradox: Where are all the Aliens?
Liftoff from a tropical rainforest to the Edge of Time itself. James Webb begins a voyage back to the birth of the Universe. On December 25th, 2021, NASA launched the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope.
Hubble has provided and continues to provide us with some of the most magical pictures of our universe, but the JWST is projected to be 100 times more powerful than Hubble. Built over 30 years, the JSWT is designed to capture more light and detail than Hubble ever could. This will let astronomers gather more information and allow them to dig deeper into the history of the universe than ever before.
About six months after its launch, the JWST delivered the most detailed image of the universe ever taken, known as Webb's First Deep Field. The image isn't just star-studded; it's galaxy-studded. In this image, you see galaxies that span an enormous distance and may be an even greater duration of time. The distances we're dealing with here are so large that it would take millions, maybe billions of years to travel to them, even at the speed of light.
When we look at these images, we're looking into the past. This pale red dot, for example, is a galaxy that appeared 13.1 billion years ago. We know this because that's how long it has taken the light from it to reach us. But for all of its size, do you know how much of the night sky that everything in this entire image would cover? Just about the width of a grain of sand held at arm's length.
There are hundreds of billions of other galaxies in the observable universe, and some scientists even put that number in the trillions. These galaxies, in turn, have hundreds of billions of star systems, much like our own; and these star systems have planets orbiting around them.
What are the chances that there wouldn't be another planet with life in some faraway galaxy? What are the chances that in this incredible vastness of space, we're all alone? You see, no matter how difficult it is for life to exist and no matter how rare it is, the universe is so big that there should be millions, if not billions, of planets able to support life.
You can define whatever requirements you want for life: temperature, distance from a star, number of moons, presence of water, number of asteroid impacts, and so on. Purely by chance, there should be many planets with life on them. And surely some of that life would be intelligent enough to reach out to us, right? It's not like the laws of physics, chemistry, or biology are exclusive to Earth—they're not.
But if there is life on other planets, if there's nothing special about Earth, where's everybody else? Where are all the aliens? Before we answer that question, I want to take a moment to thank Raid: Shadow Legends for sponsoring today's episode.
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Enrico Fermi asked this question in a lunchtime conversation with his colleagues in 1950. Fermi was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist considering the existence of space-faring civilizations. Truth be told, humans haven't been around for that long, and if, in our short existence on this planet, we've considered branching out to Mars or some other world, it's reasonable that another civilization might have thought the same thing.
If a civilization has been around long enough and it's sufficiently technologically advanced, it should try to branch out to other planets in search of resources. At the very least, it should try to reach out to them to communicate. That hypothesis, though, stands in contrast to reality, which has given us no evidence for life other than our own on this planet.
The great silence, as it's called, persists today. The mismatch between our intuition that the universe should be teeming with life and its apparent emptiness is known as the Fermi Paradox. So where are the aliens? Just this morning, jet fighters raced aloft over Wright-Patterson Air Force Base of Dayton, Ohio to intercept a reported saucer returning.
Pilots swore that it was a light that could not have been a reflection and that it evaded them at a very high rate of speed. Well, even though we've always been fascinated with aliens, we haven't officially been looking for them for very long.
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, is the most famous organization actively looking out for alien life in the universe, and it only formally began in the late 1950s. Some of its significant efforts include sending radio signals to outer space and listening for ones that may be sent our way. Of course, this only covers intentional signals.
SETI is one of the first organizations to intentionally send radio waves, but our technologies have been emitting radio waves through space-time ever since they were invented. This includes everything from mobile phones, televisions, FM/AM radios, and even the earliest radio transmissions in the late 1800s. For all we know, our alien counterparts are laughing over Charlie Chaplin movies right now.
But if you think about it, our radio signals may not have even reached potential intelligent life yet. As we mentioned at the start of the video, the distances we're dealing with in space are pretty literally out of this world. Even if we consider the oldest transmissions from over a hundred years ago, when radio waves were first sent out, they would have only traveled a tiny portion of space.
If today, at this very moment, our earliest signals were to reach our so-called galactic neighbors, and they were so intelligent and capable that they recognized their existence and decided to reach out immediately, it would take another 100 years for the reply to reach Earth, barring a breakthrough in physics that allows them to break the speed of light.
Before we ever know if our earliest attempts to reach out were successful, most of us would be faded memories. What if life exists not a hundred light-years away, but 50 or even 20 light-years away? Well, in that case, aliens would have had enough time to receive and reply to our signals by now. So why haven't they?
One answer would be that aliens simply don't exist, which let's be honest, this is rather boring. So let's assume they do exist. A logical question would be then: why haven't they reached out to us? To answer this question, we need to place alien civilizations into three advancement categories: less advanced than us, equally advanced, or more advanced.
If they're less advanced than us, it's likely that they simply don't have the technology to reach out to us. It's also important to know what signs to look out for. For two billion years after life started to evolve, it would be unobservable. If another civilization were to look out for the same things we're looking for right now, then there's the possibility that they're equally advanced as we are.
And if that's the case, they might be paranoid about contacting us because they're uncertain about what they're dealing with. This is in line with what Stephen Hawking said: "Reaching out to alien life would be a big mistake because they might come for our resources and our planet. They might carry pathogens we can't fight off; they might have colonial intentions."
The list goes on. Given how we've treated other human beings because of differences we created in our own minds, it's fair to say that it would be a mistake to assume that an extraterrestrial species would greet us with kindness.
The third possibility is that the aliens possess far superior intelligence; humans are no longer attractive to them. It might be a difficult pill to swallow considering how human-centric we are, but hear me out. If the universe is teeming with life, if there's nothing special about us, then there's not much point in them reaching out to us, much less spending precious resources visiting us.
Colonial intentions would likely be less important to a civilization that can, for example, harvest the power of stars. We’d be like the ants of the universe. To most people, ants might be interesting when they see them, and they can be intriguing, but then interest subsides, and we walk past millions of ants every day without paying any attention to them.
Sure, some biologists might still be interested, but most of us simply ignore them. We could apply a similar line of reasoning to a superior alien civilization. The exact reason a nearby alien civilization might exist, namely the abundance of life, is also why we haven't felt their presence.
On a more cynical note, they might not have visited us yet because they prefer an ambush rather than a hello. The Dark Forest Hypothesis states that the universe is full of cunning civilizations that would rather forego the risk of contacting anyone else and observe from the darkness. Whether to reach out is up to them, but as this hypothesis suggests, just because we haven't been contacted doesn't imply nobody is listening.
Of course, this is assuming they haven't already visited us. On July 26, 2023, David Grouch, a former intelligence officer, testified under oath that non-human biologics were recovered by a highly secretive UFO recovery program run by the US government.
Now I know we've had many so-called sightings of alien spacecraft and a lot of grainy video footage to go along with it, but this is the first time someone whose credentials have been verified has gone under oath and said things that could easily land him in jail if proven false. Skepticism is needed; extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Nevertheless, even if David's claims are real, there's still a general lack of evidence. If one alien spacecraft can reach Earth, so can hundreds or thousands more. If they visited us once, there's no reason to believe they won't do so again. At a civilization level, a government cover-up can only go so far, especially when there's a strong likelihood that a civilization reaching out to us would be far more advanced than us.
Having said that, though, we come back to our starting point: where are the aliens? And if they're so common, why haven't we been bombarded with visits? Well, one of the more widely accepted theories is that of the great filter. It's a hurdle in the evolution of a civilization that typically leads to its extinction.
It could be anything: an asteroid impact, a massive volcanic eruption, an incurable virus, runaway artificial intelligence, self-destruction—the list goes on. The idea is that most civilizations that go through the great filter fail and are inevitably destroyed. If that's what's happened so far in the universe, that would explain the great silence.
Our civilization alone may have passed this intergalactic test; thus, we exist when others don't. But that's only half the story. You see, the scenarios I spoke of only make sense if you assume we've already passed the great filter. What if we haven't? What if the great filter isn't behind us but waiting for us in the years ahead?
Maybe we exist not because we've passed a great filter but because we've yet to go through it. Asteroid impacts have happened in the past but could also hit us in the future. Nuclear annihilation is only a button or two away. We've seen some devastating viruses take their toll, and runaway intelligence? Well, we're on our way.
The great filter could be any of these things or it could be none; it could be something else entirely—something our human-centered minds cannot even imagine. Part of the intrigue with alien life involves answering one question, and it's how special are we?
Almost everything about the Fermi Paradox is a projection of that—things we look for, how we look for them, how we expect them to behave. It's a self-centered, egotistical pursuit that is ironically very human. But this human-centered curiosity might end up costing our civilization dearly.
As Stephen Hawking said, "Maybe seeking out extraterrestrial life is a terrible idea." For all we know, the great filter is just that—our curiosity. Maybe it's the courage to ask, "Where are all the aliens?" Maybe we shouldn't know.
We could be dealing with something genuinely otherworldly in the vast unknown of space. Two dares wins not this galactic race; we don't. Maybe the great filter is not a catastrophe that will happen to us; maybe it's one we seek.
Hopefully, the James Webb Space Telescope has some answers, or at least newer questions for us. Watch the video on your screen to understand why the JSWT is so important.