#fermi paradox

Is Physical Law an Alien Intelligence?

Alien life could be so advanced it becomes indistinguishable from physics.

By Caleb Scharf

Illustration by Tianhua Mao

Perhaps Arthur C. Clarke was being uncharacteristically unambitious. He once pointed out that any sufficiently advanced technology is going to be indistinguishable from magic. If you dropped in on a bunch of Paleolithic farmers with your iPhone and a pair of sneakers, you’d undoubtedly seem pretty magical. But the contrast is only middling: The farmers would still recognize you as basically like them, and before long they’d be taking selfies. But what if life has moved so far on that it doesn’t just appear magical, but appears like physics?

Continue Reading

The Fermi Paradox

Once upon a time, scientists decided, “what would happen if we point Hubble at this dark piece of the sky and leave the exposure open for an absurd amount of time?” Said scientists then experienced sudden bowel incontinence from the results. Vast specks of light, like the first image and when zoomed in, each individual speck of light is it’s own galaxy with it’s own solar systems.

Seeing the sheer vastness of the universe and that it’s so large, it’s incomprehensible to our feeble minds, is it possible that we’re alone? Where are all the aliens?

The Fermi Paradox tries to describe why we seem to be alone in a vast sea of endless possibilities for intelligent life to form. Life seems to form easily, surely it’s the same elsewhere.

Here’s some main bullet point arguments as to why we’re seemingly alone.

• We’re too far apart, separated by vast space and time
• We’re rare or we’re the first
• The aliens don’t have advanced technology (we don’t either). Think of it this way, an octopus or a crow is intelligent life. They’ve never even visited the moon.
• Mass extinctions happen more often than not, they might be dead or intelligent life never exists long enough to make contact with each other before it’s wiped out
• We haven’t existed long enough to be discovered or to figure out how to find others
• They’re too advanced for us
• It’s simple nature of intelligent life to eventually wipe itself out
• Intelligent life has discovered that it’s too dangers to be in contact
• We’re not listening properly for their messages. It’s like trying to listen to a CD on a record player - it won’t work.
• We’re not contacted because we’re in a simulation or an alien zoo
• Maybe they’re already here, observing
• Maybe they’re here (e.g. UFOs?) we just don’t know how to talk to them or acknoweldge them. We laugh at most UFO reports.

Possible solutions to the Fermi paradox, which is the apparent contradiction between the lack of evidence and high probability estimates given by the Drake equation for the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations.