Are We Humans Acting Out an Answer to the Fermi Paradox?

Please don’t click out yet. This essay will get relevant—quite relevant— to your life here on Earth. I promise.

But first consider the Fermi Paradox. That’s the puzzle that Enrico Fermi, the nuclear physicist, noted on beholding the vast number of stars in our Universe. There are trillions of them. So there must be at least a few million, give or take, with “just the right” combination of solid ground, seas, and atmosphere to have evolved carbon-based intelligent creatures like us.

So why don’t we see any? Where are all our fellow intelligent species?

That’s the Fermi Paradox. Now that we’ve discovered dozens of exoplanets, we see it even more acutely. Some of them even look somewhat like Earth, at least as far as we can tell from a distance. For decades we’ve searched diligently for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligent life, with massive projects like SETI. So far, we have nothing to show for our efforts.

So what explains our inability to detect, let alone contact, our fellow intelligent creatures?

No doubt distance is part of the answer. With distances measured in light-years, and the Universe billions of light-years across, a great civilization in a distant galaxy could rise, fall and decay into barely detectable archaeological remnants in the time it takes light to reach us from there.

But perhaps there’s something else. What if “intelligent” life is self-limiting? What if it contains—intrinsically and in the nature of things—the seeds of its own destruction? Stay with me.

I put “intelligent” in quotes for a reason. A truly intelligent species might perhaps be able to see its own shortcomings and avoid those self-limits. Socrates told us “Know Thyself” about well over two millennia ago. More recently, Robert Burns advised us similarly. But how many of us, let alone our great leaders or whole societies, have mastered that skill?

Our planet is about 4.54 billion years old. Single-celled life evolved on it relatively quickly, about 3.5 billion years ago. Primates evolved much later, only about 55 million years ago, and we self-entitled Homo sapiens (“wise man” in Latin) evolved only 200,000 to 300,000 years ago. In comparison, our entire recorded history as a species—the time during which we could record, review and revisit our history and our thoughts—is at most 6,000 years. (I’m being generous here: the Jewish calendar and Chinese recorded history are both at the high end of the 5,000s.)

Next to this, we’ve had Science for less than four hundred years. Most people date the “discovery” of modern observational and experimental science to Galileo’s publication, in 1632, of observations verifying Copernicus’ heliocentric theory of our solar system.

In a mere nanosecond of our evolutionary history—the last century—we’ve discovered and rolled out three classes of inventions that might extinguish ourselves, either partly or wholly, each one by itself or some or all working together. They are: (1) nuclear weapons; (2) carbon-based fuels that we burn continually and massively, producing greenhouse gases that are changing our Earth’s climate now and for the long term; and (3) so-called “forever” chemicals that don’t appear in nature, have never occurred in our evolution and have already permeated our own bodies and the Earth’s entire biosphere.

I won’t dwell on the first two, both of which have been subjects of endless analysis and speculation. I’ll just make three observations. First, our species’ sole actual use of nuclear weapons so far (as distinguished from chest-beating testing) has been to end the most horrible war in human history. Now a big group of us is planning how to use them (or the threat of using them) to wage and win “conventional” wars of imperialism and aggression. Second, there is a very real possibility—to a currently unknowable extent—of our burning fossil fuels triggering a self-sustaining release of “natural” methane, among several other positive feedback loops, that could drive our planet’s climate to a wholly new climate equilibrium. That new equilibrium is likely to differ from our current climate as much as our most recent global climate differed from the last Ice Age. (In an obscure publication, one climate scientist calculated that similar releases of “natural” methane and carbon dioxide ended the last Ice Age with a 30 degree Fahrenheit rise in average global temperature in just “several decades.”). Finally, even if limited and not self-extinguishing, nuclear war will interact with mass migration caused by planetary heating to make both worse, and our species’ survival yet more precarious.

Before we get to the “forever” chemicals, let’s review our evolutionary history once again. It took 4.5 billion years for this planet to evolve to support life and for us to evolve on it to our present stage. In the four centuries since we’ve had Science, and in the century or so that we’ve had modern industry, we’ve created three self-made existential risks. Each is entirely of our own making, and each could, wholly or partly, extinguish our species, whether all by itself or in combination with one or more of the others.

To put it in numbers, after all that planetary and biological evolution, we’ve threatened our own extinction in three ways in a mere 0.000000022 percent of the total elapsed evolutionary time. Might this kind of thing, if repeated with other “intelligent” species, explain the Fermi Paradox? If we don’t all take stock and change our ways, might we double or triple that risk in the next century, assuming most of us survive that long?

In some ways, “forever” chemicals are the most “innocent” of our three self-extinction possibilities. At least their motivation was innocent. Unlike nukes, they were not made to gain an advantage over others of our own species through demonic destructive power that no rational group bent on species survival ought possess. And there were no immediate clues to trouble, like the toxins, unhealthy pollution, and potentially lethal exhaust that arise from every instance of fossil-fuel combustion. All we were trying to do with “forever” chemicals is make non-stick cooking utensils, put out fires easily and reliably and make cheap fabrics that resist getting wet and staying greasy, plus (later) germ-resistant medical instruments.

All we were trying to do, in the immortal and now terminally ironic words of DuPont, was to provide “Better Living Through Chemistry.” Yet what we did—and are still doing—is to change the biochemistry of our bodies and bloodstreams, and of most of the biosphere on Earth, in ways that appear to be permanent, and whose consequences we have no way of even beginning to assess in the short term, let alone the long term. We made a whole bunch of fluorine-carbon compounds, some of which mimic natural compounds in nature and our bodies, but for all of which Nature has no counterpart and no apparent way of breaking them down—hence the name “forever” chemicals.

It gets worse. Some of these compounds have known and devastating toxic effects on animal biology, impair human immune-system functioning, and have outsized effects on human endocrine systems. The World Health Organization has classified some as carcinogens in food and drinking water.

And what do our bodies’ endocrine systems, which these chemicals effect adversely, regulate? They control our bodies’ reactions to extraordinary stress—our so-called “fight or flight” systems—and our reproduction. Individually, we experience their chemical influence as strong emotions like fear, hate, rage, lust and love. What could possibly go wrong, with these disrupters now present in detectable amounts in the bloodstream of almost every person tested so far, even in people remote from highly industrialized “first-world” countries?

Scientific studies of these effects, cited in the linked papers, generally go back about a decade. But they are just beginning to penetrate the sphere of “general” news and public debate. Among the publicly available general news reports are those of Consumer Reports noting the chemicals’ presence in drinking water and in milk (including “organic” milk) and Netflix’ dramatization of a lawyer’s efforts, beginning in 2007, to expose the poisoning of a small West Virginia town.

“Hubris” is an ancient Greek word brought forward into modern English. It connotes a blend of pride and arrogance. Its longevity as a concept suggests a big place in human history and a high rank among our species’ flaws.

Maybe every intelligent species in the Universe has flaws like that. It’s understandable for a species without much tooth, claw, strength or speed, which ends up the top predator of a whole planet, and which invents and builds all the stuff we have in the last century, to show a little pride and talk a little trash. But when that species gets to the point of utterly transforming its environment and its Home, perhaps it needs a dose of humility.

Planetary geology and biology took 4.5 billion years to evolve us and our Home, working mostly by trial and error. Do we really think we can best them both, in less than a century, while trying to (a) beat a terrible foe among us, (b) plunder cheap energy to meet our daily needs, and/or (c) make better stuff than nature evolved for us, to meet rather minor goals like non-stick pans and easy-clean carpets? If we’re going to introduce whole new classes of chemicals, or invent new artificial life forms, or artificial intelligences, that never appear in nature, shouldn’t we at least determine whether our biosphere and our bodies can eliminate or accommodate them before producing them in bulk?

Besides perhaps explaining the Fermi Paradox, this tale has two morals. First, the “dismal science” of economics has failed us far more gravely than we know. Not only has it deluded us into selling our American factories and industrial base to China while claiming that “free trade makes everybody better off,”—a hypothesis so broad and untestable that no first-year student of the philosophy of science would entertain it for a moment. More to the point of this essay, modern economics has deluded us into believing that we can properly “regulate” potentially dangerous innovations by comparing their costs and benefits.

Yet a major point of this essay is that the “benefits” of innovation are usually far easier to discern than the costs. The benefits will often be obvious: (1) putting a quick end to our species’ most terrible war; (2) enjoying cheap, readily available energy to build a vibrant economy and society after that war (and to vigorously prosecute more war whenever deemed necessary); and (3) enjoying the delights of non-stick pans, ever-clean upholstery and carpets, and germ-free surfaces for packaging and medical devices. But the costs you have to look for, and a successful search for real dangers, especially longer-term ones, requires real intelligence and massive persistence.

Who would have guessed that, by developing the Bomb and dropping it on two cities in Japan, we could end our species’ most terrible war early, but at the cost of letting today’s Russia perpetuate an imperialist atrocity that a few allied bombing raids on Moscow could have easily curtailed in earlier times? Who could have foreseen that the electric cars of the 1920s, driven by inefficient lead-acid batteries, might, if followed up sooner, have led our species to earlier electrification of transport and helped save what now seems to be an already bygone, cool “Holocene” climate? Who could have known that fluorinated carbon compounds would turn out to mess with our health and immune systems, and our most delicate hormonal systems, and persist in our environment and our bodies, doing incalculable damage, virtually forever?

Perhaps no one. But that’s precisely the point. We have to look for downsides, not just assume they don’t exist. We have to be more cautious—far more cautious—lest hidden risks and dangers make us yet one more species that failed to escape the Fermi Paradox. Unfortunately, that seems to be the path to perdition that our hapless species is on today.

In order to take these precautions, we must also preserve an appropriate form of government. That means, in my view, heavily regulated and democratic capitalism. I think Today’s China, Iran, Russia, or Saudi Arabia would have done no better with any of these dangerous innovations had they invented them first. They, too, would have reached spastically for the gold ring, maybe even more so. Soviet Russia actually did reach the modern heights of military espionage in stealing our secrets for the triggers for nuclear weapons.

Nothing in human history bespeaks intelligent caution like the rule of law. The only effective governor for unrestrained industry, whether private, governmental or military, is a population whose scientists are empowered to step in and raise the Fermi-Paradox objection to the “next great thing” about which movers and shakers are all enthused, mostly because it will help make them richer and/or more powerful.

Without scientists’ careful and methodical but necessary cautionary work, that next great thing—by itself or in combination with others— might spell our collective doom. Just imagine current versions of artificial intelligence being put in charge of launching nukes.


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Beware the Hurricane!

“And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ‘round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!” — Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons, per the character of Sir Thomas More.

As the most consequential election since our Civil War approaches, Donald Trump is placing his bets on migration. Polls show consistently that it’s the issue on which he enjoys the most lopsided advantage over Biden.

Trump calls undocumented migration an “invasion.” But is it really?

What Vladimir Putin’s Russia is doing to Ukraine is an “invasion.” It involves tanks, troops and millions of artillery shells. Every single day, Ukrainians get killed or injured, as their dwellings and infrastructure get reduced to rubble by exploding shells, missiles, bombs and drones. Ukrainians often hide or sleep underground, in subway tunnels. They school their children there, just to give them a feeling of safety and normalcy.

That’s an “invasion!” Other examples of “invasions” are what Hamas did in Israel on October 7, and what Israel is doing in Gaza now.

Does our unprecedented wave of desperate refugees look or feel anything like that? Not hardly. The vast majority of them are helpless people, driven here by misery, poverty, violence, and corruption in the homelands they are fleeing. All they have is what they can carry on foot.

Unlike past waves of migrants, this one consists significantly—if not predominantly—of families, unaccompanied children, and women. All are seeking decent work and peaceful, better lives. Most of them do jobs that native-born Americans won’t do, under pay and conditions that native-born Americans would never accept. And the bosses welcome them for their docility and willingness to accept low pay and poor conditions without complaining. At the same time, the bosses foment fear and hate against them for political purposes.

On the left, the big issue appears to be women’s reproductive rights. Yes, it’s a terrible thing when women who, for half a century, had the rights to make their own decisions in matters of sex, childbirth, and family have had those rights snatched away by a bunch of so-called “conservative” judges drunk with activist political power. But is this anything like what’s happening in Ukraine or Gaza, or happened in Israel on October 7?

And so we come to the title of this essay and the hurricane analogy. As Hurricane Katrina became a tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico and gathered strength, the citizens of New Orleans were going about their business as usual. They were discussing and arguing about local politics. They were debating the divisions between the posh Garden District, with its great mansions, and the low-lying Ninth Ward where the poor and mostly Black people live. They were talking about the oil, gas, and plastics industries downriver, and how to keep their pollution away from the city.

What they should have been talking about was the levees. They were built to withstand a Category 3 hurricane, and Katrina was a Category 4. The sad and wet denouement is now history. Devastation and pervasive mold still scar New Orleans to this day, nearly nineteen years later. Katrina changed New Orleans’ destiny for a generation and counting, just because the levees didn’t hold.

As the head quote from the (fictional) mouth of Sir Thomas More suggests, you can make a good analogy to levees in politics and government. The rule of law is the levee that protects us from the winds of human hate, greed, violence, and lust for power.

One of many big ideas in the Western Enlightenment was that law, by replacing the whim of individual monarchs and tyrants, could serve as levees against these all-too-common human failings. Law could, and often did, make our lives more stable and predictable, and all of us safer and happier.

Like the denizens of New Orleans as Katrina approached, many of us are missing the point of the upcoming election. A hurricane is approaching, so we should all look to our levees. If we don’t, a storm surge of authoritarianism could wash our levees away and leave us back where humanity was before the Enlightenment: subject to the whims of tyrants, a self-focused aristocracy, and an overweening Church that told everyone what to believe. Then everything would relentlessly get worse.

What are the signs of the coming hurricane? There’s Trump’s pledge to pardon those convicted for the January 6 insurrection, as well as people like (former) General Michael Flynn, who was convicted for lying about official activities. There’s the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025”—a complete plan to revolutionize the federal Executive, upon Trump’s inauguration, to maximize presidential power in service of Trump’s and the GOP’s agenda, whatever that may be. This project is essentially a concerted attempt (dare I write “conspiracy”?) to consolidate Executive power in a so-called “unitary Executive”—once a fringe legal theory but now a concrete plan—to effect a Republican agenda regardless of the will of Congress or any popular consensus.

But to consider all these threats to democracy and the rule of law together is to risk the same loss of focus that drowned New Orleans, and that may make Trump president again. We have to focus on a single clear threat to our democracy. So I’m going to focus on a single, specific, concrete plan that Trump outlined in a recent interview.

Beginning shortly after his second inauguration, Trump pledges to use presidential power to round up and deport the vast majority of undocumented immigrants in the US. And he says he will feel authorized to use the US military to do this job, perhaps with coerced recruitment of the National Guard and local police as well.

A old law called the “Posse Comitatus Act” stands athwart this plan. It forbids the use of America’s federal military forces against civilians, as distinguished from foreign military forces or domestic rebels or terrorists. But Trump has claimed, in the interview, that undocumented migrants are not “civilians.”

The point here is not Trump’s interpretation of the law. He’s no lawyer or judge and cannot make a legal ruling, even if elected president again. The point is simple, practical cause and effect. What is likely to happen if, having made the decision to use our armed forces against helpless undocumented immigrants, Trump can clear all eleven million of them before Congress or the courts can act?

At the end of the day, neither our courts nor Congress controls our armed forces. (That’s something our first rogue President, Andrew Jackson, pointed out.) So the success of Trump’s plan, in practice, will depend on the the willingness of our military officers to follow what appear to be illegal orders.

By constitutional fiat, our President is Commander in Chief of our armed forces. But our military brass pledge loyalty to our Constitution, not to any individual or officer. Their oaths allow them to disobey orders that they find illegal or immoral. Thus much depends on how our top military officers will respond to presidential orders to round up and deport eleven million mostly peaceful and productive but undocumented immigrants.

Yet even that is only legal theory. In practice, the president has the ultimate trump card (pardon the pun!): the power, as Commander in Chief, to fire any recalcitrant military officer.

There is strong precedent for using this power. Lincoln removed several commanding generals during the Civil War, before settling on Ulysses S. Grant to lead Union forces. Harry Truman fired General Douglas McArthur for advocating the use of nuclear weapons against China after it intervened in North Korea’s side in the Korean War.

So think it through for a moment. Does Trump really believe that deporting eleven million undocumented immigrants and using our Army, Navy and Air Force to do it will make us a better nation and secure his place in history? Unlikely. Possibly his plan is a sop to his ordinary supporters, who would like to see him come through on at least one important campaign promise, besides lowering taxes for the rich and corporations.

Much more likely, in my view, this plan is a pretext for Trump to fire our top officers and appoint his own loyalists to take over our military. During his first term, he tried to co-opt the military beginning with (former) General Michael Flynn, who later got snared in a perjury charge. He tried again with General Mark Milley, who later apologized for his role in the anti-democratic disaster of using troops to clear peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square.

If there’s any consistent line in Trump’s erratic behavior, it’s seeking ways to consolidate, enhance and exercise his personal power, free from any restraint. So I deem it likely that he would use an effort to clear the nation of all eleven million undocumented immigrants not as and end in itself, but as a means to clear the military of all opposition to his unopposed rule.

He would seek absolute power backed by the world’s mightiest military force controlled by his loyalists. And he could be confident that at least a large minority of Americans, whipped to an anti-immigrant frenzy by Fox and his own lies, would support him enthusiastically, despite the catastrophic effects on our communities, our economy (with eleven million workers gone!), and our democracy.

After that, we would be retracing Nazi Germany’s path in the 1930s. Or, if various highly-placed military officers in various regions resisted, we could find outselves in a second civil war.

This is the hurricane that threatens us, and this is why we must look to our levees. All other issues—inflation, unrestrained immigration, women’s reproductive autonomy, and our fading influence over Benjamin Netanyahu’s atrocities in Gaza—pale in comparison.

The consequences—and likely the aim—of Trump’s Executive takeover of our military would be to nullify the people’s power to affect decisions in any of these fields. Our nation, in effect if not in word, would be governed by martial law, thus validating, for our own country, Mao Zedong’s famous dictum that “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

This outcome is just one of several plans our right wing has to consolidate power in the Executive, take effective control of the nation, and press the Republican agenda regardless of Congress, the courts, or popular sentiment. This is how democracies die.

As Adolf Hitler should have taught us all, when a man—let alone several groups of influential citizens—publishes plans to weaken and destroy democracy and take over, citizens/subjects had better believe him and them. The Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, Fox, and the Koch Brothers’ Americans for Progress, among many others, have made their aims clear.

So when time comes to vote in November, keep your eyes on the hurricane and the levees. No other issue rises to the same level of importance. Without a democracy and the rule of law, neither women nor anyone else will have peace, let alone reliably enforceable rights.

No protest will have any meaning, as protestors could be jailed or shot. With the federal bureaucracy and the Army, Navy, Air Force and Space Force on his side and controlled by his lackeys, Trump will have no effective counterbalance: not an inevitably divided Congress, and certainly not the courts, which are already dominated by a Supreme Court suborned by the Federalist Society.

Either all important decisions will come from the White House, or there will be a second civil war. If no war comes, everything will be up to a “unitary executive” headed by Donald Trump, managed by a bureaucratic phalanx (dare I say “Deep State”?) of his loyalists, not experts, and inspired and perhaps led by cabals of men (nearly all men!) far more wealthy, intelligent, socially entrenched, single-minded and devious than he.

This gathering hurricane is by far the key issue in the election now only half a year away. The only sure way any individual voter can help avoid it is by voting for Joe Biden and getting others to do so, too. The survival of our democracy and the long-term fate of the Western Enlightenment in North America depend on voters, especially young ones, appreciating this dismal but simple truth.


For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

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