One thing about the Fermi Paradox is that
the potential solutions to it keep growing in number. Some are more prominent than others, such
as the zoo hypothesis or that there simply aren’t any alien civilizations nearby to
detect. But all we really have about solutions to
the Fermi Paradox are ideas and there are also obscure solutions that while they are
at least plausible, they are not well fleshed out or talked about when discussing the subject. So here are ten obscure solutions to the Fermi
Paradox. Number 10. Aliens Don’t Like Planets The biggest problem with solving the Fermi
Paradox is that … given that we’ve never seen an advanced alien civilization, and we
ourselves aren’t yet advanced enough to colonize other star systems, then how exactly
can we predict just where aliens would choose to be? We assume, such as in SETI searches, that
civilizations would be interested in wet planets that orbit ancient, quiescent sun-like stars,
or smaller stars like red dwarfs. And, as a result, that’s where we point
our radio telescopes. And we also think in terms of energy production
being a key factor, that aliens might construct Dyson swarms around their home star to collect
energy, and indeed Kardashev’s scale is based on energy use. If that’s the case however, then there are
far more powerful stars in this galaxy to harness energy from than sun-like stars. But these stars tend to be hostile environments
where life is not expected to arise. Certain types of giant stars would provide
many, many times the energy output of the sun. The problem is that these stars are short
lived and die violently by supernova. But there is a period where they might be
useful as energy sources. One scenario would be where an alien civilization
heads out into the universe abandoning their home star system, and setting up shop for
a few million years at one of these giant stars, and then simply move on before it goes
supernova heading for the next suitable star. Finding evidence of such a civilization would
then be a needle in a haystack, and could literally be anywhere in the galaxy if they’re
in the process of travelling, or they’re camped out next to a star that would otherwise
not be considered a likely target by SETI. Number 9. Surface Oceans Might be Rare One of Earth’s great mysteries is just how
it acquired its water. This is still hotly debated, but one strong
possibility is that some time around 3.85 billion years ago Earth was bombarded by icy
comets originating from the Oort cloud. It’s certainly an interesting notion that
every time you take a drink of water, you may be consuming something that came from
the Oort cloud. But there’s a bigger mystery here. What caused the disturbance in the Oort cloud
that sent all those comets our way? The answer is we don’t know, and we may
never. If comets are indeed the source for Earth’s
water, then whatever event disturbed them might have been a rare event, such as a closely
passing star. If this was the case, it may be that rocky
planets within the habitable zones of their stars that have oceans may be the exception,
rather than the rule in the universe. If so, then life itself might be rare on habitable
zone terrestrial worlds. While there are other hypothetical solvents
that extraterrestrial life might be based on, water is very common in the universe and
one of the more likely things we can say about alien biological life is that it’s very
likely to be based on carbon and water rather than any other combination just because both
are widely available in the galaxy. In principle, you might be able to construct
a functioning hat made out of fried bacon, but the vast majority of hats you will find
will be made of fabric. It’s worth noting here that this only applies
to oceans on terrestrial planets. If our solar system is any indicator, subsurface
oceans are probably very common in the universe. We have numerous moons in our solar system,
and even an asteroid, that seem to sport liquid water below their surfaces. It’s possible that those places too might
be abodes of life. But there are problems here. One is that earth’s water contains about
half as much heavy water as some comets do, suggesting that our water actually came from
the asteroids and planetesimals that earth formed from, which generally have the same
ratio of heavy water as earth. However measurements of more recent comets
showed some of them to have the same ratio as earth, muddying the story, though those
comets are known to have originated in the Kuiper belt so it may be that our water originated
there rather than the Oort cloud. The other problem is that geology is showing
us that minerals that form in the presence of water show that the water was here very
early bolstering the case for it originating with asteroids and planetesimals in which
case there would be no reason to think that ocean worlds like earth would be rare in the
universe. Number 8. Aliens Have Different or No Math One open question within astrobiology is the
question of mathematics. Is our ability to perform complex mathematical
calculations a result of our evolution, or is it present in all life that gets to this
stage of evolutionary development. We don’t know, but we do get hints that
some animals do have a limited ability to comprehend numbers. But it’s different to what we normally think
of as counting. It’s thought that animals might do this
through subitizing. Think of it like this, if you have four cookies
on a plate, you don’t need to count them, rather you seem to instinctively know that
there are four there because there are only so many ways to arrange four objects. This becomes more complicated with numbers
much larger than that, but another way animals might subitize is a cat preferring a larger
bowl of food, just because it looks bigger. It doesn’t need to count pieces of food
to know that one bowl has a larger quantity. But there are cases of people with neurological
conditions dealing with perception that can subitize, but are unable to count objects
in a room, suggesting that subitizing and counting originate in different areas of the
brain. This may suggest that humans mathematical
abilities are hard wired into our brains through evolution, but this may not be so for an otherwise
intelligent alien species. If the conditions in which they evolved were
different from the conditions that predisposed us to mathematics, then they may have no conception
of it. If for example they didn’t need to ability
to understand larger numbers of prey or predators as we seemingly did, they might not get math. It’s hard to imagine such a mathless civilization
getting very far, building rockets would be beyond unlikely without mathematics, but doesn’t
preclude such civilizations existing. If not being able to use math, or having a
very different concept of what math is and how to do it, is the norm for the universe
then civilizations of otherwise intelligent aliens could exist, but never venture into
space, or try to contact anyone with radio transmitters because they can’t build them. Number 7. The Chemistry is Too Hard to Happen Often Tracing the chemistry of the origins of life
has been difficult, and scientists still don’t have a complete picture of what actually happened
when life got its start on earth. We have hints, the Miller-Urey experiments
first showed that the building blocks of life could be created relatively straightforwardly
in an environment like early earth. RNA and DNA however have not been so forthcoming,
and for the time being we do not see simple life emerging from successor experiments to
the Miller-Urey work. Just the building blocks for it. But this is something that we are moving towards. In the coming decades scientists will likely
unravel the chemistry of abiogenesis and we’ll finally have an answer. This answer could solve the Fermi Paradox
in one shot. If it turns out that the chemistry is relatively
straightforward, or even inevitable under the right conditions, then the universe probably
teems with simple life and maybe more. But If it turns out to be hard, essentially
a fluke, that can only happen under really strict conditions, then we have our solution
to the Fermi Paradox. We may not be alone, and there could be other
life and even civilizations out there, but they may be very, very rare, to the point
that they can never interact with each other. Working against this of course is that we’re
clearly here, we show that life is possible. And this planet is full of life. But it’s all related, and life only seems
to have developed here once. There could be many reasons for that. Maybe it did happen multiple times, it’s
just that they didn’t survive, or were consumed by existing life. And, there’s another take on this. You would think that nuclear fission wouldn’t
be very likely to happen in nature. It seemed for years to be a thing you’d
only expect to find in a reactor or a bomb. But, evidence of natural nuclear fission in
uranium deposits has been found. It’s not common, but it happens. Perhaps the chemistry of abiogenesis works
along those lines. It happens occasionally in the universe, but
it’s merely uncommon. Number 6 The Scientifically Frustrated Universe We live in a time where we are about to be
presented with an increasing amount of ethical questions of how to manage our own future. Transhumanism, for example, or ideas of the
technological singularity tell us that we are getting so advanced that our own future
may be incomprehensible to most of us. We may reach a point, perhaps sooner rather
than later, that brings us to a level of technological development where we are quite simply no longer
human. Ideas of uploading one’s self into a computer,
or customizing the body genetically, or living many times longer than a current human through
augmentation come up. Do we necessarily want these dvelopments? Will there come a time where we simply say
no, we don’t want to change on that level and we simply choose to remain human. Or perhaps more likely, a majority may choose
to remain human, but some choose augmentation. Could this happen with colonization of the
galaxy? Where we simply conclude that there’s no
need to do it, it’s better to spend our time bettering earth while still remaining
human? Might others conclude this as well? A variant of this is that we might simply
run out of science, and that certain questions within science are simply unanswerable with
any reasonable study. Take for example the standard model of cosmology. It’s a model that seems to explain observations
well enough, but it’s not a complete model. We still have questions about things like
dark energy and dark matter and the best theory we have, General relativity, breaks down at
quantum scales. So we have theories that predict what we see,
but we don’t know how they actually work. What if we never do? What if no one ever does? This could happen. The experiments needed to prove certain concepts,
such as string theory, or determining if backwards time travel is possible, may be so impractical
that they cannot be practically attempted in our universe. There may simply be too much energy involved,
or too much distance in order to do the experiments. In other words, a scientific brick wall may
await us and everyone else in the Milky Way at some point and colonization just is never
in the cards. My guess is that would be one frustrating
universe where everyone hits the scientific and technological brick wall and just can’t
get any further. This is a particularly interesting solution
because it seems like our own development over the next five decades will answer whether
it is viable. Or maybe it won’t. But we do have radio, so perhaps the first
message we might receive from an alien civilization, even one millions of years older than ourselves,
might be a query to see if we’ve figured our way past certain scientific mysteries. Number 5. You Need More than One Habitable Planet For
Life One of the greatest mysteries within the story
of the origins of life on earth is if it originally is from here at all. There are certain signs that it might not
be, such it having appeared on earth virtually the first moment it could. That could be simply how it happened, or it
only appears that way because Early earth was contaminated with life from somewhere
else. The conspicuous candidate for this is Mars,
which is smaller and it’s surface would have cooled faster and presumably would have
been habitable earlier than earth. While it’s unknown what the conditions were
for the genesis of life, and indeed we’re not sure which came first, DNA or RNA. But if it were RNA, there may be a hint that
life actually originated on Mars. Some researchers believe that there was a
chemical catalyst involved in the formation of RNA, a kind of scaffold. The best chemical candidates for this do not
seem to fit earth well, for example you’d need oxidation at a time when Earth’s atmosphere
had very little oxygen and you’d also need a relatively dry environment, which earth
was not. Mars however may have better fit the bill. But, it no longer does, and earth is now the
better world, dramatically altered by its life that it is. So the question is, do you need two planets
exchanging material for life that leads to a civilization to get going? This might make intelligent life in the universe
rare, but it’s worth noting that we now know of star systems like Trappist - 1 that
have multiple planets within the habitable zone of the star that could all be transferring
material between themselves. Number 4. Intelligence is a Fluke Right now, there are an estimated 8 to 14
million species living on planet earth. Across the age of life on earth, that number
is far higher. It’s thought that as much as 99% of all
species to have existed on earth are extinct. Out of all of those species, only one can
build and launch a rocket. Even the other extinct members of our genus,
the neanderthals, homo erectus and so on did not develop sufficient, or the right kind
of intelligence to head to the moon. Going on that premise that so far as we know
we are the only space-faring, radio telescope building species ever to appear on this world,
and then only recently after billions of years of life on earth, that wouldn’t seem to
bode well for intelligence appearing commonly on exoplanets. Could it be that the conditions that caused
us to develop our intelligence were so unlikely that human intelligence is actually a fluke? We don’t know, but if we continue to see
no indicators of intelligent alien life in the galaxy, at some point we will have to
consider this option. Number 3. The Scientifically Happy Universe One thing is clear, we do not have a complete
view of most areas of science. We know some, but not all. One area where this is somewhat pronounced
is physics, we don’t have a complete view of it, especially when trying to reconcile
the aforementioned general relativity with quantum theory. One area that may link the two might be string
theory, but that’s still unclear. It may not be, and within that missing puzzle
piece might lay some interesting things about the universe. This might include things like parallel universes
existing, or even other areas of science that we’re not yet aware of. So that creates a question. Would a civilization that has a very good
handle on astrophysics still bother to study it much? Perhaps science leads in a direction that
once you know how stars work, and galaxies merge and so on, then there comes a time where
your understanding is so complete that you simply study other areas where your understanding
is still incomplete, such as things like string theory which appear very hard to test. Why study this universe, when you can study
a more interesting alternate one that you have little understanding of. Or they may come across something within science
that makes the whole study of it frivolous past the development of technology. One option here is if it were discovered that
the universe is unequivocally a simulation. Is nature all that interesting when you know
it’s all fake? Number 2. Not Enough Mass Extinctions We tend to think of mass extinctions as terrible
calamities, and they are, but think for a moment about what happened in the aftermath
of the cretaceous-tertiary mass extinction. By removing the dinosaurs, birds excepted,
it allowed for the rise of the mammals. That in turn resulted in us. Had that asteroid not struck 66 million years
ago, we very likely wouldn’t be here and this planet may well still be dominated by
giant reptiles. It could be said that our evolution is a direct
result of that mass extinction. Whether the dinosaurs would have eventually
developed intelligence and civilization is completely speculative. Maybe, maybe not, though one does have to
wonder what happens to rocketry and space exploration when your astronaut is 70 feet
long and weighs 25 tons. That aside, it may be that earth’s relatively
frequent, but not too frequent, mass extinction events helped the process of evolution to
eventually produce us. And there is some evidence of this; during
periods where there is little pressure on species, evolution tends to slow down. Under periods where the situation changes,
such as in the aftermath of an asteroid impact, it appears to speed up. If mass extinctions on an exoplanet with life
happen too slowly, then it may take significantly longer to reach a situation where intelligence
can evolve. If the cadence is too rapid, it might completely
reset the conditions of the planet before it gets too far along any given path. Number 1. It’s Very Slow Out There One assumption we tend to make when searching
for exocivilizations is that we all perceive time the same way. But this may not be the case. An example of how this might work comes not
from science fiction for a change, but fantasy. The Ents from the Lord of the Rings communicated
and presumably thought dramatically slower than hobbits, leading to frustration on the
hobbit’s part. But it wasn’t that the ents were less intelligent,
it was that they operated fundamentally on a slower basis. There’s no reason that this might not be
the case for an alien civilization. This might lead to very long, slow communications
times. Take the infamous Wow! Signal, which contrary to popular belief remains
unexplained, and did not turn out to be due to comets. It was a single narrowband burst of radio
at 1420 Mhz. It looked like a signal generated by technology. But it has not been detected since. But if transmissions only repeat every 50
years, just to put a random, arbitrary number on it, then it’s no wonder that we haven’t
seen it again. But we would pick it up again in 2027. That might mean that 50 year intervals aren’t
very long periods of time for a slow civilization. And it may not just be a biological phenomenon. Technology could play a role here, if that
civilization were near enough to a black hole, they would be affected by time dilation, or
they may choose to slow down their perception of time technologically for some purpose. And the opposite could also be true, they
might be sped up compared to us, in which case their transmissions might only run for
a blink of an eye, making it very unlikely that we’ll just happen to be looking at
the right part of the sky at the right time to catch them. Thanks for listening! I am futurist and science fiction author John
Michael Godier and be sure to check out my books at your favorite online book retailer
and subscribe to my channels and for regular, in-depth explorations into the interesting,
weird and unknown aspects of this amazing universe in which we live.
