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"Who is Fermi and what is his paradox?"

"Where is everybody?"

"Huh?"

"I said, 'Where is everybody?' That is the paradox."

"I don't get it."

"Where are they? The aliens? Unless intelligent life on Earth is practically unique in the galaxy, some alien race or other ought to have visited Earth by your time, either via spacecraft or unmanned probes. Or at least sent a 'Hello' message. Something."

"But wait, you Asgardians have visited Earth. Doesn't that count?"

"True, we did, but that was only under very strict rules and limitations because we are so powerful, so dangerous. That's why those rules exist. And that is why Asgard itself was isolated in its own pocket universe. It's a safety precaution, a firewall, to protect the primary universe in case things in Asgard go all pear shaped."

"Which they did. Those idiots almost wiped themselves out in that Last Battle."

Skuld sighed, "Even angels can be flawed, Keiichi. You know that better than most."

"Tell me about it. And we humans are just as badly messed up. Say, do you think that is why God created that living bridge to us lowly humans? To reach us before we kill ourselves, say, in a nuclear holocaust or something?

"Hmm, I never thought of that. I suppose it's possible. But there's no way to know for sure."

Skuld then re-crossed her legs as she lay on the white glassy floor with her arms folded behind her head.

She said quietly to herself, "Humans operate at such a low level. It's remarkable."

Keiichi heard it. "Why do I feel insulted..."

She turned her head and gave him a benevolent smile. "Sorry. What I mean is that you straddle the line between fleshly animal desires and spiritual ones. Humans exist right on the dividing line."

Keiichi was thoughtful. "And that causes temptation."

"Much of it, yes. Humans use their intellect to try to justify their wants. That happens everywhere in human civilization. In the Soviet Union for example, Stalin told his scientists to find ways to prove that Communism worked, to prove it was scientifically valid. And they did. Thousands of papers were published, with intricate math, all to 'prove' what they wanted to believe, or what they were told to believe."

"What a waste. I'm glad that foolishness stopped happening during my time."

"You think so? You're wrong. It still happened much of the time. Even in America's great research universities, the researchers would submit grant proposals for funding to the government, to the NSF, NIH, or NOAA. The proposals cited what they intend to prove or discover. And so they get their funding, and lo! They find it! Amazing!"

"Wow, what a coincidence.."

"It is a dirty secret in the academic world that most scientific research is either pointless or full of biases and unproved suppositions, essentially junk. Track who funds the research and you can predict the end result. Just follow the money."

"Like the Tobacco Institute funding research on smoking."

"I was thinking more like the cabal that controls US federal funding for climate research. If you submit a grant proposal that even hints that you are looking to refute claims of the global warmists, they will slam the money spigot off, boot you from publication in their peer-reviewed journals, and destroy your academic career."

"But isn't that putting the cart before the horse? Science is the search for truth, isn't it?"

"It ought to be. But sadly much of the time it isn't. Not anymore. Oh, it was like that early on when most researchers were self-funded amateurs like Thomas Edison, James Maxwell, and Guglielmo Marconi, but no longer. Most real scientific discoveries are a fluke. Did you know that at any given time there are only about 50 individuals or so in the entire world who have the ability to create any real breakthroughs, or to make any real discoveries? Up until 2001 most of them gravitated to the great research universities of the United States, which was why that country led the world scientifically. But after 9/11 the legal immigration door for the world's geniuses to come to the US had slammed shut. Those 50 geniuses now stay home or go elsewhere. And so the flame that powered true scientific innovation in the United States had essentially gone out. Now it's all about researchers getting grant funding and cranking out an endless series of obscure scientific papers that nobody reads except themselves.

"It used to be the rule that to get taxpayer grant funding, the raw data and the computer source code had to be shared on request. That way other scientists could verify your work, spot errors, shoddy statistical analysis, and so on. But then the grant agencies quietly changed the rules in the 1990s. Researchers could now hide all their raw data and hide the source code for their computer models."

Keiichi asked, "How did they get away with it?"

"Because the foxes ran the hen-house. Up until the 1990s, if you wanted a US federal research grant you had to make available all your raw data. If another researcher wanted to see the actual experimental results you had to give to them. If you had a computer model you had to provide the source code upon request, kind of like the GPL. Not anymore. Like I said, they quietly changed the rules. Now everybody hoards their raw data. Nobody releases the source code. Especially the global warmists. Those computer models have totally flunked all their climate predictions from 1998 onwards. In 2009 a model from the Climate Research Unit [CRU] of the University of East Anglia got leaked. It was full of hacks that biased the temperatures upward, growing for later time periods. If you fed that computer model with random data, with white noise, it would generate a temperature trend line that accelerated upwards like a hockey stick. The input didn't matter. That is why a computer model without its source code is worthless scientifically. Or it ought to be."

"Follow the money."

"Pretty much. There's big money in the global warming hysteria. Grant funding, carbon credits, buying and selling offsets. How do you think Al Gore nearly became a billionaire?"

Keiichi shifted his sitting position on the hard glassy floor. "Oh well. So anyway, getting back to Fermi's Paradox, are you saying that no space aliens ever said 'Hello' to us? Not once?"

"Sad to say, they never did. Keiichi, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence [SETI] had been ongoing for decades by your time. Near the end, they crowed-sourced the signal analysis out to over a million home-based computers, each as powerful as a Cray supercomputer of 30 years prior. They searched practically the whole spectrum for a modulated signal across both hemispheres of the sky. They found nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Oh, there were a couple odd one-shot signals, like the famous 'Wow' signal in 1977**, but never anything definite."

"So what's the explanation then? Why is the universe so silent?"

"The answer is simple."

"Well?"

"Everybody is hiding."

"Hiding from what?" Keiichi chuckled, "The Borg or something?"

Skuld wasn't laughing. "Basically, yes."

"You're serious."

"I am. Look, it only takes one [bleep]-hole alien race to ruin the whole neighborhood."

"Wait, the Borg are real?"

"No. It's much more primitive than that. It only takes one jerk race to decide that they have to be the only ones to exist in the galaxy. Some time long ago, nobody knows when exactly, some long dead and unnamed alien race built and launched a set of self-replicating probes called Von Neumann probes, named after the famous computer scientist who first postulated them."

"Self-replicating probes."

"Yeah. It is actually not all that particularly hard for an advanced civilization to create them. The unmanned probes were automated and operated on fairly simple software. They travelled at sublight speed. They searched for coherent signals and home it on them. When they get a lock they then shove an asteroid to set it on a collision course with the signal source. Then they make more probes from raw material in the ejecta and go out again."

"But that's awful!"

"I know. We call them Berserkers, named after the SF author Fred Saberhagen who first wrote several stories about them. Berserkers are just another type of predator, one that preys on intelligent life. Remember what I showed you earlier - that predators will always be found anywhere life exists? It is a universal constant."

"So is that what happened to the Earth?"

"No. But it would have. Sooner or later."

"Really?"

"Keiichi, the TV signals transmitted from I Love Lucy in the 1950's were dozens of light-years out in space by your time. Eventually a Berserker would have locked on and it would have all been over. So even if the KBO didn't hit, Earth was going to be doomed anyway. I'm sorry***."

"But if Earth's technology had gotten advanced enough, quickly enough, before they got there then perhaps a defense.."

"No. Then Earth would have just succumbed to gray goo or something else."

"You think so? Why?"

"Because it's a simple fact that most sentient races don't reach the level of spaceflight, or if they do, it is not for very long. Such civilizations typically self-destruct. Or they turn inward. Or they turn murderous."

"You mean like the Scorpio galaxy, the Empire fighting the Rebel Alliance and all that."

"Yes. It was remarkable how long their space-faring era lasted given how unstable and violent it was. All that destruction. But all that occurred a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away."

"What happened to them?"

"Some moved on, but most destroyed themselves. The typical pattern."

"The typical pattern?"

"Eventually these civilizations self-destruct. They reach a critical turning point. Technology progresses faster, then faster, then even faster still, until the line goes almost straight up. Vernon Vinge called it the 'singularity'. When this happens every individual possesses incredible power. They become demigods, or they think they are. It's not unlike how Asgard was."

"And it takes just one bad apple to wreck the whole barrel. Like Sena."

"Yes. When every person has the power and technology to destroy the world, sooner or later one of them will. Life is delicate. It takes only one deflected asteroid or one vial of grey goo to wipe out all life overnight. It could even be accidental, a science experiment that goes out of control."

"It's unstable."

"The problem is that Earth's technology would have rapidly progressed to the point where any idiot could build a world-ending weapon, be it biosphere-eating nanites or whatever, even by mistake."

"So Earth never got to see a cool Star Trek future."

"Sadly, no. Life is just too fragile. The Star Trek film Into Darkness showed how just one person could mess up even as advanced a civilization as that one. It's just too easy to drop stuff from orbit."

Keiichi's shoulders slumped. "Great. Now you are just bumming me out."

"Sorry about that. Didn't mean to. I'm just trying to explain why God had to cut short the story's ending and rescue the survivors. Otherwise nobody would have survived."*4

Skuld finally went silent and closed her eyes for a bit. Meanwhile, Keiichi sat and thought quietly about what she had just told him.

Author Note:

*** This rather depressing scenario was laid out in Greg Bear's end-of-the-world novel, The Forge of God (1987). Ironically, the recent worldwide shift from analog TV to digital TV (where the RF signal is so compressed that it looks exactly like the random static of a natural radio source) might save us. Otherwise, curse you, Lucy!

[Excerpt from After Ragnarok, chapter 33.]