I have been mulling over UAP for over a year or so now, and the Fermi Paradox or Great Silence for even longer. Like basically everyone who has studied either of these topics, I am stumped. Questions of this scope are unlikely to be solved soon, if ever, but not knowing drives me crazy so I attempt to make my best guesses. I understand that everything below is highly speculative and lots of it may end up being totally off the mark once we have more data. I am not going to disagree with anyone who tells me that, but I genuinely believe that given what we know already, this is the most plausible scenario that explains our collective observations the best. Nothing beats raw data, but unfortunately we don’t have raw data on alien behavior, UAP, the lifetime of intelligent species, future technologies, or stuff like the likelihood of abiogenesis or complex life, among other things. The best any of us can do right now is attempt to explain all of our observations, give weight to those that seem the most likely, and adapt as more research and science is done. But anyways…
When talking about the Fermi Paradox and the lack of (scientific) evidence for intelligent life beyond Earth, the Copernican and Anthropic Principles come up a lot. For those who aren’t familiar, the Copernican Principle says that we shouldn’t generally find ourselves in a special or privileged position in the universe. Modern science has largely corroborated this notion, as our planet, Sun, and galaxy do not seem to be exceptionally rare or special in the grand scheme of things. Yet, the sky seems devoid of stellar engineering, radio signals, and Earth has obviously not been settled by aliens yet. So, where is everyone?
Sometimes this is when people invoke the Anthropic Principle to explain things, namely that Earth and/or our species are exceptionally rare, potentially the only in the galaxy or even the observable universe (aka the Rare Earth Hypothesis). This is actually entirely plausible given the uncertainties about abiogenesis, the conditions necessary for complex life, and how often intelligence emerges, and since the Anthropic Principle says that an observer should expect to only exist where observers can exist. For example, it is not anomalous by any means that we observe that we live on a rocky oxygen-rich planet with liquid water, a large moon, and a yellow sun no matter how rare those are IF those are generally necessary for the emergence of intelligent life. However, if we don’t see lots of aliens out there in the universe this implies to a certain extent that our place in the universe is then special or unique somehow, possibly the only of its kind in the observable universe.
The Anthropic Principle can provide even more information about our place in the universe, though, when it is paired with Copernican reasoning, giving us the Refined Anthropic Principle: As observers, we should expect to find ourselves in the most typical place that observers can exist. If one accepts this notion, which I honestly find self evident and the best thing we’ve got in the absence of radio signals and flying saucers on the White House lawn and the like, it has earth-shattering implications. If I am the most typical intelligent observer, I should find myself in the most typical period of time and the most typical location for the sum of all observers. This holds true no matter how common or rare that life is.
So let’s start with time. We are living in a population explosion on planet Earth, with over 8 billion people alive right now. Our best guesstimate for the total human population to have ever existed is no more than a couple hundred billion. However, if humanity were to go on to colonize the Solar System, building megastructures and rotating habitats to house trillions, and spread out across the galaxy doing the same, our population would skyrocket up into the quintillions and sextillions and our species could live on for trillions of years. At face value, this actually seems to be inevitable. There are practically no plausible known ways to kill off every single intelligent species after they have colonized their star system, and we are already making strides toward colonies on the Moon and Mars. It really does seem as if we are alone in a galaxy that is ripe for our taking. This seems to be the general consensus among futurists, for example. But this strongly violates the Anthropic Principle. If a few hundred billion people existed before me, yet there are going to be gazillions of observers, all potentially immortal, why am I not a post-biological machine intelligence living like 100 trillion years after the Big Bang? Instead I am a very mortal biological being living on my species’s home planet without any prospects of ever traveling among the stars. This is probably a typical or at least one of the most typical kinds of existences for an observer to find themselves in throughout the entire history of the universe/multiverse. This conclusion is kinda hard to escape, and has been dubbed the Doomsday Argument. Basically, humanity is most likely to go virtually entirely extinct sometime between the next few centuries to millennia.
When we apply Anthropic reasoning and the Doomsday Argument to the Fermi Paradox or Great Silence, we get a clear resolution. 99.99999% of civilizations go extinct quickly on cosmic scales. I don’t know what causes these nigh inevitable doomsdays, and it doesn’t really matter, but it is very highly certain to kill off all humans in a cosmic blip. We are doomed to extinction, and so are basically all other alien civilizations regardless of whether they are ubiquitous or rare.
(post continued in comments)
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