The Fermi Paradox: If Aliens Exist, Why Haven’t They Visited Us?
When human beings look up at the sky, they can do nothing but be overwhelmed. The universe is everything: a place where we live, nothingness, immensity, the incomprehensible and life.
The Milky Way, the galaxy where the solar system (and in turn the Earth) is located, has a mass of 10 to the power of 12 suns, with billions of stars similar to the Sun itself that gives us life. If this seems inconceivable to you, imagine if we take into account that it is estimated that there are two billion galaxies in the entire universe.
No matter how anthropocentric human thinking may be, (almost) we all agree that the probability that we are the only living, thinking form in the universe is very low, since this term encompasses the totality of all forms of matter, energy, space-time (what you see and conceive and what you do not). Given such a vast and unfathomable whole, statistically there must be some other living entity, right?
We are no longer even talking about extraterrestrials with human forms, but rather a microscopic acellular entity, a concept, an ethereal “something” that can be classified as an open but self-regulated system (just as the cell is), although we are not capable of understand it. Based on these philosophical and biological premises, we explain everything you need to know about the Fermi paradox since not all thinkers think the same regarding the existence of intelligent life beyond Earth.
The premise of this paradox is very simple: If intelligent life existed beyond our planet, we would have already observed signs of it throughout our evolutionary history
Based solely on scale and probability, there is no doubt that intelligent species or entities should exist outside of Earth, but the fact that the interaction with external biological entities has been zero tells us otherwise. Any sign: a fragment of a construction, parts of a space vehicle, a communicative signal, footprints, organic matter or biological evidence they would have been enough to throw the Fermi paradox to the ground.
Curiously, as indicated by studies versed in the matter, the Fermi paradox was neither coined by the physicist Enrico Fermi (creator of the first nuclear reactor) nor is it a paradox in itself. Fermi came to postulate questions like “Where is everyone?”, but the first idea of this thought came from the hand of Michael Hart, who postulated that Interstellar travel and planet colonization would have been inevitable at this point if intelligent life forms truly existed In other words: “They are not here, and therefore, they do not exist.”
This is a very clear apparent contradiction. Below, we present a series of data that puts the thought into perspective:
Things get even more interesting if we know that, Although 99% of intelligent civilizations had self-annihilated, the absence of interaction with humans or the rest of the planets remains unexplained The idea, again, is clear: they are not here, and therefore they do not exist.
Drake’s equation
The Drake equation, postulated by the American astronomer after whom it is named, tries to estimate the number of civilizations present in our galaxy through mathematical processes The equation is the following:
Simply put, this operation takes into account the rate of star formation, the number of stars that have planets orbiting around them, the fraction of planets that could have developed life, the fraction of planets that could have developed intelligent life, the percentage of these “communities” capable of emitting detectable signals in space and the temporal interval during which these signals could have been emitted.
With all these parameters in mind, Drake postulates that there should be 10 detectable civilizations in the Milky Way, which we remember has a calculated mass of 10 to the power of 12 suns. In any case, other professionals are not so “generous”, since other estimates using the same formula calculate 0.000000067 or less, depending on the parameters used.
Contrary to the Drake equation, it can be argued that this formula does not take into account the fraction of planets with chemical elements conducive to life, such as water or carbon, as well as the presence of a stable and durable ecosphere over time. . While it is true that all these parameters only apply to the life present on our planet, we have no others, since this is the only concept of existence that we can imagine.
Scientific explanations for the Fermi paradox
The Fermi paradox is based on the Drake equation to defend the non-existence of intelligent life in the universe. If mathematically there are a total of 10 civilizations emitting signals through the Milky Way, it is clear that we should have detected them. All this is further cemented if we keep in mind that the Earth is a typical planet (principle of mediocrity). If life has arisen in a place where the initial characteristics were not far from the average, then it may have arisen in thousands more
The biggest conceptual hole in all of these postulations is that the Drake equation uses point estimates, or in other words, the use of collected data to give rise to the most reliable guess about a complete value. These estimates assume that we have absolute knowledge of parameters that are impossible to understand on a large scale, such as the probability of the emergence of life or the potential number of intelligent societies.
Let’s be honest: Even in the scientific community itself it is difficult to estimate what intelligence is as such, imagine what a puzzle it must be to apply this ethereal concept to a living entity that may not even be governed by the same parameters as us. When we take realistic uncertainty into account, replacing point estimates with probability distributions that reflect current scientific knowledge, the observed picture is much more different.
The brilliant scientific publication Dissolving the Fermi Paradox (published in 2018 on the Researchgate portal) does this same thing, and presents us with data that directly clashes with the Fermi paradox. Taking into account real scientific knowledge, it can be calculated that the probability that we are alone in the Milky Way ranges between 53 and 99.6%. We go further, since the probabilities that we are alone in the entire universe are placed at 39-85%.
Summary
Although the Fermi paradox and the Drake equation are of great interest at a scientific and philosophical level, we cannot do more than recognize that the parameters that give rise to life, the concept of intelligence or even the record of communication methods universals escape our hands. Perhaps intelligent life has been trying to communicate with us for centuries, but their methods may be imperceptible to human cognition or the machinery developed by our species
It may also be that our planet is not as typical as we think, or that the conditions necessary for the emergence of life are so extremely rare that they have not really been replicated on other planets. At this point, we can only look to the sky and, as we have always done, continue moving forward in search of knowledge and hope that one day answers will arrive.
