THE FERMI PARADOX
Educated Guesses From The Hendrix Faculty 1
The Milky Way galaxy is huge, with billions of stars capable of supporting an intelligent life form, in an Earth-like carbon-based mammalian manner or otherwise. A space-faring civilization, even at the slow pace of currently known space travel, could spread throughout the galaxy in a few million years. The galaxy is at least 10 billion years old. So where are the aliens? Are they all just invisible? Where is any trace, debris, radio signal, or Aricebo-style message? Are they hiding? Aestivating? Or are we a lot more special than we realize? I asked Professors Lars Seme and Wenjia Liu, who teach a class together on the topic of Science Fiction, the hypotheses they choose to entertain.
- SEME:
I hope that the answer is that space is big, but that we’ve only been looking for less than a hundred years, which is a very small length of time on a galactic scale. So, within the next couple eons, presuming humans are still around and searching, the answer will come, and we will at least know whether or not we are alone. I fear that the answer is that, due to the sheer size of the galaxy, and how much of it is truly empty, interstellar travel is impossible. The energy requirements, and the hard barrier formed by the speed of light, certainly seem to suggest that a galactic empire couldn’t exist within the known laws of physics. Now, a Dyson Sphere? That’s theoretically possible, sure, but the real issue is making that energy accessible to a device that is actively moving away from the sphere. Even if you manage that, and all of the other very hard problems within long-term space travel, excluding any hyperspace-wormhole stuff, the great cosmic speed limit will always remain.
- LIU:
I’m partial to the “Dark Forest’’ hypothesis, as suggested by sci-fi author Liu Cixin, that surviving alien civilizations must be paranoid and silent, or get swept away by some currently unknown massive destructive force. It is also worth noting that there could exist more dimensions than we are aware of, given that we currently only have the ability to intentionally travel across three. It could be that travel across one of those higher dimensions is much more efficient, and the more popular option for advanced civilizations. Lastly, of course, there’s the Zoo Hypothesis, that aliens intentionally make themselves unknown to us, so they can monitor our growth in isolation, making us like zoo animals, or lab rats. There’s no way to really know, but those possible solutions make sense to me.