THE USM SOUTHWORTH PLANETARIUM
207-780-4249 www.usm.maine.edu/planet
70 Falmouth Street Portland, Maine 04103
43.6667° N 70.2667° W
Altitude: 10 feet below sea level
Altitude: 10 feet below sea level
Founded January 1970
Julian date: 2458672.5
"Darth Vader and Mr Spock are the modern day mythological figures. When the Hellenists viewed the ocean, they saw an opaque realm of indeterminate depth. They, like the Romans, largely feared the sea as it was not merely unknown, but unknowable. Consequently, in their minds, the most frightful and exotic creatures inhabited it. They used their imaginations to compensate for their ignorance of marine life and fashioned a veritable Universe of deep sea denizens, most of which were malignant and aggressive. Ironically, modern day ocean explorers have revealed an ocean teeming with life forms that we, for all our creativity, could have scarcely fathomed. The biologically exotic has replaced the mythologically fantastic. We will find it the same with extraterrestrials if and when we encounter them. We are quite sure that life bearing worlds exist and in substantial numbers. The Milky Way could very well be a thriving bazaar of alien life of varying levels of structural complexity and technological sophistication: algae on one world, star-farers on the next. Only when we interact with them, when our development enables us to join the galactic community, will the astrobiologically strange replace the mythologically wondrous facets of science fiction. Spock and Vader will then inevitably fade from our collective conscious, just as Cetus has gradually vanished behind the narwhals. We won't need them anymore to satisfy the currently unfulfillable yearning to be part of the intricate latticework of thriving civilizations now concealed behind the opacity of our night sky."
THE DAILY ASTRONOMER
Monday, July 8, 2019
Another Answer to the Fermi Paradox
Are you there, Marvin?
(Image by Ian King)
It is something of a relief to us mortals to realize that the world's greatest minds will sometimes condescend to engage in casual conversations. It's akin to finding out that Apollo plays billiards on alternate Sundays. In 1950, eminent physicist and Nobel Laureate Enrico Fermi (1901-1954) was discussing UFOs with fellow physicists Edward Teller, Herbert York and Emil Konopinski over lunch and posed a simple question that has since become known as the Fermi Paradox. "If aliens exist throughout the Universe, where are they?" By the early 50's, astronomers were truly beginning to fathom the extent of the galaxy and to estimate the number of its stars: about 300 billion. In such an expansive galaxy, shouldn't aliens be so numerous that they'd be almost everywhere?
Hence, the paradox: Why haven't we encountered aliens, yet?
The incorrigibly pessimistic have cited this paradox to claim that life is so fragile that advanced species tend to destroy themselves before attaining space-faring technology. After all, we developed nuclear bombs before we went to the moon!* We've invented self-annihilation weaponry long before star ships. If the human timeline is indicative of the typical technological sequence in the galaxy, most worlds are doomed! Of course, according to these dystopia fanatics, the world population in 2019 should have been about 186, consisting only of the survivors of the fifth nuclear war and their cockroach overlords.
Another, less nihilistic answer relates to the distance separating the stars. The closest star, Alpha Centauri, is about 4.24 light years from the Sun, a distance comparable to the average stellar separation distance along the galaxy's spiral arms. Most species throughout the galaxy are thriving, but haven't yet attained the technology necessary for interstellar travel. (Remember, humans haven't ventured more than 240,000 miles from Earth's surface...so far.) The species haven't necessarily obliterated themselves in a nuclear conflagration: they are just closely bound to their home worlds.
Yet another answer to the Fermi Paradox question, "Where are they," is, well, "Right here!" The aliens are present, perhaps in great abundance, and perhaps right with us at this very moment. We just can't see them or interact with them. They might not necessarily be enshrouded in invisibility cloaks: reality, itself, might provide sufficient concealment.
Not only would an advanced race have developed technology we can't even fathom, they would also likely have knowledge of physical reality that we can't even comprehend. (Without wishing to indulge in the "snobbery of chronology," just try to imagine explaining the concept of thermonuclear fusion element creation to a medieval alchemist.) Perhaps one facet of these reality involves other dimensions: those dimensions beyond the three dimensions comprising our spatial reality and the one time dimension
These aliens could well know how to travel through these hyper dimensions so as to observe others without the inconvenience of interaction.
Think of the sphere that passed through the two dimensional realm in "Flatland." It first appeared as a point and then as a circle of ever increasing and then decreasing radius until returning to a point. It was also able to hover "above" or "below" the plane, a concept that A. Square couldn't truly understand.
We're not trying to "solve" the Fermi Paradox today. We're not even asserting that the other theories are incorrect. Instead, we're trying to entertain all the possible explanations as to why we seem to be alone in a Universe that we know very well to be prodigiously creative. (During the time you required to read that last sentence, more than 100,000 stars ignited throughout the cosmos.) Perhaps the only way to solve this paradox is to either encounter aliens or venture out into the distant reaches of the galaxy, itself. The latter scenario is years, if not centuries, in the future. The former scenario could happen in an hour.