Did you make it all the way through 3 Body Problem on Netflix? Like most so-called “hard sci-fi” it doesn’t hold up to rigorous scientific analysis. One of the problems with science, especially when you’re talking about space travel, is that real science as we understand it today makes long-distance space travel either impossible or impossibly lengthy. So there’s always some sort of “shim” that’s required to let us talk to other civilizations or have them travel to Earth.
But, one thing that is brought up in episode 1 is “The Fermi Paradox.” That’s a real thing, and it’s one of those things which really does raise a good question. Wikipedia describes it as well as anyone else, so I’ll rip off their condensed explanation:
- There are billions of stars in the Milky Way similar to the Sun.
- With high probability, some of these stars have Earth-like planets in a circumstellar habitable zone.
- Many of these stars, and hence their planets, are much older than the Sun.
- If Earth-like planets are typical, some may have developed intelligent life long ago.
- Some of these civilizations may have developed interstellar travel, a step humans are investigating now.
- Even at the slow pace of currently envisioned interstellar travel, the Milky Way galaxy could be completely traversed in a few million years.
- Since many of the Sun-like stars are billions of years older than the Sun, the Earth should have already been visited by extraterrestrial civilizations, or at least their probes.
- However, there is no convincing evidence that this has happened.
Wikipedia
As Fermi supposedly put it, “Where is everybody?” and that’s the point. We should have been visited by other civilizations by now. If we have, where’s the evidence? If they’re not trying to contact us now, why not?
Possible reasons for the Fermi Paradox
Over the years, several explanations have been offered as to why we haven’t been contacted at all by alien civilizations. They range from the interesting to the incredibly depressing. Here are some of the ones I’m aware of:
“The Prime Directive”
Perhaps the most optimistic explanation for the Fermi Paradox is that there’s some sort of galaxy-wide government that prevents contacts with immature civilizations like ours. This would be like Star Trek’s Prime Directive, which is intended to let civilizations mature at their own pace.
That’s a wonderful thought. It implies the galaxy is full of life and that there’s a way to travel much, much faster than light. However, the problem here is that there’s no science to back that up. You would think there would be some evidence of all that life, some thing that “looks” like an artificial pattern that we would be able to detect. It also implies that in the whole galaxy, there are no “bad guys” who would actively try to ignore that rule.
They don’t live long enough
On the other hand, the most depressing possible explanation is that it’s practically impossible for an intelligent civilization to mature to the point of space travel and survive more than a very short time. This theory says that advanced societies develop nuclear power and lose connection with nature and so maybe 1 out of 10,000 actually survives long enough for them to be detectable. With the universe being so old, if there really are so few civilizations that reach maturity and stay there long enough, it’s possible there just aren’t any other ones in the galaxy right now. There’s an equation called the “Drake equation” and it talks about this probability.
They exist, maybe they have been here, and we can’t see the signs for whatever reason
This is a tempting explanation and it covers a lot of ground. Maybe space travelers came to earth and that’s the source of a lot of our religions. I’m not the first person to suggest that theory. If you’re curious about it, look for a book called Chariots of the Gods? which was popular about 50 years ago. It’s garbage, but it is an interesting read.
It’s also possible that alien civilizations are so different from us that we can’t even see them for what they are. Think about this for a moment. Some flies have a lifespan of just one day and they move incredibly quickly for their size. To them, we probably look like big rocks, too slow to detect. What if other civilizations are like that? What if there’s an alien race that lives a million years and we can’t even detect that they are alive? I know it sounds silly but to that end, Mt. Everest itself could be an alien and we wouldn’t know it. The recent MCU film Eternals tried to make this argument but the problem is, it wasn’t a very good film.
The problem with most of the theories like this is that they end up being reductive and degrading to non-western civilizations. For example, the argument being that such-and-so civilization was “too primitive” to have built some monument so it “must” have been aliens.
We’re just not as good at detecting intelligence as we think
We’re just now learning that there are several other species on this planet that are about as intelligent as toddlers or small children. (If you have a toddler, you know they can be pretty enterprising.) It’s possible that a few, like elephants, octopi and dolphins, are even more intelligent. Yet we can’t decipher their language or even interact with them very well. We don’t understand their societies even though we’re supposedly smarter than they are.
Isn’t it likely to think that a spacefaring alien civilization would be much smarter than we are? If we can’t even learn to speak dolphin, how could we learn to speak alien? This speaks to a very basic divide in the definition of “intelligence” and whether or not it’s even possible to define that term in a way that isn’t species-specific.
So maybe at this very moment, there are alien scientists observing us and trying to figure out how to communicate with such a primitive species, and not knowing how to do it.
A million other theories but…
…as we understand science today it’s practically impossible to test them. Distances in space are unimaginably vast and our physics tells us it’s impossible to go fast enough to make it from one place to another quickly. This means that being visited by aliens may be impossible. There may be other forms of communication over long distance, but we may not be able to understand them. It’s also very possible that the desire to travel to other worlds is unique to humans or unique to species at our technological level. Truth is, we don’t know.
Luckily there’s one thing we do know. We know that the events posited by 3 Body Problem are pretty darn unlikely, because they’re built largely on crap science. If nothing else, that should make you feel pretty good about things.
