Debunking the Fermi Paradox

Modeling the future of advanced intelligent life as humans with better rockets is fundamentally mistaken

The Fermi Paradox usually follows one of these lines of argumentation:

• If intelligent life was abundant in the universe we should see tons of radio communications in the night sky

• Or else, if it was abundant, we should already have been conquered / destroyed / colonized and since we believe humans evolved naturally on Earth, this means they must be incredibly rare (“Grabby Aliens” hypothesis).

• Or else, some variety of argument that assumes the future of all advanced intelligent life is industrializing the light cone according to our current familiar set of energy and resource constraints. I call this the ‘indefinite rocket future’ since it assumes there are no fundamental advances in physics left to be made.

Other arguments get even more out there, something like “we live in a simulation and the purpose of this simulation is to explore the ramifications of AI expanding into the universe forever, and so it only needs one AI bearing planet to test this hypothesis.”

My personal opinion is rather harsh - all of these perspectives are extremely narrow minded and unimaginative. The conclusions they reach are provincial: we use radios, radios are awesome, therefore all civilizations will use radios forever, we don’t observe tons of radio traffic and therefore there’s no one else out there. Similarly, we are developing AI, we think that will be a big deal, and we think it’ll continue getting smarter indefinitely and replace all biological life. Since we’re biological life we’re the first to develop AI. Somehow this means we live in a simulation or that all of reality is fake. The pattern is starting with a narrow view of history and technological progress and extrapolating this into a sweeping general claim about all life in the universe or contesting that reality itself is a hoax.

Unfortunately this is a familiar way of thinking on the topic of alien life. We observe some trend in our local environment and place in time and history and then do a straightforward extrapolation out from there. Some call this “situational awareness” but really its narrow-minded provincialism. In the 1960s we were making incredible strides of progress in aerospace and rocketry, and so we naturally assumed that in 30 or 40 years we’d all have vacation homes on the Moon. This did not happen because technological progress in those fields reached limits set by material science on things like jet engine and rocket performance and so the rapidly advancing wave of technological progress transitioned from an exponential into a sigmoid function. Now we think AI is going to conquer us because once again we see lots of rapid progress. Already this progress is tapering off for LLMs. By all metrics of 10 or 20 years ago we’ve reached AGI and yet somehow society is not completely upended. Woops.

The more advanced a civilization gets the more it respects the right of self-determination

This is the common failing in thinking about alien intelligent life. We assume they will be humans but with better versions of all our current technology stacks: better robots, better AI, better rockets. We have a hard time imagining there may be fundamentally new branches of technology yet to be discovered; more to the point we think our view of physics is nearly complete and you can’t get anything better than rockets.

Here’s the counter-argument: as a civilization progresses it doesn’t just get better technology, it becomes more enlightened in the sense it develops higher degrees of conscious awareness of itself, its surroundings, of moral responsibility and environmental stewardship. We can see this in our own recent past. A couple thousands years ago it was par-for-the-course to conquer a neighboring polity, kill all the men, enslave the women and children. This was right and just and totally normal. Only a couple hundred years ago it was considered fair game to colonize the indigenous people of less developed countries, put them into slavery, extract all the resources possible.

Today things are a bit different. Take North Sentinel Island as an example - one of the last uncontacted indigenous tribes on the planet. The Indian Government has banned anyone from visiting. Why? Because the Sentinelese have made it very clear they don’t want anyone visiting; they’re extremely hostile and independent. Moreover, introducing diseases or technology would either wipe them out biologically or else culturally. Even more to the point, North Sentinel island is no longer a relevant or meaningful resource extraction opportunity considering the incredibly vast reach of humanity over the planet. The potential economic incentives given our current level of technological mastery and global reach are pitifully small compared to the moral unease of utterly destroying an independent society.

This points to the most important general principle when considering the mindset of civilizations as they achieve higher degrees of enlightenment and conscious awareness. The respect and enforcement of the right to self-determination.

We know by experience that the right to self-determination is the best performing meta-principle for social organization and economic prosperity. America is the country that has more than anyone else enshrined this right to the greatest degree in its set of founding documents and its out-performed everyone else on the planet by a large margin in providing for a quality of life and achieving scientific and technological mastery. America has even fought foreign wars at terrible costs to uphold the right of self-determination of other countries against totalitarian foreign oppressors, like Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Communist Russia. It won those wars and then did what? It’s armies left. America was more interested in having other self-determined societies that could be trade partners than its colonies.

Looking at our own civilizational history paints the trend: the more advanced and enlightened a society becomes the more they respect and codify the right of self determination, and then apply it to other societies. Is this another indefinite linear extrapolation? Not really: respecting the rights of self-determination trades off against pursuing your own self interest out of resource constraints. If you achieve complete physical mastery and no longer face resource constraints, you simply saturate at the level of “we respect others rights of self-determination because the resources acquired by breaking this are trivial and uninteresting to us.”

This is the starting point of where the “Grabby Aliens” / industrialize the lightcone modality of thinking about intelligent aliens falls apart. We think aliens will be humans with better spaceships that are still primarily concerned with collecting raw resources and energy at the expense of everyone else, and wipe them out, because thats what we did during the era of European Colonial powers. We gloss over how modern humanity treats the Sentinelese and our respect for their self determination, and the comparative tinyness of their small land-mass in comparison to the resources we can access that don’t require destroying another society.

Our understanding of physics is still shallow

There’s the final frontier of provincialism we can smash through on this intelligent aliens business: the assumption that our understanding of physics is nearly complete and therefore intelligent advanced species will face the same material and energy constraints as us, and so compete with less advanced species for those things.

We assume aliens will need tons of steel, nuclear materials, perhaps methane and oxygen for their better version of rockets. They’ll be interested in strip-mining the asteroid belt and turning every solar system into Dyson Spheres. Again this strikes me as narrow-minded and provincial, because it assumes that into the indefinite future stars will be the best source of energy for any civilization.

The assumption here is that our set of physics is nearly complete and we’re already close to ‘the end of technology’. There are reasons to doubt this, because there are a bunch of loose ends in physics that are still unexplained, things like quantum gravity, dark energy, dark matter, CPT symmetry violations, and so on. Here are a few suggestive lines of physics research that destroy the contention that future advanced intelligent alien life operates under the same material, energy, and space-time constraints we currently assume:

• The Casimir effect. This is a small but measurable force that exists between two parallel plates. What produces the force? Well it turns out that even in empty space there is a huge amount of energy when you sum over all the allowable ground states of the electromagnetic field. Between the two plates there is less energy because the number of ground states is greatly reduced to only those that fit between the plates. Because forces are produced by gradients in energy and if the plates are closer together there is less energy, there is a slight force pushing the plates closer together. It’s unlikely we can extract energy from the Casimir effect directly, but it suggests that Zero Point Energy is very much a real thing; harnessing this would produce a nearly unlimited source of energy although its not currently understood how to do this.

• Alcubierre Drives. Achieving faster-than-light travel is possible if you can induce positive and negative curvature behind and in front of the space craft. The region of space between the two curved regions will start accelerating and locally the craft wont go faster than light, but, in reference to distant objects it will. Doing this requires huge amounts of energy however so it’s not thought to be feasible.

• The existence of additional or higher physical dimensions. Something posited by many physical theories but not something experimentally demonstrated already. Still, this is not something we can rule out conclusively, and naturally as a civilization achieves higher levels of scientific and technological mastery they would leverage these to their advantage.

More generally, if a civilization is able to engineer its level of technology and society into a state that is undetectable by lower-tech civilizations, it would do so immediately in either a dark-forest theory of interstellar life or a benevolent respect-for-self-determination theory. In either case there is no advantage to being seen unless you want to be seen.

Where does this land us? In a new view of advanced alien intelligence. I’ll sum this up quickly:

• Spiritually advanced: Advanced intelligent life respects the right of self-determination of lesser advanced species, and in the vastness of space the moral weight of destroying a civilization versus acquiring their relatively tiny amount of resources is one-sided towards non-interefence. In this sense they are not just more technologically advanced but also far more spiritually advanced.

• Free from resource constraints: The energy and material constraints relevant to our current industrial civilization are no longer of any concern to advanced intelligent life as they are able to access things like zero-point energy and manipulate spacetime far in excess of our own abilities.

• Invisible unless they want to be seen: Either through more conventional cloaking technology like negative-index of refraction materials or else through more exotic means like leveraging additional physical dimensions to escape our detection abilities altogether. There is no advantage to being seen unless you want to be seen.

This paints a very different picture from the “humans with better rockets” view of intelligent life that is still just hell-bent on acquiring materials and resources and building Dyson Spheres. Free from energy and material constraints and able to travel anywhere in the universe relatively easily, advanced intelligent life becomes more like gardeners than conquerers. They are interested in environmental protection, cultivating life, enjoy seeing it flourish and prosper. They have respect for other civilizations and their right of self-determination. They avoid explicitly interfering in their affairs or overtly directing the course of their natural progression and evolution. They remain undetectable unless they explicitly choose to reveal themselves for some purpose that is more likely benevolent than anything; the resources of any one planet are totally trivial compared to their powers.

And, likely they are already all over the place: where ever there is a nascent technological civilizations getting on its way they would likely take an interest. It’s entirely possible they are already present around the Earth and interested in its affairs, keeping a mindful and respectful distance, waiting for the right time to fully reveal themselves. Perhaps that inflection point is when we achieve some level of AI, or perhaps some level of physics, or perhaps when we evolve culturally or spiritually to the point we respect each others rights of self determination. Perhaps they are waiting for us to traverse some Great Filter after which point its no longer interference to make first contact. After all, if we saw Sentinelese using cellphones and making TikTok’s its unlikely we’d hold off contact to preserve their culture.

Of course, there is also plenty enough evidence for the interested researcher to conclude this is exactly the case and there have been multiple contacts between advanced alien life and humans already, but that these are uniformly dismissed as hallucinations, hoaxes, conspiracies, etc, because they fall so far outside our existing worldview. In the end the truth is something every person should seek and determine for themselves, but the contention that “advanced alien life should think and look like humans with better rockets” is something entirely unsupported when you observe the cultural progression of humanity and the tantalizing future of continued physical mastery.