Are we alone in the Universe?
This is a question that has kept scientists and folks alike puzzled for centuries. Archaeological mysteries like the Pyramid and Annunakki, or mythological stories the Greek Mythologies, Chinese Mythologies, and Old Testament of the Bible seem to suggest the existence of some supernatural, superhuman beings in the ancient ages; and UFO footages or urban legends about Alien Kidnappings seems to suggest that aliens exist. However, to this day, none of these has been officially confirmed, nor is there any concrete evidence about whether aliens really exist.
The Fermi Paradox is, in essence, the contradiction between the theoretical likelihood and the lack of concrete evidence about the existence of aliens. According to Wikipedia, It states something like this:
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- There are billions of stars in the Milky Way similar to the Sun.
- With high probability, some of these stars have Earth-like planets in a circumstellar habitable zone.
- Many of these stars, and hence their planets, are much older than the Sun. If Earth-like planets are typical, some may have developed intelligent life long ago.
- Some of these civilizations may have developed interstellar travel, a step humans are 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.
- Since many of the Sun-like stars are billions of years older than the Sun, the Earth should have already been visited by extraterrestrial civilizations, or at least their probes.
- However, there is no convincing evidence that this has happened.
To try to answer this question, people over the last decades have come up with multiple theories explaining the existence of aliens. This is my favorite one.
“The Dark Forest”
The Dark Forest Hypothesis was brought up by novelist Liu Cixin in his trilogy The Three Body Problem (my favorite book).
Imagine two snipers in a dark forest, and each sniper has the ability to completely destroy the other one. Now imagine that you are one of the snipers, and you have discovered the other sniper. You don’t know whether or not the other sniper has spotted you, or whether the other sniper is friendly (that is, not shooting at you when they spot you). Your only goal is to survive. Now, what are your options?
- You can decide to not shoot. If so, you want to make sure that once the other sniper discovers you, they won’t shoot at you. But how can you be sure? Think about this.
- If you are friendly and the other sniper is not, you’ll be shot.
- If you are friendly and the other sniper is friendly too, will you be safe? The answer is not necessarily. How does the other sniper know that you are friendly? If they think you’re not, they would see you as a threat, and since you’re a threat, they’ll have to eliminate you. You’ll be shot.
- Furthermore, even if the other sniper thinks that you are friendly, how would they know what you think of them? Will you fire first because you see them as a threat? They’ll shoot you.
- This “chain of suspicion” goes on and on. No matter what happens, without communication, you’ll surely be shot.
- You decide to communicate. But remember, interstellar communication is slow and inefficient (stars are usually light years apart, and the speed that information can travel is limited by the speed of light. This means it will usually take years to get one message across). But one thing is for sure — if you communicate, you’ll surely expose your location. But due to the limited capacity of interstellar communication, the aforementioned “chain of suspicion” still exists, and the other civilization might still view you as a threat. Now, it’ll up to them to decide whether or not to shoot you, and based on the above logic, you’ll likely be shot.
- So, your only option would be to shoot them first. Whether you like it or not, because that’s the safest choice.
So, what does this dilemma have to do with aliens? Think about how humanity has grown over the last few centuries. Our weapon systems are developing at an exponential rate, since we went from swords and arrows to nuclear weapons within 1000 years, a blink of an eye in the grand time scale of the universe. What will happen to our weapon system in the next 1000 years? What unimaginable power will we be able to harness?
If we continue this trend of technological advancement, we will be able to destroy planets and solar systems at ease; and to other aliens, we will be a sniper, capable of destroying them at any moment.
But what about other aliens? Suppose a civilization began its technological development 1000 years before we did, they would already have such power. To us, they are snipers too.
But for now, humanity is not a sniper yet because our technology is not advanced enough to destroy planets and stars. What if we were discovered by an advanced alien civilization that knows that we aren’t capable of destroying them? We would still be shot. This is because that civilization cannot know precisely when you will grow advanced enough to become a real threat. If you grow too fast and discover them, you would be able to shoot them.
Now, imagine a universe filled with aliens. The universe would be a dark forest, filled with snipers; and if you were to expose your existence and position to other snipers, you will surely be shot. Even if, for some unknown reasons, that many civilizations that discover you decide to not attack you, it will only take one “evil” civilization to completely wipe you out.
You would never want that to happen.
Therefore, the only way for a civilization to survive would be to hide. Aliens have to make sure that nobody ever discovers them. So, they would hide themselves in voids of darkness, concealing themselves from the rest of the universe. Therefore, we discover nobody.
Bright stars, supernovas, and quasars might not be where the dangers of the universe lie; the dark places were. So, the next time you gaze up at the night sky thinking about aliens, don’t think about the stars, think about the voids of darkness.
Hi Frank,
Thank you for the nice dose of existential dread.
One thing that I had a love-hate relationship with was just exploring the depths of what was possible within Science Fiction, because all of it is so darn interesting, but there are so many harrowing feelings that you get from the knowledge.
To me the Dark Forest theory is the pinnacle of that idea: it opens so many possible ideas of intergalactic warfare that makes Star Wars look like child’s play, but it also spells doom for us. Using your analogy of two snipers, Earth’s attempts to communicate in an “empty” universe would make us akin to a crying baby, broadcasting ourselves and our presence into the forest for everyone to know and monitor: We’ll be ended before we can even grow up.
While naive, the belief that I’d rather hold to be true is the Great Filter answer to the Fermi Paradox, basically saying that the Universe is filled with corpses of countless civilizations that ran into a “great filter” that led to their extinction. The consequences of the theory depend on where you believe the filter is. If it’s ahead of us, it spells doom for humanity just like the Dark Forest theory, something ahead of us that we don’t know about will put humanity to an end. On the other hand, believing that humanity is past it might sound great. While it means that humanity can expand and continue to grow, that means we’re virtually guaranteed to be alone in this universe, floating through nothing on the rock that we call home until the end of time.
Fun.
Hey Frank,
Let me just begin by saying how fantastic of a read this was. Your analogy between the elements of the universe and snipers, perched in trees and faced with a psychological dilemma, instantly grabbed my attention. Moreover, it made me question what all we have been able to achieve as humans: do our nuclear weapons, our modernized tanks, even our advanced healthcare systems, mean anything? These aliens, who may have had a head start of 100 years—enough for humans to go from powdered muskets to nuclear weapons—surely would be miles ahead of us, mere humans. What about other supernatural life forms which came even earlier? And what about the countless number of stars, of galaxies, maybe even universes, which could seal our existence in the matter of seconds? Safe to say your blog gave me a good bit of otherworldly stress (a healthy dose), so for that I thank you.
Hey Frank,
This was a really interesting post. But I’d also like to propose another argument to your post. Do you really think that aliens would view us as snipers? Or on another, even deeper assumption, do we really think that the idea of an “advanced civilization” will be similar to us? Do we really think that the logic that governs intelligence on Earth applies to other galaxies as well? Could they develop in ways that allow for certain inventions easier to develop, yet others to be harder? Could they result in societal structures that result in a lack of advancement in their own civilization? Or will they have a psychology that doesn’t allow them to think in the cold rational way you hypothesized aliens to think?
Earth is just one planet in our universe. We happen to have life here, but can we really generalize life here to life in all other planets? I don’t know, and I think maybe these questions should be addressed first before we pry into that kind of idea.
-Kai
This is a very interesting read and I’m glad I’ve been enlightened on the topic of aliens. I found the Dark Forest Hypothesis to be interesting–it reminded me a lot about game theory. From what I’ve known already, the Fermi paradox also states that there could be an abundance of aliens in our universe and even galaxy, or there could be none at all. However, the probability of life forming from molecules and given the right conditions was calculated to be one in a million million, according to Drake’s formula. that means if there are multiple planetary systems in space and there exist about 2 trillion galaxies in our observable universe, then according to Drake’s formula there should be a lot more than a handful of civilizations besides our own.
It’s exciting to see how far space exploration and the technology in that realm could advance. It’s also scary to consider the possibility of a myriad of other civilizations existing and we’re the only ones who haven’t discovered another civilization yet and also that we could be the only ones attempting to put ourselves out there instead of concealing ourselves. It’s also exciting to contemplate the idea that life could have existed in our own solar system on Mars. Great post, it’s fun to ponder these possibilities.
I wouldn’t say it crosses my mind on a regular basis, but the question of whether or not we are alone in this universe certainly comes up once in a while. My brother also read the three body problem and told me about the dark forest hypothesis. Personally, I think we might be better off not trying to contact aliens. I think we should wait until we personally have the capabilities to seek them out, because at that point we will likely also have the capabilities to defend ourselves should they be hostile. When pondering this question, my mind is immediately drawn to our Earth’s colonization stories. Every time a civilization with better technology found new land with native inhabitants, it ended really, really bad for the native population. Not only were they robbed, pillaged, and murdered by the direct action of the colonizers, but they would’ve died regardless simply because they were not immune to the diseases that the colonizers carried. To me, it is the obvious choice to stop trying to contact aliens, because every single time a powerful human civilization has discovered a weaker one, it has ended poorly.
Frank, thanks for providing me with my next thing to stress out about. I’ve never heard of the Fermi Paradox or the Dark Forest, but it was very interesting to learn about. In my mind, it’s 100% certain that there is other life out there in our ever expanding universe. Whether it be creatures similar to us or not, there has to be something. However, if these aliens are so much older and advanced than us, I would take on a different theory as to why we don’t know about them. If I was a super smart alien, I wouldn’t waste my time with dumb humans. They would probably treat us as some form of entertainment and laugh at our politics. They wouldn’t see us as a threat at all because we would be the toddler of the universe.
Another theory that my dad told me about is more related to the thought of a simulation instead of aliens, but it’s still very scary to think about. Basically, it starts with the assumption that eventually, whether it be 50 years or 1,000 years, robots and AI will become smarter and more powerful than us and start controlling the world. Maybe not in a Matrix sort of way, but possibly similar. We are already on this path, so it is inevitable that the ever growing capabilities of AI will exceed ours. In the span of the Earth, which is about 4.5 billion years, those 50-1,000 years are just a sliver of time in the long run. The chances of us being on the precipice of an AI takeover are so so so low. So, what’s to say that hasn’t already happened? What if, many years ago, we passed the point of AI becoming more powerful, and now we are in a simulation created by said AI? I don’t believe in this theory, but you have to admit that it would make a little sense. However, there’s so many theories out there and we won’t know until much later, when we finally discover other life. Sad thing is, we’ll all be dead and never get to know.