A Brief Thought About the Fermi Paradox

When I looked into some of the ancient astronauts stuff a few weeks ago, I came across a lot of discussions of the Fermi paradox. I think I've come up with a possible explanation that I haven't seen before.

The argument made by Enrico Fermi was that while it would take millions of years for a technologically advanced civilization to explore the entire Milky Way galaxy, this is not very long compared to the billions of years that the galaxy has existed. Therefore, if a technologically advanced civilization existed in the Milky Way galaxy, then they should be here by now.

A number of suggestions have been put forward to explain why we see no evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations. This range from, we are the first and only civilization to they are hiding from us. You can read about some more proposals on the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

A few days ago I came up with another explanation. Some time ago I came across an article that suggested that there could well be planets that are more suited to life than Earth (see: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/01/140117-exoplanets-superhabitable-planets-space-astronomy-science/). I thought, if extraterrestrial civilizations arose on a planet more suited to life than Earth, they might very well look at Earth as uninhabitable and pass it by.

Our space programs have sent probes to planets that we don't think are inhabitable. But, would a civilization that had visited many solar systems still want to explore uninhabited planets? I suspect that if we explored other solar systems, that after a period where we did explore uninhabitable planets, we would come to see that as a waste of time. I've made the assumption that life on an Earth-like planet is sufficiently rare that an extraterrestrial civilization is unlikely to find a case before they give up on Earth-like planets.

An extraterrestrial civilization could have explored many Earth-like planets and never found one that was inhabited. If they saw Earth from a nearby solar system, they might well conclude that there wasn't any point to actually visit. They might think: if you've seen one Earth, you've seen them all.

The main objection I see to this idea is that it assumes that the civilization had a low level of curiosity. For a civilization that had decided to undertake interstellar travel, this seems unlikely. I'm not sure we can discard the idea based on this objection, especially since, as of now, we can't prove it one way or another.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

Do Ancient Alien Probes Watch Earth?

In the last couple of posts I talked about the possibility of aliens visiting Earth in the past. One of the reasons is that I had not found any serious discussion of the possibility. I found some this week.

I came across Robert A. Freitas Jr. (www.rfreitas.com), who in the late 1970s and early 1980s produced a number of studies on the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). One line of inquiry was the possibility of alien probes within the Solar System. Although he did not, strictly speaking, focus on ancient alien visits, the discovery of alien probes would be proof of visitation.

The list of articles he wrote can be found at http://www.rfreitas.com/AstroPubls.htm. In addition he produced a book on the subject "Xenology" more information and a link to portions of this book can be found at http://www.xenology.info/.

The article "The Search for Extraterrestrial Artifacts (SETA)", (which can be found here: http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/SETAJBISNov1983.htm), gives an introduction to Freitas' ideas.

I haven't read all of the material he wrote, but I have found some ideas that are relevant to the question I started with: If There Really Were Ancient Astronauts, What Kind of Evidence Would We Find?

• In his articles Freitas focuses on observational probes. He concludes that these would be small, in the 1 meter to 10 meter range.

• He identified three broad categories of probes: probes that didn't want to be found, probes that wanted to be found, and probes that didn't care if they were found.  He suggests that a any technology capable of sending an interstellar probe would be able to successfully hide from us.

• He concluded that any probes would be located in stable orbits close to Earth. He identified five such orbits.

• He conducted a preliminary search for alien probes. This did not identify any potential probe, but was not of sufficient detail to eliminate the possibility that alien probes existed close to Earth.

Freitas has restricted himself to a more limited range that I have so far. I do think that any definitive proof of alien visitations will be found in space.

I would think there would have been some follow up work along these lines more recently, but other than doubtful claims of cities, space ships and monuments found on the Moon or mars, I haven't found anything more recent that the early 1990s yet. It appears that since about 1985 Freitas has moved onto other research projects, specifically nanotechnology.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog