The Fermi paradox or Fermi’s paradox, named after physicist Enrico Fermi, is the apparent contradiction between the lack of evidence and high probabilityestimates, e.g., those given by the Drake equation, for the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations. The basic points of the argument, made by physicistsEnrico Fermi (1901–1954) and Michael H. Hart (born 1932), are:

• There are billions of stars in the galaxy that are similar to the Sun, many of which are billions of years older than Earth.

• With high probability, some of these stars will have Earth-like planets, and if the Earth is typical, some might develop intelligent life.

• Some of these civilizations might develop interstellar travel, a step the Earth is 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.

Wikipedia: fermi paradox

Many people like to speculate about the existence of aliens, it’s fun, it’s cool and why the heck not? Science fiction makes a universe chalk full of aliens, seem like a cool time to live. But what is the real barrier to growing past our home star and reaching beyond; either to colonize or meet other life? It’s the same topics I’ve been writing about race, religion, money and nation. These are the defining factors because they are crucial to the development of civilization and they are also the things that cause it to collapse when unbalanced and antiquated to rigid constraints unaligned to the needs of life. Let’s assume all planets with intelligent life reaches a point like us: they use fossil fuels from past eras to fuel their growth, they divided their planet up by historical migration patterns in to defined jurisdictions, trade and consume products that are developed along an increasingly global supply and value chain, reinforced by a common currency system. These systems couldn’t have been developed on our planet without the linear progression of religions, money and nations (race is a social invention and is therefore not an arbitrary element when cross comparing alien life). Religion has acted as the precursor to science in our history, money acts as a way of encouraging innovation through the necessity of survival. The idea of a money system for survival and interconnected acts of need, is the underwriting idea that capitalism exploits, and it’s fair to say that an alien civilization developed under a common system (communism has never really been implemented in practice, so it’s not comparable). Nation seems like an easily replicated idea: people move and then settle, others continue to move and some compete for resources and amenities proximal to their areas (i.e. war), probably to claim it for their respective groups. So the idea that another intelligent species did so too is reasonable.

The linchpin in this comparison is the point in which these intelligent species realized what was in their best interest and those with social powers coincided personal wealth for the continuity of the planetary population. The extraction of resources in any way than equitably owned and disseminated to the population, creates a distribution curve in which the resources are controlled by fewer and fewer. I’m assuming that this life is like us, and breathes air and uses fossil fuels, in which case the same scenario that in happening to humanity would have happened to any other planet with similar life. This means that they either collectively reformed the practice of their internal planetary function, died out or colonized a close by planet to “save the species”. In either case moving forward, they would not do the same things that killed their planet in the first place. They would understand that the real pillar to the fermi paradox and the drake equation is that they would have to understand the constraints of their development, and align it with a path that would sustain the habitability of the planet. (Drake states that given the uncertainties, the original meeting [SETI] concluded that N ≈ L, and there were probably between 1000 and 100,000,000 civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy. It also has been estimated for Earth to be a “don’t touch the zoo planet” there must be at least 700,000 civilizations more advanced than us in our galaxy) An economic system not designed to extract wealth would continually develop to improve the standard and way in which they lived. Therefore, it would accelerate the rate of innovation and technology without the barriers of a capitalist market, which seeks to maintain profit and reliable returns. This freedom of innovation, means that alien life that transcends these economic, national and ideological barriers that we experience, would ultimately be more adapt at traversing the universe by the margin of technological capabilities. It is reasonable to believe that race, religion, money and nation are the real limiting reason for the drake equation and that the fermi paradox means that life is not rare, but what is rare is intelligent life being able to look past their individualism and extractive systems to prosper past the confines of their planet. So maybe its not that were alone, but we’re too selfcentred to join the club because other intelligent life would know that showing up isn’t just going to magically solve our issues. We wouldn’t just stop seeing race, religion, money and nations as defining aspects of our humanity; we’d most likely just try and normalize and exploit them for our own gains and that’s probably the mentality that“they’ve” learned to avoid like the plague.

food for thought?

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