Where Are the Extraterrestrials?

Maybe it’s us. Could we be too boring or too repulsive to interest an extraterrestrial civilization?

Source: Image by Chaz Windus

Confirmation of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) would be a profound moment in human history and force a radical overhaul of our psychological perspectives. Based on the size, age, and content of the universe, it is rational to suspect, perhaps even expect, that extraterrestrial civilizations exist in great numbers. And yet all we know is loneliness.

More than 70 years ago, Nobel Prize winning physicist Enrico Fermi famously asked, “Where are they?” That question became known as Fermi’s Paradox. It endures today as an irritating intellectual itch felt by all those who consider the problem of a universe that “should be” teeming with ETIs but has given us nothing but cold, dark silence. To date, we have no visit, no evidence, not even the faint whisper of some eternal drone in a distant post-biological society.

With all due respect to the Drake Equation and its mathematically loose but compelling case for ETIs, it is possible that we are alone. However, if extraterrestrial civilizations do exist in great numbers, then one or some combination of the following eight responses to Fermi’s question are a good bet to explain why First Contact has not happened.

Time. In the cosmic context, our species has not transcended mayfly status. Anatomically modern humans are little more than 300,000 years old, and civilization is six or seven thousand years old. These are miniscule fractions of moments in a universe where time is measured in billions of years. Our flash of existence may not yet have provided a sufficient window of time for an ETI to happen by or contact us from afar.

We are repulsive. Maybe it’s us. Perhaps ETIs observed us and didn’t like what they saw. We could be such a bizarre, crazed, obnoxious, and reckless lifeform that they said, “No thank you”, and kept going. It is not difficult to imagine ETIs struggling to justify First Contact with a lifeform that allows a significant portion of its kind to suffer in extreme poverty while also routinely using lethal technology against itself and destroying the ecosystem it depends on to live. Would you be enthusiastic about making friends with a species that has not yet figured out how to be friends with itself?

The cosmos is a killer. The universe doesn’t care how smart you are, and it has multiple ways of obliterating civilizations. Maybe wandering black holes rip up extraterrestrial societies and gamma-ray bursts sanitize entire galaxies at a frequency that doesn’t allow civilizations enough time to find one another.

Distance. Current physics confidently declares that nothing can exceed the speed of light. If no one can beat or cheat this ultimate speed limit it means we are all stuck in cosmic molasses. The astounding distances between stars and between galaxies translate to journeys that probably are beyond the patience of most or all ETIs. For example, if we had a spaceship capable of achieving 99.999 percent of lightspeed it would take us more than two million years to reach the Andromeda Galaxy, a relatively close neighbor here in the Virgo Supercluster. If most ETIs happen to be congregated over on the other side of the universe it would take them billions of years to reach us. To make matters worse, the expanding universe pulls us farther apart every moment.

Nobody cares. What if curiosity is a rare eccentricity and most ETIs don’t want or need to explore, expand, or colonize? What if this behavior is uniquely human? We can’t assume that wanderlust is a common trait of intelligence or that space travel is a standard feature of civilizations. Maybe ETIs tend to look inward rather than outward because they are content or so sophisticated that they don’t waste time thinking about mundane life on faraway worlds.

Science is not inevitable. Our societies today are so saturated with science and technology that it seems to us as if science arises naturally as a byproduct of thinking. But maybe the methods and principles of science don’t “just happen”. Scientific discovery and complex technology could be rare, even among extremely intelligent lifeforms. Intelligence is a complicated, varied, subjective phenomenon that is not necessarily synonymous with “scientific”. Maybe we are a quirky outlier. ETIs could be intelligent in ways we haven’t imagined or can’t comprehend, ways that do not include spaceships and interstellar broadcasts.

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Self-destruction is inevitable. Dead aliens don’t send postcards. In the blink of an eye, we went from the charming Wright Flyer at Kitty Hawk to ominous B52s loaded with fusion bombs. Perhaps spacefaring civilizations are by necessity so ambitious, creative, and voracious that they inevitably eat their own tail. Call it the more brains, more problems syndrome. Maybe when imagination and technology grow in tandem, over thousands or millions of years, the odds of self-destruction increase until something finally gives. We admire intelligence because we have it, but what if it is the fool’s gold of evolution? Complex civilizations could be dead-end streets where ETIs race to destruction. Our sample size of one proves nothing, of course, but we seem to be demonstrating this predicament right now. Without radical species-wide psychological maturation, significantly enhanced thinking skills, and a thorough redesign of key social structures, it is difficult to imagine how we can survive ourselves.

We are boring. Maybe we fall so far over on the unfortunate end of the boring-fascinating spectrum that ETIs have no interest in meeting us. It could be that we move, communicate, and think so slowly or incompetently that they choose to visit other worlds or stay submerged in their own virtual universes. Lichens are an amazing fusion of fungi and algae. Much as they fascinate me, however, if I were exploring someplace populated with dynamic, creative, and deeply philosophical lifeforms, it might take me a while before I knelt to appreciate the local version of lichens. We love to think highly of ourselves, but somebody must be the dullest of them all. Maybe it’s us. Maybe we are the lichens of the cosmic intelligentsia.