They Are Here
Those who attribute UFOs to alien spacecraft have a ready answer to the paradox. However, there is little mainstream support for this view.
They Exist But Have Not Communicated With Us
Another possibility is that advanced civilizations either deliberately or accidentally hide evidence of their existence from humanity. They might do so out of ethical concerns for primitive beings or a desire to encourage cultural diversity. This has the Uniformity of Motive flaw common to other Fermi solutions: assuming that all alien civilizations throughout time will behave in the same way.
Civilizations might be deliberately hiding themselves in order to avoid destruction from more advanced civilizations. It has also been proposed that a fundamental information theoretical axiom might be behind the lack of recognized signals. Information theory states that a message which is compressed maximally, is indistiguishable from white noise. The counterargument to this would be that even though as bandwidth becomes a bottleneck to communication, there ought still be some niche technologies which would not or could not strive to maximal data compression. Science fiction authors have proposed another possible explanation -- that someone, or something, is destroying intelligent life in the universe as fast as it is created. This theme can be found in novels such as Frederik Pohl's Heechee novels, Fred Saberhagen's Berserker novels and Greg Bear's The Forge of God. Technological civilizations may usually or invariably destroy themselves via nuclear war, biological warfare, grey goo or destroying their planet's ecosphere) before or shortly after developing radio or spaceflight technology (a very real possibility).
Another possible explanation is that advanced civilizations would construct multiple concentric Dyson Spheres around their stars, each one radiating less energy than the next smallest one, with the outermost sphere radiating energy at close to the background radiation. These would be essentially unobservable from any distance.
Yet another is that all intelligent life inevitably evolves towards a technological singularity and quickly becomes unrecognizable to humanity in our present state.
They Do Not Exist
Others argue that the conditions for life, or at least complex life, are rare. For instance, some hypotheses say that complex life required the stimulation of tides from Earth's moon to evolve, and the Moon is the result of freak
occurrence, a body of a certain mass striking Earth at just the right angle to
carve off the material and put it in a stable orbit.
Another possibilty is that ice ages, comet or meteor impacts, supernovae, gamma ray bursters or other catastrophic planetary or galactic events are so common that life rarely has the time to evolve. Alternately, these events may not be frequent enough on other planets and evolution is slowed because there aren't enough mass extinctions to encourage diversity.
Even if the conditions for life are common, the evolution of human-like intelligence, the invention of radio technology or interest in the exploration of outer space may be vanishingly rare.
Conclusion
A common concept used in the scientific method to test the validity of certain ideas is Occam's Razor. To paraphrase, Occam's Razor states that the explanation for a given phenomenon that has the fewest assumptions should be preferred over more complicated ones.
All this draws us to a few possible conclusions, say adherents of the Fermi Principle: that as a technologically advanced species, we are alone in our part
of the Cosmos. The simplest explanation, say adherents to the premise behind the Fermi Paradox, is the last one.
0 comments:
Post a Comment