Imagined Life by James Trefil & Michael Summers

Author:James Trefil & Michael Summers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Smithsonian
Published: 2019-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

The paradise hypothesis: The extraterrestrials are fat and happy in an ideal environment and have no interest in exploration.

The replacement hypothesis: Organic life has been replaced by intelligent machines (a future often envisioned for the human race), and machines have no interest in contacting organic life.

We could go on, but we think you get the point. The problem, however, is that while we can imagine any of these scenarios playing out in a few extraterrestrial civilizations, it’s really hard to consider any of them as the inevitable outcome of the development of life. To see the importance of this point, go back to chapter 1’s section “Doing the Math.” There must be many millions of Earth-sized planets in their stars’ CHZs, a conjecture supported by the fact that we have already found a couple dozen of them in our small sample of a few thousand exoplanets. That all of them would adopt something like Star Trek’s Prime Directive, for example, is extremely unlikely. We’re afraid that the most logical answer to the question of why we aren’t aware of the existence of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations is that these civilizations aren’t there. As far as we can see, the only explanation for this that depends on the laws of nature (see chapter 11) is one that depends on the operation of natural selection.

This leads us to a very dark possibility about the fate of life on Goldilocks worlds. Given the tendency of natural selection to produce aggressive species—species like Homo sapiens—it is possible that the entire history of the universe has been taken up by the process of evolution producing intelligent life forms on one Goldilocks planet after another, only for those life forms to wipe themselves out once they discover science. In other words, there may have been vast numbers of civilizations that reached our level out there, but they all destroyed themselves before they could colonize their nearby stars. This doomsday scenario is a common explanation for the Fermi paradox.

It’s a chilling thought. Having said that, however, we have to point out that discoveries made about the interstellar medium while this book was being written may suggest another possible solution that, like the scenario above, is based on the fundamental laws of nature. These discoveries, along with other as yet unanswered questions, appear in chapter 17.

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