Fermi's Inbox Paradox

[dr_tectonic]

melted_snowball posted about the Fermi paradox, which is the question: if there's intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, why hasn't anyone contacted us?

As a total side-note, I just finished re-reading -- somewhat randomly -- The Search For Signs of Intelligent Life In the Universe, the one-woman Lily Tomlin show by Jane Wagner, and I was actually thinking about posting about that today! It's a wonderful, wonderful play. I have it because it was one of the texts for a class I took at MIT on non-linear and interactive fiction, which ranks up there amongst my favorite college courses, actually. It's very funny, and it's about all these synchronicitous and random connections between people, and how we communicate and what it means for people to be in touch with one another. And that's sort of what lots of other people on LJ have been posting about lately (just have a look at my friends page), and kind of what LJ is about anyway, and I guess just... : hey, wow. Synchronicity. Cool.

Anyway, my theory: First, it needs to be noted that the universe is really big. Really, really big. No, bigger than that.

This next paragraph is techno-babble about how many civilizations might be out there. If your eyes glaze over, just skip over it.

There are about a hundred billion galaxies in the universe, at least. A typical galaxy like ours has about a hundred billion stars in it. That's a lot of stars. How many of them have habitable planets? Well, recently, astronomers have been finding lots and lots and lots of stars with planets around them. Okay, supra-jovian gas giants, but still, planets seem pretty common. Let's say one in ten stars has planets at all, and of those, one in ten has planets with the conditions that make life possible. (One in eight is the number we'd pick based on our own solar system.) Complexity theory seems (in my mind, anyway) to suggest that life is an expression of the natural behavior of many far-from-equilibrium systems, which is to start creating complex, ordered systems by locally exporting entropy. So given the right conditions, life should probably be pretty common. Personally, I think there's decent odds we'll find life of some sort elsewhere within our solar system -- life may we not be as common as dirt, it may be MORE common. So let's go with the same "relatively common" number we've been using and call it one in ten. So, that gives us a hundred million planets with life on them, just in our galaxy! How many of those will develop intelligent life that then develops a civilization capable of interacting with others across interstellard distances? That's a complete unknown. But if we plug in 1/10 and 1/10 again, because, hey, it's just a vague estimate, that leaves you with a million.

Think about that. A million separate, civilized, intelligent, alien races out there. In our galaxy alone! Never mind the hundred billion other galaxies! That, my friends, is a LOT of aliens.

Let's hypothesize that there's some way for them to communicate with one another without years of lag. Somebody will have invented something like the Internet. Think about the web. Think about all the useless, stupid, crap out there on the web. All the pages devoted to pictures of someone's car. Badly-spelled and incoherent posturing about whose choice of team sucks more. Nigerian spammers. Websites in orange text on a pink background with the blink tag and background music. Viruses in email attachments. Popup ads. Pages devoted to someone else's freaky sexual fetishes. (And other people's fetishes are always freaky.)

Now. Raise that to the power of a million.

With aliens.

That's right, the web to the power of a million with alien fetish porn and Aldebarian spammers trying to get you to call them long-distance with your planetary bank account information.

Is it any wonder that nobody's contacted us? Nobody wants MORE aliens joining the intergalactic community, there's too damn many already! Shut up! We don't want anymore newbies forwarding us the Nyiem'n-MrrQ*us Hundred-Credit Zoglut-Chip Cookie Recipe! The galactic community is full, go home!

That's why I think nobody's contacted us.

They're just too damn busy sorting through their email.

Comments

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

We saw Lily perform Search on Broadway in 2000. It rocked. It rocked so, so much.

(Frustratingly, we also saw her perform here in our shitty medium-sized city about 5 weeks ago, and she sucked. I think it was because she had to tune down all of her cool stuff to not freak out the old conservative boring people. But it was really disappointing...)

I'm pretty sure I've heard variations on the argument you give, before. But it's worth a chuckle, at least.

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

I also saw it a few years ago with my Mom here in Denver. As you say: rockage.

Funny scientific theories are inherently better than boring ones.

[nehrlich.livejournal.com]

I saw it here in San Francisco. I think. I can't pin down a date or timeframe, or really any relevant space-time details in my memory. But I definitely saw it live.

The best part was they had a tech breakdown at one point, and lost the lights on-stage. While the techs ran about furiously trying to get things going, one of them gave her a flashlight, and she just started talking to the audience, taking requests for some of her old characters, and just generally riffing. She was just so wonderfully personable and open that I was actually a little disappointed when the lights came back on - the show was excellent, but I would have paid to just sit there and watch her riff for two hours. Phenomenal performer.

[dpolicar]

Have you ever read Vinge's "Fire on the Deep"?
He does a pretty good riff on the Galactic Web very much along these lines. Worth reading for that if nothing else.

To further add to the fun, our heroes start to experience breakdowns of their Clarke3-level-semantic-context-extractor as the story continues, so the "posts" become increasingly bizarre and uninterpretable. Towards the end, they get a post from somebody claiming that they have solved the local plot difficulty, and the key insight depends on the fact that humans are six-legged, with a little computer generated footnote "Translation uncertain".

I giggled for days.

It's actually a perfectly serious novel, this is just a kind of running joke throughout it.

Oh, and yes, SfSoILitU seriously rocks.

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

Yes! You know, I thought to myself that I should mention A Fire Upon the Deep, and then I forgot.

I liked the hive-mind wolf-pack critters, the tines. They were nifty.

[dpolicar]

I resented the tines, 'cuz I'd been struggling for a long time with an idea for an intelligent lifeform whose consciousness was housed in N bodies in a not-entirely-collective fashion but couldn't quite make it gel and then Vinge did it precisely right and I pouted. But, yeah, they were nifty.

[bryree.livejournal.com]

Do you still own/could I borrow Fire? These are some strong recommendations.

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

For sure! If you'd like to borrow any number of books for on-call nights, feel free.

[toosuto.livejournal.com]

I second the recomendation...

Yay, I haven't read that yet!

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Thanks, I'll look up Fire.

My absolute favourite Galactic Web short story (with a very similar xenophobia theme) is "They're Made of Meat" by Terry Bisson. If you haven't seen it, it's on his webpage so if you haven't read it you have no excuse for not going there right now. OK, that's a bit over the top. I apologize for ranting about Terry Bisson, but a bunch of his work is genius. Or, at least, finely attuned to be just what I'm looking for in a sci-fi short story.

Re: Yay, I haven't read that yet!

[dpolicar]

I am a huge fan of TMoM. I quote it regularly.

Bisson

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Cool. In that case, I'll stop ranting about it. :)

I wish Bisson's long fiction was as good as his short stories... I believe he has a new book of short stories coming out next year, though.

Yow, I just discovered from his site that he co-wrote a book with the Car Talk guys. I guess that makes sense.