Posted on 10/25/2001 9:13:53 AM PDT by RightWhale
Is there obvious proof that we could be alone in the Galaxy? Enrico Fermi thought so -- and he was a pretty smart guy. Might he have been right?
It's been a hundred years since Fermi, an icon of physics, was born (and nearly a half-century since he died). He's best remembered for building a working atomic reactor in a squash court. But in 1950, Fermi made a seemingly innocuous lunchtime remark that has caught and held the attention of every SETI researcher since. (How many luncheon quips have you made with similar consequence?)
The remark came while Fermi was discussing with his mealtime mates the possibility that many sophisticated societies populate the Galaxy. They thought it reasonable to assume that we have a lot of cosmic company. But somewhere between one sentence and the next, Fermi's supple brain realized that if this was true, it implied something profound. If there are really a lot of alien societies, then some of them might have spread out.
Fermi realized that any civilization with a modest amount of rocket technology and an immodest amount of imperial incentive could rapidly colonize the entire Galaxy. Within ten million years, every star system could be brought under the wing of empire. Ten million years may sound long, but in fact it's quite short compared with the age of the Galaxy, which is roughly ten thousand million years. Colonization of the Milky Way should be a quick exercise.
So what Fermi immediately realized was that the aliens have had more than enough time to pepper the Galaxy with their presence. But looking around, he didn't see any clear indication that they're out and about. This prompted Fermi to ask what was (to him) an obvious question: "where is everybody?"
This sounds a bit silly at first. The fact that aliens don't seem to be walking our planet apparently implies that there are no extraterrestrials anywhere among the vast tracts of the Galaxy. Many researchers consider this to be a radical conclusion to draw from such a simple observation. Surely there is a straightforward explanation for what has become known as the Fermi Paradox. There must be some way to account for our apparent loneliness in a galaxy that we assume is filled with other clever beings.
A lot of folks have given this thought. The first thing they note is that the Fermi Paradox is a remarkably strong argument. You can quibble about the speed of alien spacecraft, and whether they can move at 1 percent of the speed of light or 10 percent of the speed of light. It doesn't matter. You can argue about how long it would take for a new star colony to spawn colonies of its own. It still doesn't matter. Any halfway reasonable assumption about how fast colonization could take place still ends up with time scales that are profoundly shorter than the age of the Galaxy. It's like having a heated discussion about whether Spanish ships of the 16th century could heave along at two knots or twenty. Either way they could speedily colonize the Americas.
Consequently, scientists in and out of the SETI community have conjured up other arguments to deal with the conflict between the idea that aliens should be everywhere and our failure (so far) to find them. In the 1980s, dozens of papers were published to address the Fermi Paradox. They considered technical and sociological arguments for why the aliens weren't hanging out nearby. Some even insisted that there was no paradox at all: the reason we don't see evidence of extraterrestrials is because there aren't any.
In our next column, we'll delve into some of the more ingenious musings of those who have tried to understand whether, apart from science fiction, galactic empires could really exist, and what implications this may have for SETI.
I agree -- you either solve the problem of faster than light travel OR increase life span to virtual immortality to make a galactic empire feasible.
Given the SF "sleeper ships" (i.e. top speed ~.2c), and the time it take humans to fill and develop a planet to the point where they can send out a wave of their own sleeper ships( several hundred to a few thousand years, your guess is just as good as mine . . .), you could fill the galaxy in a couple of million years: an eyeblink in astronomic terms.
re where are they: Everywhere. Just cloaked. Duh!
One wouldn't have much of an empire, true, absent some faster-than-light technology, or magic, or something. A civilization might realize, however, that it is likely not alone in the galaxy. It might understand, too, that all it would take is one other civilization to start colonizing the galaxy for the whole place to be occupied. Rather than risk getting overrun by aliens, this civilization might figure it's better for it to start colonizing. And there we are.
Didn't you guys catch the Learning Channel's special -- Hyperspace?
It doesn't even have to involve a huge destructive war. Just look at how the Vietnam war sucked all the resources and interest out of landing on the moon, and how WTC911 has converted the space program to military goals already. And that is without any actual crippling damage to the infrastructure. How can we possibly go to the stars when infants such as bin Laden are whining for attention all the time?
There had to be a simpler way. Heinlein wouldn't have lied to me!
I stopped being a NASA fan when they canceled the Moon flights in December of 1972. And I became an enemy of NASA when Skylab -- a better space station than MIR would ever be -- was allowed to disintegrate into scrap.
I felt that I was not alone in this rage. I knew that there must have been others who loved Space but despised or even hated the space program. What if some of them, I thought, worked for NASA? What if they took their expertise with them into a sort of Space Underground? What if NASA tried to stop them? We've recently heard about the Mars Underground, but this idea occurred to me two decades ago.
In the summer of 1976, I started work on a novel entitled Hidden Millions. The title suggested the laundered money that might flow into such a venture, but also the millions of people in the counter-economy who might be involved knowingly or unknowingly in the effort.
Suffice it to say that my abilities as a writer back then were raw and I shelved the 80 pages of the manuscript to concentrate on projects more appropriate to my skills...
It was in 1985 that I began to research a novel called Huntress, but at that time The Jehovah Contract was about to be published in the US and I only made some mental notes.
Then Challenger fell. And you note that I say "fell" and not "exploded." As we now know, the tank ruptured, but the spacecraft was not incinerated.
Shock turned to sorrow and almost immediately to rage. The disaster had killed seven astronauts and destroyed one fourth of Earth's space fleet. I knew that -- by then -- the scales must have fallen from the eyes of others both outside and inside NASA. After a brief year's detour to write Solomon's Knife, I began on the Dante-esque journey that was Kings of the High Frontier.
Agreed, totally. Even if the galaxy is uninhabited by other civilizations, when we finally get off this mudball and get out there, we will have to break up into separate self-rule entities. While we might spread out throughout the galaxy in a million years once we get moving, linkages to a central authority would be next to impossible.
I Find Your Lack Of Faith Disturbing...
This is an intriguing article, not to be dismissed lightly. However, the grand distances involved in space do raise additional difficulties. Would Columbus have set sail knowing that it would be his grandchildren that would have arrived?
I read an interesting article about whether humans could endure the required isolation for a trip to Mars. The consensus among psychologists is that it would be very unlikely. Multiple that into years!
It's quite certain that we humans have something within us that draws us to investigate the unknown. What if it is that that is unique?
Now that I think about it, there's two problems: communications and force projection.
1) Communication times will render political adminstration of any "interstellar empire" impossible. Why send petitions to a distant ruler when you won't receive a timely reply? The local head-honcho on site will have to have considerable autonomy simply because of the problem with communications. He/She/It won't be able to call for outside help or advice, since by the time a reply makes it out there, years have passed, rendering the reply irrelevant.
2) Force projection: Say our local head-honcho decides to take over his/her/its turf. What can the "emperor" do about it? Due to communications, it'll take years before the "emperor" knows what's even going on. It'll take some more time to put together a force (assuming the "emperor" is completely starkers) to track our honcho down and hang him/her/it for their treason. Then it takes even more years to actually travel to the colony to go repossess it. Odds are, the forces sent to quell the insurrection will get chopped to pieces since the colony's had all that time to prepare a suitable welcome to outsiders, and the expedition can't exactly call for swift reinforcements. Of course, they could simply annihilate every inhabited portion of the planet/system, and send word back that some new property (slightly radioactive, perhaps?) is available.
Not much of a scalable "force spectrum", if you get my drift. Either do nothing, or flatten everything, with no in-between option like invasion and occupation.
Of course, biological, social, and political factors might mitigate this somewhat, but the problems only get worse with distance. End result is that a species may go hog-wild colonizing everything in sight, but no political organization will be in charge of anything beyond its own star system.
Since no political organization will benefit that much by sending off a lot of their loyal/troublesome citizens/subjects off into the void (it'd be simpler just to execute the dissidents), who else can do it? I believe that the only people that would have the motivation to leave everything they know behind and head off to parts unknown are those that have nothing to gain by staying home. Those dissident types (either political, religious, or those in any persecuted minority) may be the ones who have the reason to get away, but they probably wouldn't be able to pull it off unless they either got major backing or "acquired" the means to leave home.
As I said before, probably every civilization eventually evolves Democrats to hobble the rest of the population. :)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.