Collin R. Skocik

How do we resolve the Fermi Paradox? There are more than a hundred billion stars in our galaxy. Seeing the persistence of life on our planet, it does seem ridiculous to think that life has not come to be anywhere else. We've found life in climates where it wouldn't seem possible for anything to survive. Volcanic pits, the frozen strata of Antarctica, the radioactive zones around nuclear test sites, and soil layers far beneath the point that all life was thought to cease. Cockraches are impervious to radiation (how? Aren't they made of DNA like the rest of us?), blacksmokers thrive in deadly poison, and I'm pretty sure I've read that bacteria on the lunar landers have survived on the Moon -- though I don't recall my source and that might have been in a science fiction novel, not something real.

So considering that life appears to be a natural process that occurs anywhere you have liquid water and a source -- any source -- of energy, it therefore seems a foregone conclusion that it must have evolved elsewhere; in fact, since water and energy are overpoweringly abundant commodities not just in the universe, but even in our solar system, life should be everywhere, all around us. I have little doubt we'll eventually find evidence of life on Mars, Europa, Callisto, and comets. So you'd think there'd be intelligence throughout the galaxy. If even one in a million planets with life on them evolved into intelligent life, there ought to still be plenty of intelligent civilizations out there.

So if that's the case...where are they? True, we've only been scanning the skies for alien radio signals for a very brief time, but even in that brief time we ought to have picked up something. No, they'd be unlikely to be answering our signals, since anything we transmit would only be fifty light years out by now, and therefore intersected a handful of the nearest stars, but we still should have detected signals sent out by civilizations long ago. We're a very young civilization; there should have been civilizations from two or three generations of stars back, in other words hundreds of billions of years old, plenty of time for their signals to have crossed the meager hundred thousand light year-diameter of our galaxy. So...where is everybody? It certainly is a puzzle.

Is it possible we really are alone? Think of it this way. Life on Earth has existed for 4.5 billion years. Human civilization, intelligent Homo sapiens, has existed for roughly a hundred thousand years. As far as we've been able to prove, Homo sapiens is the first and only life form on Earth we would classify as unambiguously intelligent. And yes, the intelligence of other animals like dolphins is quite extraordinary, and there's fertile ground there for research and debate, but no dolphin ever built a radio transmitter or spaceship. So rigidly defining intelligence as the ability to not only think and learn, but also to apply and build tools, it would seem that intelligent life is much more rare than life alone. Intelligence does not seem to be, as a general rule, vital to a life form's survival. An animal is more likely to develop sharp claws, fast legs, powerful jaws, and various other simple means of survival than the devlopment of a large brain case and dextrous fingers. The human body and mind is the result of a very rare combination of unusual climatic circumstances. A large brain case and manual dexterity were already a primate characteristic when the jungles of Africa receded some five or ten million years ago. Primates such as Autralopithecus aforensis and africanus, stranded in deserts and caves, could either die out or develop their minds. Thankfully, with an already above average intelligence and opposable thumb, our remote ancestors began to think through problems and find solutions not dictated by instinct alone.

Of course, I'm grossly oversimplifying an incredibly long and complex process, so I don't want to get a lot of comments from pedantic anthropologists correcting my errors. My point is that it's much more difficult for animals to rise to what we'd consider an intelligent level than it is for the mixing of chemicals to produce bacteria, or even for single-celled life forms to make the monumental leap to multicellular forms. So even if the universe is teeming with life -- and indeed some astronomers are now convinced that Earth is in a unique position to do even that; the sun is unusually stable, we're in an area of the galaxy unusually low in radioactive levels, etc. -- how likely is it that intelligence would rise anywhere else?

But...on the other hand...the more we learn, the more we must shed our human vanity that we're just so much smarter than everyone else. Dogs, birds, monkeys, elephants, squid, dolphins, all consistently reveal themselves to be much more intelligent than we ever suspected. Nor are we the only animals with technology. Ants, bees, beavers, spiders, the world is replete with animals who contruct amazing artificial structures. Bats and whales even use sonar -- in fact if I'm not mistaken that's where we got the idea for sonar. How much of a push is really necessary for animals to start...thinking? I often think we've created a society in which intelligence is no longer necessary to survival and therefore we've stopped doing it. As a general rule it seems people are sliding backwards into a contented stupidity. Maybe somebody else on our planet will start doing the thinking and move in on our territory. Not that I'm lying awake at night worried about talking apes inheriting the Earth, but I wouldn't be at all surprised in a few hundred thousand years to find us schismed into H.G. Wells' Eloi and Morlocks. Maybe intelligence is self-destructive and the reason we've never encountered intelligent aliens is because they've all destroyed themselves before having the chance to signal anyone.

Another possibility is that we've already detected plenty of alien signals. After all, if it's an alien signal, we wouldn't know how to read it. The universe is brimming full of natural radio waves. The truth of the matter is we have no idea what we're looking for. We could have proof flowing through our radio telescope arrays every day and not even know it.

But I think Richard Feynman summed it up nicely: "Sometimes I think we're alone, sometimes I think we're not. Either way, it's staggering."