The Fermi Paradox

The slightly modified Copernican principle tells us there is nothing special about us. Why would an intelligent species want to visit our home? We want to get off this death trap that is going to explode.

Space near suns is a dangerous place. There are all kinds of rocks, radiation, strong fields, etc.

I think a species capable of going beyond an Oort type cloud for a generation would want and be able to stay out of the danger zone.

Think about it. If you are standing beside an isolated atom and you think atoms are a natural consequence of laws of our universe you'd wonder why you can't see another atom near, as if it is a violation of Principle of homogeneity. But if you look out on a grander scale you'd see there are other atoms and they are (on appropriate scale) spread homogeneously. Of course as intelligent, conscious, technological civilization has evolved on Earth, it should also have done on other planets by now. I think the problem is we are seeing on a smaller scale just around our planet. Biological systems are a natural consequence of our set of laws of Nature. When we have the appropriate technology we will find that life has indeed formed all over our universe.

The elegant resolution of the Fermi Paradox is to reject the Principle of Homogeneity, specifically the modern version of the Copernican Principle. I have posted an informal proof that "people have a privileged position as observers of the universe" on the "A Physicist and a Science Writer Walk Into a Bar" thread. See "Testing for an Isomorphism between Mathematics and the Physical Universe" dated Nov. 28, 2014 @ 10:23 GMT. It is part of a discussion thread starting with Steve Agnew's comment on Nov. 21, 2014.

I thought that there was too much philosophical speculation about how to make definitions that would be useful for all of physics, so I choose a piece small enough on which to construct an informal proof. It shows how to describe the motions of the Sun and the Moon as seen from the Earth using pure mathematics. The extreme improbability (p

The elegant resolution of the Fermi Paradox is to reject the Principle of Homogeneity, specifically the modern version of the Copernican Principle. I have posted an informal proof that "people have a privileged position as observers of the universe" on the "A Physicist and a Science Writer Walk Into a Bar" thread. See "Testing for an Isomorphism between Mathematics and the Physical Universe" dated Nov. 28, 2014 @ 10:23 GMT. It is part of a discussion thread starting with Steve Agnew's comment on Nov. 21, 2014.

I thought that there was too much philosophical speculation about how to make definitions that would be useful for all of physics, so I choose a piece small enough on which to construct an informal proof. It shows how to describe the motions of the Sun and the Moon as seen from the Earth using pure mathematics. The probability of the correlations (including those from my further comments) being random is less than one part in 10-15. This extreme improbability implies that all of math and science are just different facets of the same reality. Empirical data is useful for insight and validation, but is not strictly necessary.

Erratum - The probability of the correlations between the motions of the Earth and Moon on the sky and elementary number theory being random is less than one part in 1015. I left in a minus sign when I had to repost after the Previewer did not show me that the posting operation would break on a unbalanced left pointed bracket.

The probability is really on the order of one in 1020. To get that high improbability one has to further analyze the second order constant associated with the month and the year and to look at a couple of things in the background. Because 2 was divided out three times, 10 needs to be used in three places. The first was the 10*7 = 70, the inverse inclination of the Moon's orbit. Another one is the 10*47 = 470 year lifespan of Copernicanism from 1543 to 2013. The last is in the 1020. The finite symmetries of the Celestial Sphere are represented by the Platonic solids. There are 20 ways, 10 of each handiness, to embed a tetrahedron in a cube in a dodecahedron. The 1020 is the number of chiral ways raised to the number of achiral ways. This arises from the formation of a phase space.

Correction - In calculating my dates for the era of "Copernicanism" I did not take nutation into account. Ignoring nutation the obliquity of the Earth would have been exactly 23.5 degrees about November 1542. That would be about when Copernicus fell ill leading to his death in May 1543. His master work, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium was being prepared for printing at the time. Including nutation gives an earlier date about July 1545 and a later date about July 2015, which is about when my ideas for a new geocentrism are likely to be widely distributed.

These dates are important for understanding how to interpret "realism" in the new science. Using the Big Bang as the center we have a "holographic" universe in which dynamically changing interference patterns become "simple" for some particular model, so it can be "discovered". Copernicus may be thought of as the last of the old guard preparing the way for the new "centerless" universe of Newton and later scientists. Thus the earlier correlation is with the end of Copernicus's life.

Taking "Now" as the center we have a "Shakespearian" universe. The whole world is a stage upon which to live out the stages of life and the rest of the universe is a backdrop. Mathematically we can extrapolate into the past and future using the simple patterns currently observable.

THE FERMI PARADOX: THE THEORETICAL REALITY SUPPORTING EXTRATERRESTRIAL VISITATIONS

Where is everybody?" was a question posed by physicist Enrico Fermi. The 'paradox' is that extraterrestrials should be here, yet there is no indisputable evidence to support that. Or is there? Those pesky UFOs just will not go away!

The Fermi Paradox (after physicist Enrico Fermi) briefly goes as follows. Extraterrestrial intelligences with advanced technology and interstellar spaceflight capability exist. Sub-light interstellar spaceflight violates no laws of physics. Adopting the mantra of quantum physics, 'anything that's not forbidden is compulsory'. The time it takes to explore every nook and cranny of our Milky Way Galaxy via sub-light interstellar spaceflight is a tiny fraction of the age of the Galaxy. There's at least one universally valid reason to boldly go - species survival. No star, no solar system lives forever. We (Planet Earth) can't hide from alien exploration and/or colonization. So, where is everybody? [By analogy, terrestrial life forms like bacteria, ants and cockroaches, birds, and of course humans, have explored and colonized Planet Earth in tiny fractions of the time that Earth itself has existed.] So again, where is everybody?

I can hear screams of 'objection, objection' now. It's obviously too far and takes too long to get from there (wherever that is) to here. Well, life wasn't meant to be easy! Seriously, if you think about it a while, methinks you protest too much!

Firstly, aliens could have a very long natural lifespan relative to us carbon-based terrestrial bipeds. There's no natural law that confines intelligent life forms to an existence of just three score and ten.

Secondly, advanced extraterrestrials may have perfected various hibernation techniques. Put your spaceship on autopilot and sleep the long journey away.

Thirdly, there's that way old sci-fi chestnut, the multi-generation interstellar spaceship. While I feel that's an unlikely concept, especially for exploration, it might not be quite so far out if the objective is interstellar colonization.

Then there's bioengineering, turning an organic body into something that's more machine than flesh and blood, perhaps akin to Doctor Who's Daleks. Given advances in artificial body parts for humans, albeit it hip replacements or dentures or even mundane tooth fillings, that's certainly a valid possibility.

Fifthly, why stop there? Send 100% machines - artificial intelligences in the form of cybernetic 'organisms' or robots or androids or tiny nanotechnology machines. One obviously things of Data from 'Star Trek: The Next Generation', or something akin to the original 'Battlestar Galactica' Cylons. Think of the savings in not having to provide life support and other life essentials for biological organisms. We've made a start already down this path. There's nothing different in principle between a Cylon and our Pioneer 10 & 11; our Voyager space probes. It's just that a Cylon is a lot more sophisticated. The day will come when our Pioneers and Voyagers will morph into something approaching a Cylon, or any one of multi-dozens of similar 'beings' in the sci-fi literature. Since AI is nearly immortal (relative to flesh and blood), that takes care of travel time arguments, and the possible environments fit for relative easy exploration (colonization?) are expanded greatly.

Lastly, maybe, just maybe, a sort of warp drive, faster-than-light ship is possible. Aliens whose science is thousands of years more advanced than ours just might have gotten around Einstein's speed limit. I wouldn't want to wager any money on it, but I'd be less than open minded not to admit the possibility, however remote. Add to that, theoretical but allowable 'gateways' between distant points of our Universe, maybe even to other universes - wormholes and Black Holes. Maybe, just maybe, an advanced alien civilization has the ways and means to manipulate such objects and forces to facilitate easy travel in space (and time too maybe). An excellent hardcore science based sci-fi novel that doesn't rely on pseudo techno-babble that illustrates this is Carl Sagan's "Contact".

So yet again, where is everybody?

Answers include (but aren't really limited to) general concepts that suggest that...

They don't exist; never have and never will. What's wrong with that? Well, given the vastness (100,000 light-years across) and timelessness (over 12 billions of years minimum) of our Milky Way Galaxy's entire expanse, the odds that we are the proverbial IT, the one and only, is extremely unlikely. It's a massive violation of the Principle of Mediocrity or the Copernican Principle.

We're the first kids on the block, not the new kids on the block. What's wrong with that? Again, the odds that in all the vastness of our Milky Way Galaxy we should happen to be the first, is unlikely in the extreme. Our Solar System is but 4.5 billion years old; our Galaxy is way, way, way, way older than that.

They exist but don't care to explore space, to seek out new life and new civilizations. They don't want to boldly go or seek communications. They want to be left alone - isolationists. What's wrong with that? That might be true for one, or several alien civilizations, but to extrapolate and suggest that that applies across the board to each and every extraterrestrial civilization is illogical.

They boldly go, but haven't come our way yet. What's wrong with that? Again, it doesn't take that long to explore the entire Galaxy. It would be a fluke if we hadn't of been noted and logged in some other civilization's database.

They're here, but leave us alone. What's wrong with that? Again, that might be true for one, or several alien civilizations, but to extrapolate and suggest that that applies across the board again strikes me as illogical. There is such a thing called the Zoo Hypothesis to explain the Fermi Paradox. It's both a Star Trek 'Prime Directive' concept combined with that of a zoo. Aliens (the zoo keepers) don't interfere with us (though of course every now and then the zoo keepers have to interact with the animals (humans) in the zoo), don't allow others to interfere with us, yet probably wouldn't allow us to escape the cage (meaning probably the confines of our solar system - I mean we have been allowed to travel to the Moon).

They're here and interact with us and our environment - UFOs anyone? What's wrong with that? Absolutely nothing!

UFOs are a perfect answer to the Fermi Paradox!

Further readings: The Fermi Paradox

Hart, Michael H. & Zuckerman, Ben (Editors); Extraterrestrials: Where Are They?; Pergamon Press, N.Y.; 1982:

Hart, Michael H. & Zuckerman, Ben (Editors); Extraterrestrials: Where Are They? [2nd edition]; Cambridge University Press, Cambridge; 1995:

Verma, Surendra; Why Aren't They Here? The Question of Life on Other Worlds; Icon Books, Cambridge; 2007:

Webb, Stephen; Where Is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life; Copernicus Books, N.Y.; 2002:

Life is a very interesting phenomena. I tend to think that life is a pure chancing event, an anomaly due to the sheer number of possible events in the whole universe. It is like a lottery winner, we know out of a bizillion possibilities, there will be one winner. Then you ask the winner why he even exists.

There is no other plausible explanation but pure chance. By that understanding, it is highly unlikely to have conscious biological beings out there.

My verdict is that we are the lottery winner and lottery winner ought not to ask other lottery losers why they lose.

Now that science has firm evidence for earthlike planets from the passage of those bodies in front of their suns, it would seem likely that the nearest intelligence will be in excess of 400 years away in time. Some of those other planets will then be looking at earth's passage just as we are looking at theirs.

The dispersion of light pulses means that communication would need to modulate something as bright as a 1/1000th of a star, which is already quite a lot of total energy. A massive structure the size of the earth could enhance the signal that others already measure for earths passage in front of the sun.

However, it is much more likely that a civilization would use high energy neutral atom beams instead of just a really massive and bright source of lower energy photons like a sun or even high energy gamma rays.

Science should therefore look carefully for signs of high energy neutral atom pulses in the passages of likely planets across their suns. One possible communication source is with very high energy neutral particles since such atoms have much less background and would tend to journey in the same path as light. In principle, there is a way to modulate the phases of an electron and proton in a stepwise progression of coaccelerations of the electron and proton into a neutral atom beam.

The resultant high energy neutral atom beam would then be highly collimated and have a large amount of information stored in the differential modulation of the electron and proton phases of each atom, but as bunches of redundant and identical atoms. Even capturing one atom would in principle reveal the information of an entire civilization. If we could create and point such high energy and highly phase modulated neutral hydrogen beams to promising planets, then those planets should be transmitting similar high energy neutral atom beams to us as well if they are intelligent enough.

Once civilization reaches the point that we can code and decode such a high energy neutral atom in space, we should be able to participate in the larger galactic communication internet that surely now exists, albeit hundreds of years out of phase with each other. Even if we only received one atom per year, we could still keep in touch with the cosmos.

Although we do not yet understand how to code and transmit the aware matter packets of thought, eventually we will learn how to do that. Our fragile bodies born of our mother earth simply cannot journey far into harsh and inhospitable cosmos of our father time. The aware matter packets of consciousness stored on a single atom, though, can make such a journey. We should be able to have dozens of neutral beams transmitting and receiving aware matter packets from stable orbits around our sun and therefore begin sharing our lives with an increasingly greater portion of this vast universe.

The Fermi paradox is not a paradox but is simply a limitation of our imagination...

Another aspect of the simplicity is that it indicates the death process of the universe toward infinite entropy. Based on the second law of thermal dynamics, our universe is slipping into this final death of maximum entropy. An accompanying result of this process is that the universe becomes simpler and simpler. Imagine a universe where homogeneity rules and any imaginable infinitesimal particles and forces are distributed absolutely uniformly and cannot be changed a bit. This would be the simplest state and requires the simplest mathematics or physics. If we are slipping in that direction, which I think we are, then we should not be surprised that the physics laws in describing the universe is becoming simpler. Our current simplistic physical forces and laws are hinting that.

"Where are they?" Here is an answer. The time between the first detection of astronomical radio waves in 1932 and the technological singularity in 2045 is only 113 years. Each civilization capable of detecting astronomical radio waves will have a singularity. After a singularity a civilization would not bother to send out signals because it would be like communicating to dumb creatures and it would be a loss of energy (as carried away by photons). 113 years is nothing on galactic or cosmic time scales. The window of time for seeing alien life that is approximately at our stage of technological development is thus way too short. We should expect to not see them and vice versa.