The Fermi Paradox and the End of all Intelligent Life

Since the beginning, humans have always looked up and wondered.  They wondered what was up there, and as our knowledge of the Universe grew we began to wonder who might be up above.  What other creatures roam our universe, and do they look up and wonder as we do?  Is it truly possible that we are alone even with the over 300 billion stars that inhabit our galaxy, and the over 100 billion galaxies that fill our universe?

Once we started wondering those things, we started searching for any signs of life outside of Earth, and since then no proof of alien life has been found. In 1950, Enrico Fermi, a physicist, had an informal discussion where he questioned why, with all the billions of stars in our galaxy alone, we have been unable to find any evidence of intelligent alien life.(*)  Intelligent life would be the most likely for us to be able to detect, since the idea is that they would have and understand similar technology like radio signals and probes.  It is also theorized that the possibility of far more advance intellegent life should be high because many stars and planets have been around far longer than Earth, giving them far more time to evolve than us. Also, if there is intelligent life, it should go on to colonize the galaxy, just as we continue to push farther and farther toward exploring the galaxy.

The Fermi Paradox is the idea that since we have been unable to detect any alien life, and there is no evidence that our galaxy has been colonized in any way, there must be something that destroys 100% of all intelligent life before it gains the ability to go on to colonize and explore the galaxy and ultimately the universe.  Many people ponder what this destructive force may be.  Will we be our own worst enemy and destroy ourselves with our own technology? Perhaps our demise will come in the form of a massive asteroid.  Whatever the cause, all intelligent life must be destroyed, as it would go on to colonize the galaxy and no evidence of this has been found.

This paradox is fascinating to me, and I have spent some time discussing it with my husband, Andrew. Though the idea of a massive destructive force that destroys all intelligent life is interesting, I did have a few thoughts concerning the likelihood of this.  There are so many factors at play in the universe that we only understand that we don't understand most things.  Our knowledge of the universe is limited and what we do know about physics breaks down on the quantum level, demonstrating that some essential information about our universe is still being put together.  Because of this, one major flaw in the Fermi Paradox is the assumption that if other intelligent life in our galaxy exists it would be using technology similar to us.  It is very possible that any technology being used by intelligent life is far beyond any that we understand.  On a universal scale, humans have only been around for a microscopic amount of time.  Given a few hundred million years, or even a few billion, the technology of the day would be far more advanced than ours and possibly undetectable with our current level of technology.

Something else I thought about is that the Fermi Paradox makes the assumption that intelligent life is something that can happen on any planet in a habitable zone with enough time.  Perhaps Earth is lucky, and intelligent life is actually far rarer than we like to assume.  We have only catalogued about 2 million species on Earth currently, and it is estimated that there are 8.7 million species in total on Earth today.(*)  The amount of species that have ever existed on Earth is immeasurable and massive, and from what we know we are the only technologically advanced species.  Think how many species had to come along before we evolved into the intelligent life we are today.  If the evolution of intelligent and technologically advanced life is rarer than we like to speculate, it is possible humans are the first in this galaxy, or are one of the first to evolve.  It is very possible that there are components to intelligent life that are much more complicated than we care to admit, and that our understanding of the human body and mind is still extremely limited. What other factors have to be in play for intelligent life to have room to evolve?

Something I have noticed about many science authorities and historians, is that they have the tendency to underestimate the human race.  Although this is somewhat related to my previous point about the possibility that intelligent life is a very rare occurrence, I think it needs to be pointed out the there is the possibility that humans are a unique occurrence.  I personally believe this is far less likely, and intelligent life does exist out there.  None the less, there is that possibility that humans are, in fact, unique.  Perhaps our thirst for knowledge, and our tendency to always ask why, are something that requires a factor we do not understand. Humans have an ingrained curiosity for everything.  We ask how at every turn, and more importantly we are desperate to know why.  When you look back at the marvels of the world, like Stonehenge, we only have flimsy theories as to how they were created.  Since the beginning of our existence, our posterity have underestimated their ancestors, only proving to us more that what we think humans are capable of are just the beginning.

Perhaps there will come a time when humanity faces the Fermi Paradox and we will never get to truly explore the stars, but I like to think that one day we may encounter alien intelligent life and find them to be much like us, doubting their own abilities, wondering what amazing miracles exist in this beautiful expanse that we call the universe.

Daily Highlight: Dark Energy and the Virus

Daily Highlight: Dark Energy and the Virus

Credit: NASA

So, I often have moments where I am sitting just thinking about things, and while doing this I noticed something about the idea of dark energy and viruses.  Dark Energy is a hypothetical form of energy that is continuing to accelerate and expand the universe at faster and faster rates. *  It seems to grow larger the greater the amount of dark energy.  Now if you look at the universe in the organic way, you start to see the similarities between the way bacteria and viruses work. The more you have of a bacteria the faster it can grow, because there are simply more bacteria to produce and replicate itself.  After noticing this, I began entertaining the idea that perhaps dark energy is the equivalent to a virus or bacteria infecting the universe.  If we look at the universe is an organic being, than perhaps we will be able to understand concepts and theories, like dark energy, in greater detail.  What do you think?

Daily Highlight: What did the early Universe look like?

Credit: Wikipedia

As with all science, there is still much we do not know and what we do know is always changing and adapting to new information, but our picture of the early universe is amazing.  In the very beginning, some sort of gigantic expansion that traveled faster than the speed of light created our universe, the Big Bang. What was left was a mass of superheated gas and galactic dust.  Once the universe cooled some is when things really start to get going.

One idea is that in the beginning there were super massive structures that formed.  These structures would have been light years across, eventually seeding the way for galaxies once these super massive structures exploded.  I often wonder if perhaps those same structures were what also created the super massive black holes that can be found at the center of almost every galaxy.  It has been thought that super massive black holes are various smaller black holes that combined during the time when stars were much more massive, but not as massive as the super massive structures, and exploding in supernova constantly.  This created many smaller black holes that are believed to have combined together to make super massive black holes. Recently, some have thought that super massive black holes may actually be related to those super massive structures.

You can even see the earliest galaxies in the Hubble deep field picture that look like giant structures. I can not help but wonder if perhaps those are actually just massive structures and not galaxies. One lies over 13 billion light years away, at the very beginning of when the universe was cool enough to start creating stars, planets, and the other amazing structures in our universe.  Because they are so far away, our current technology can only see them as blobs of light, making it impossible to see more than the most basic form.

I often think that those super massive structures are actually the seeds of the galaxies.  Once they burn out, they explode all that matter outward, leaving a super massive black hole at the center, and over time all that exploded gas and dust came together to make stars and planets. That is how I believe the early universe may have looked.

Black Hole, Baby Universe?

Black holes have always been a huge part of science fiction, as well as an object that has entertained the thoughts of innumerable amounts of human beings.  In my belief, they hold the key to understanding the true laws of physics, on every scale. Black holes stretch the very laws of physics and still what we know about them is nothing compared to what we don't know.  Aside from being completely unobservable directly, it is impossible to escape from one once over the horizon line, making them very dangerous, even if we could travel to one.

Many strange ideas and theories surround black holes, and many are just as more likely as the next.  In my view, being that black holes are singularities and the universe was created from a singularity, it is possible they are the same type of singularities, and black holes are actually just baby universes.  Also, with the theory that at some point dark energy will push the galaxies away from each other traveling faster than the speed of light, it may even be possible to think that those black hole singularities may one day have a big bang of their own, as the conditions would be similar to those before the universe began. Once all other matter other than black holes has disintegrated into nothing, we will return to the nothingness from which the universe began.

Perhaps we are just a black hole ourselves that exploded at the end of their universe. Energy and matter, on the most basic scale, are the same thing.  We can turn matter into energy, but not energy into matter...yet. The universe appears to move in the same circular pattern as life.  It lives, it breaths, it creates, it dies.  The more you think about it, the more you can't help but think that the universe is alive.