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.


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.

Permalink to this post