ADSactly Mystery: The Fermi Paradox Part 2

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Introduction

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Last week I wrote an article about the Fermi Paradox where I introduced this interesting topic which mainly consists in the search for explanations regarding the absence of extraterrestrial contact despite the universe being incredibly big or even infinite. I recommend the reader to first take a few minutes to check the first article and then proceed with this one.

As a kind of summary, in the previous article, I briefly explained what this paradox is all about and I also shared what I consider to be one of the most authentic cases of extraterrestrial contact. The video in question is an official hearing where an ex American military explains the almost supernatural experience they had in the 60s where an unknown object was able to somehow hack the control system of their nuclear heads and disable them. This was at the time where there were a lot of tensions due to the Cold War and the possibilities of having a nuclear war were very serious.

What I am going to write today, is the continuation of the hypotheses that try to explain the Fermi Paradox.

Hypotheses explaining the Fermi Paradox

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• It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself: this hypothesis consists in the possibility that any intelligent race capable of having a lot of technological advancements that could allow them to explore the cosmos end up destroying themselves due to their own conflicts. In our case, I believe the Cold War is the closest we have been to destroying ourselves but luckily that didn’t happen. Nevertheless, as technology advances the risk of having weapons that are even more destructive than atomic bombs increases, so the idea of extraterrestrial civilizations destroying themselves is, in my opinion, a very real one.

• It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy others: this hypothesis is very similar to the previous one, with the only difference that instead of extraterrestrials destroying themselves, they destroy others. Thinking about space predators willing to destroy less advanced civilization is indeed a very scary thought. However, I would find it hard to believe that every advanced extraterrestrial being is like this, there could surely be some of them willing to exterminate more primitive beings, but there could also be some of them that decide to adopt a more peaceful strategy that respects other beings' life.

• Periodic extinction by natural events: this is a reasonable explanation because there are always natural events that can cause mass extinctions and reset any technological/biological advancement back to zero. In our case, there have been 5 mass extinctions events:

End Ordovician, 444 million years ago, 86% of species lost ...
Late Devonian, 375 million years ago, 75% of species lost. ...
End Permian, 251 million years ago, 96% of species lost. ...
End Triassic, 200 million years ago, 80% of species lost. ...
End Cretaceous, 66 million years ago, 76% of all species lost. ^Source

The average time between each of them is 94.5 million years, since the last one happened 66 million years ago, we should have about 30 million years left to figure out a solution to survive pass the next mass extinction event.

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And by the way, back in 2012, the year when a lot of people were getting kind of crazy because of the apocalypse prophecy I am sure we all remember, it was reported by NASA 2 years later than in July 2012 our Sun almost destroyed modern civilization. It was reported that “A recent revelation by NASA explains how on July 23, 2012, Earth had a near miss with a solar flare, or Coronal Mass Ejection (CME), from the most powerful solar storm on the sun in over 150 years, but nobody decided to mention it.” ^Source

This shows us how fragile civilizations can be when it comes to cosmic events. The report continues by saying “We managed to just avoid the event through lucky timing as the sun’s aim narrowly turned away from Earth. Had it occurred a week earlier when it WAS pointing at us the result could have been frighteningly different… “I have come away from our recent studies more convinced than ever that Earth and its inhabitants were incredibly fortunate that the 2012 eruption happened when it did,” says Baker. “If the eruption had occurred only one week earlier, Earth would have been in the line of fire. ^Source

The disaster that an event like this could cause would be massive, “Analysts believe that a direct hit … could cause widespread power blackouts, disabling everything that plugs into a wall socket. Most people wouldn’t even be able to flush their toilet because urban water supplies largely rely on electric pumps.” ^Source The complete report from the NASA can be found here: https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/23jul_superstorm/

• Intelligent civilizations are too far apart in space or time: given the vast size of the universe, it could be a good explanation that advanced civilizations simply emerge too far away from each other and this distance makes it impossible to have proper contact. The likelihood of 2 advanced civilization emerging near each other is very low, so if there are advanced extraterrestrials, they will probably be from far away planets.

Conclusion

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I know there are people who feel afraid about the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrials living in outer space, in my case, I have always feel fascinated about this topic and when I was a little kid I even fantasied about someday having direct contact with one of those beings and get to know them, maybe even learn from them, probably having read The Little Prince had something to do with this, although I remember being interested in these topics before reading that fine little book.

I would like to ask a question for those who think about topics like this one: which one would be a more worrisome scenario? To discover other civilizations that are more advanced than ours? Or for us to be the only advanced civilization in existence?

In my case, the more worrisome scenario would be the second one, because if we are the only race capable of having technological developments, then that could mean we are extremely lucky (which obviously would be very unlikely) or that any other civilization before us ceased to exist (which would be the most likely option I think). At which point we could ask ourselves, what are the possibilities or our race having a different fate? Nevertheless, I truly think there must be extraterrestrial life somewhere, and maybe someday we will have huge discoveries that could change everything we know.

Authored by @dedicatedguy

Resources:

https://fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/la-10311-ms.pdf
https://www.seti.org/seti-institute/project/fermi-paradox
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html