Fermi Paradox (where are all the aliens?).

I think we’re jumping the gun a bit by being surprised that we can’t see
evidence of existing alien star-colonizing civilizations when we just
realized we can’t see 96% of the matter and energy in the universe.

That is the confounding aspect of dealing with the Fermi Paradox in our temporal moment… those civilizations should be throbbing and pulsing (vaguely sexual, but I can deal with it) with radio waves, electromagnetic waves, etc…. they should be HIGHLY visible.  And we aren’t talking about silicate entities or some sci-fi approach to what an alien would be.  It is obvious what it takes to manipulate your environment in ways that are meaningful, and the fact that nothing seems to be around is just stunning.  These cultures would leave ****HUGE**** imprints on the rest of the universe.  We have probes in the universe, radio waves (Hitler’s first big broadcast not withstanding), and large amounts of information constantly careening off our planet.

Whatever the case. alien cultures won’t exist as pan dimensional beings, or shadow cultures on the flip side.  They would be obvious.

It is my estimation that we are much, much too myopic with our timing.  The Fermi Paradox suggests we should be able to tell they are out there, but I think it is a question of timing, and not looking at the bigger picture.

Think of the age of the universe.  15 Billion Years.  Think how long it took us to get where we are. The earth is something like 4.54 billion years old.  The process of evolution started and got to humans…. humans have been around 2.2million years.

We have only been a meaningful group of intrepid travelers and intelligent discoverers for, at best 10,000 years?

So…. we have been an advanced civilization for 10,000 years.  The cave paintings in Lascaux are what…. 16,000 years old?

That means changing and altering our environment in noticeable ways… more than just picking berries and hunting for calories.

When will our culture and civilization die?  We already notice that our term is much more unstable than the dinosaurs.  They lived for 160 million years or so, start to finish….  We are on the edge of instability and extinction at 2.2 million years where the technological and cultural development has been the most brutal and problematic for less than 3000 or 4000 years.  Maybe a bit longer.

All these numbers should be processed side by side with the fermi paradox… and we should recognize that the amount of time an advanced alien civilization could be around in a meaningful way to us… for communication, recognizance, contact…. or just simply recognizing them.. is bittersweet in its brevity.

The likely fact is this:

Life is not simple.  It is a brilliant amalgam of special circumstances.  To get to a puddle of pond scum in mud is a miracle, and yet we are here tapping away at one another.  If it is not simple here, we can assume it is also not simple elsewhere in the universe.  Hell, we have 9 planets, give or take a big asteroid, and we can see on those 9 that even the simplest bacterial form of life that lives by a volcanic vent in the floor of a frozen ocean is tough.  Io and Europa of Jupiter look like the promising houses of life, and even then it is a one in a trillion shot.

So we know life is hard to make.  That being said…. how do we get to where we are?  Evolving into something that can intelligently manipulate it’s environment?  It might be presumptuous, but you need to evolve into a central nervous system.  You need thumbs.  You need to be able to manipulate your surroundings… (Dolphins are probably more intelligent than us, but they can’t do a damn thing to prove it).

So again… life is hard to begin with.  Intelligent life (if you wish to be both arrogant and blase to call ourselves that), is harder.

So here we are… a difficult concept in the middle of a short temporal existence pontificating about “where the hell are the aliens”.

To me, this whole Fermi question comes out to this.  There have been more intelligent civilizations… and there shall be more.. triumphant, universe altering, Indiana Jones type adventurer of civilizations in the future.

I think that we are caught in our own temporal back eddy looking for fish… dropping our lines and fishing blindly.  The fact is that this stream is long, and it heads back up to the mountains, and it lets out at the ocean.  There might not be fish in this pool, but in the whole history of time there have been…. and there will be more after us.

Just because we can’t see them doesn’t mean they aren’t there.  They aren’t there because millions of separate civilizations have already done what we are doing… evolving, coping, struggling to understand… millenia ago.  Some evolved and destroyed themselves with technology.  Some choked the delicate balance of their planet with cancerous ruin.  Millions of civilizations have thrived and passed on well before our time.  And trillions more will encounter the same fate in the coming eons.

Civilizations have come and gone…. millions before our reign in time, and hopefully trillions after us.  But it is irresponsible to think that just because *WE* are here right now, that others should be.

Those other lonely aliens, searching in the dark for a glimpse of hope were looking for us when we were a small biological transfer process in a piece of crystal, exchanging ions.  Or they looked for us when we are foraging and coping… struggling to eat – with mysticism in our minds about the setting sun and moon.  Or they will search for us and find us, some rotting, fetid beacon of some lost radio wave… after our culture has destroyed ourselves with decaying nuclear missiles and poorly programmed computers.

I am being a bit dramatic, but the next civilizations will be stronger, and have more depth.  Time is the only thing that can create that, and there hasn’t been much chance for it.  With a universe created 15 billion years ago, and an earth that started just under 5 billion, you can do the math that only 3 meaningful cultures could have created in that amount of time.  And that is being simplistic.  It is much more complex than that in every conceivable way…

But we are early traveler’s in the temporal and spatial planes of the universe.  We are the first run.  There might have been alien civilizations before us.  There might have been entities hunting and foraging before us that died off on their planet, well before being able to make an obvious impact.  Maybe a volcanic or asteroid based extinction.  Maybe there was not enough of a balance of food in their world, and the ecology crumbled.  But if they were advanced we didn’t catch their radio waves… we didn’t find their mark on spacetime.

The Fermi Paradox *is* interesting though…. because it isn’t whether or not aliens are out there.  It is more about what the hell they did to end up so quiet.

The likelihood is that the alien civilizations will occur later than our time, and the paradox will unravel, and we will be far too gone to comprehend this… either extinct or devolved, or revolved into something that has far more pressing concerns than whether aliens exist… sustenance, shelter, protection from a rotting ecosystem.

The short of it is this… We are considering aliens in a spatial context.  What is so much more vast is a temporal context, and the universe, at 15 billion years, is till vitally young.  It might not be our role to find life out there.  We might be too young still… to find other life, or for other life to be present to find.

It might be another alien civilization’s job to find aliens.  To find us…. in a manner of speaking… changed and altered by our hardships and trials.  Confounded by discovering and losing technology and culture time and time again.  We may be found here, in some distant future, slobbering wildly over the smallest piece of sustenance, not able to comprehend our new overlord visitors that are sampling and testing our world for how we went from cities to caves.  We may be found through our radio waves as they travel interstellar distances to meet their new receivers.

In fact we may be an comical roadside stop, where advanced civilizations travel distances so vast it is euphoric and altering… to come see our world in one of the furthest spiral arms of an insignificant cold galaxy.. in the middle of nowhere like visiting a cranberry silo off the normal route in the middle of Kansas or maybe a small lodge up in Yellowknife.

And those beings will sit and stare and wonder … and look at the ancient civilization acting like barbarians… and wonder if there are more intelligent aliens than them… and what will become of their culture.

It is my estimation, like Carl Sagan, that we humans will become planet hoppers until the end of time.  That the human race will survive through ingenuity and perseverance… and that one day in our struggle to last and become living legend among the cultures and races in the universe… we will be found by incomprehensibly advanced beings that will respect us, calm us…. verify us.

And as their fingers stroke our ailing existence, they will recognize us as one of the oldest, most prolific, and important species in the history of the universe.. struggling to survive, hell bent on leaving a mark, and never willing to give up.

But all in due time.  For now, I have to go to the dry cleaners.

About Uncle Fishbits

I'm.. just this guy, you know?

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