The Fermi Paradox Still Makes Sense. Here's Why | Q&A 445

Does the Fermi Paradox make any sense? How could we talk about life out there if all the planets are just single pixels or worse? Is it all just nonsense? And in Q&A Plus, my favourite part of the Artemis II mission. All this and more in this question show. It's time for the question show, your questions, my answers. As always, wherever you are across my channel, if a question pops in your brain, just write it down, I'll gather them up, and I will answer them here. Alright, let's get into the questions. Frank Schifrin. They talk about the Fermi Paradox. We hardly Alright, it's been a while since I've given my defense or my explanation of the Fermi Paradox. So let's go for it. So the Fermi Paradox, this comes back to Enrico Fermi, who back in the 1950s was in a conversation with a bunch of other scientists talking about UFOs and aliens and the universe and so on. And the story goes that Fermi did a bunch of math on a piece of paper, maybe in his head, and then said, well, aliens should be everywhere. So where is everybody? And look, I think it's really important to kind of follow the thought process when you think about the where is everyone, why the Fermi Paradox is an enduring mystery. Because I think when most people hear about the Fermi Paradox, they're like, it's easy. The answer is the universe is really big and we haven't even looked. So how can we say that there's no life out there? This is simple. Done. Case closed. I solved it. Suck it, science. And of course, people thought of that, right? That your instinctual response to this idea, it has occurred to people before. And even thinking that through, they still find the Fermi Paradox unsettling. So allow me to roll out the Fermi Paradox in its truly most awe-inspiring, maybe horrific version. And we'll see whether or not you feel the same way at the end of this conversation. So the universe is big, right? 93 billion light years across for the observable universe, possibly infinite. The universe is old, 13.8 billion years old, that there are 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. There are probably 100 billion to 2 trillion galaxies in the universe, each of which has some number of hundreds of billions of stars in it. There are countless stars in the universe. When we look at our own solar system, life on Earth formed within just a few hundred million years of the formation of the planet, literally as soon as the Earth had cooled down to the point that life could form, life did form. And the solar system is not the earliest that life could have formed in the universe. When you look at the kinds of heavy elements that are in stars and other star systems, that chances are star systems could have formed life in them several billion years before the solar system, that the concentration of metals had already built up to the point that you had carbon and iron and oxygen and nitrogen and all these heavier elements in solar systems, probably at the 10 billion year mark. But we're even seeing evidence of oxygen in galaxies at 13.3 billion years ago. And so, it really looks like the universe was concentrating and making heavier elements, the kinds of things that life would have required much, much earlier. Let's safely say 2 to 5 billion years before the solar system formed. So, you've got quintillions, septillions of stars in the universe, where life could have formed. And if the Earth is kind of normal, then life would have formed on those stars within a few hundred million years of the formation of that star. And so, there should have been life forming on a huge percentage of the star systems here in the Milky Way, you know, tons of them qualify for that. So, that is the argument. And we see here on Earth, the history of life. Life was pounded by volcanoes and asteroid impacts, and who knows what other kinds of great calamities. Volcanoes that resurfaced the entire planet, snowball Earth, times when there was a thick layer of even at the tropics of the planet. And yet, life bounced back almost instantaneously. Once life gets established on a planet, it's almost impossible to wipe out. Although we have not proven it, theoretically, life can transport from world to world. You have a large asteroid impact, it strikes a planet, it kicks up debris into space, that debris drifts across the solar system, it enters the atmosphere of another planet, and that the life can survive that journey. It's this idea of panspermia. And you can even take this larger that maybe life can travel from star system to star system on rocks that have been ejected out of star systems that you would, over the course of billions of years, you would get this colonization of an entire galaxy just through natural processes. So that is the case for the universe that we find ourselves in, that not only life should be possible out there, but life should be literally everywhere. And when you consider what it's like to be on planet Earth, look around you. Now, I live in the middle of a Canadian rainforest. And so wherever I see, I see trees, I see birds, I see bears, I see life. But no matter where you go on planet Earth, you go down to the bottom of a well that was drilled five kilometers below the surface of the Earth, you find life. You go to Antarctica, underneath the ice, you find life. You look in nuclear reactors, you look in high temperatures, low temperatures, you look up in the upper tops of the atmosphere, wherever you go, life is everywhere. Life spreads. You have a new volcanic island that appears in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and within a few hundred thousand years, it is completely colonized by coconuts and spiders and things that can travel across the ocean and seabirds and you name it, right? So life just fills every nook and cranny of every available ecological niche that we have. And so you would expect the same thing to happen to the Universe. If there is evolution happening almost instantaneously on tens of millions, if not billions of worlds across the entire galaxy, and on those worlds, you got evolution, natural selection, you've got this process moving forward. Some percentage of them are going to have intelligent life. That intelligent life is going to want to explore the stars in the same way that we are. Not all of them, probably not most of them, but some of them. Some fraction of those civilizations out there are going to want to explore the cosmos. And they would have started five billion years ago, two billion years ago, three billion years ago. These civilizations would have reached the level of technological advancement they're at, and then would have kept progressing beyond us. Imagine us with another two billion years of technological progress. What could we accomplish? Right now, we can't send a robotic mission to another star system. Would we be able to do it in a million years? In a billion years? What would we be able to accomplish? Well, the laws of physics say you can do a lot of really complicated and obvious things. You can do things like send out self-replicating robot probes that will go from star system to star system and replicate themselves, and then go to another star system and replicate themselves and go to another star system. If we had, let's say, 1% of the stars in the Milky Way had advanced civilizations who sent out robot probes, then there would be one billion civilizations who had sent out self-replicating robot probes that would go from star system to star system, make copies of themselves. You can fully explore an entire galaxy in about 10 million years. Just 1% of the speed of light, you can reach your entire galaxy in about 10 million years. So, imagine a billion advanced civilizations within the Milky Way that the solar system should be just filled with self-replicating robot probes. There should be evidence of ancient factories on the surface of the Moon in the asteroid belt. It should be everywhere. They're drifting around these old robot factories long after the robots have come and gone and continue on to explore. We don't see any of that. Advanced civilizations could be building larger and larger structures to access the energy from their star. We don't see that. They would be communicating, sending out signals in various wavelengths, not just to communicate with themselves, but to communicate with each other. We don't see that. To send messages to civilizations that are on the rise, like us, we don't see that. So, from our perspective, the entire universe looks like a desert. It looks like not a desert island that is starting to have life, but literally nothing. It just looks like it's rocks, and it's ice, and it's stars as far as the eye can see. There is no evidence in a universe that if life is as complicated and as big as it should be, life should be everywhere. But we see none of it. People always say, well, we've barely started to look. We've gone to the ocean. We've only put a thimble full, and we haven't found any whales. Well, imagine if whales came to you, which is what you would expect. That the whales would come and move into your house with you. That we would expect to see the explorers coming from other star systems. We see the rocks, right? Oumuamua, Atlas, Borisov. We see rocks and ice making the journey from star system to star system, and yet we don't see the spacecraft. So, philosophically, it has to tell us that life is a lot more rare than we thought, that it's not 1%. There aren't a billion civilizations in the Milky Way. There aren't a million civilizations. There aren't 1,000. There aren't 10. All it takes is just one civilization to fully explore the entire galaxy, to clog every star system with the self-replicating robot probes, and we don't see any of it. So, the Fermi paradox says life should be everywhere, but we don't see any evidence of it, any obvious evidence of it. Where is everybody? Again, you get plopped down randomly to any place on Earth, and you're not going to have this argument with your friend, oh, it's really hard for us to find any evidence of life. Life will be everywhere, everywhere you look. Even if you're dropped into the harshest desert on Earth, you'll flip over rocks, you'll see spiders. You will see life. If you look at the soil with a microscope, it will be teeming with life. But we don't see that evidence in the Universe. It feels like the Universe is empty, which is not what you would expect. That is the paradox. So, any flippant answer that people give about the paradox is insufficient. Well, maybe we just haven't started to look. We've looked. We've looked with a level of detail. We've looked at the Moon, and we don't see anything on the Moon. We've listened for signals, and we don't see any signals. We've scanned stars, and we don't see anything weird that's happening. It looks like the Universe is this empty wilderness, and that is the paradox. It's weird, and it should be unsettling, because it's not what we should see. We should see life everywhere. It should feel like it's the Federation with ships coming and going, and that's not what we see. It should feel like the Borg are continuously gobbling up every star system within reach, and that's not what we see. It's time to shout out all the new $5 patrons and above. Gregory S. Panis, Douglas McLaughlin, Paul Tomas, Joshua Lowry, Matthew Ryan, Aaron, Peter Zucker, Ty Ranchula, Andrew H., and James Gekkel. Join the club at patreon.com slash universe today. Did you know you can watch this same video with no ads and get a bonus question over on Patreon, completely for free? We call it Q&A Plus. This week's bonus question, what's my favorite part of the Artemis II mission? I'll put a link in the show notes. All right, those are all the questions that we had this episode. Thank you everyone who joined us for the live show, everybody who put your questions into the YouTube comments. I'm going to talk about my media that I am consuming right now, but first, I'd like to thank our patrons. Thanks to Abe Kingston, Andrea Pedretti, Brian Bowdoin, Caridwyn, Chuck Hawkins, Commander Baylock, Darkfinger, David Gilton, and David Matz. And for all the reading and math for toddlers, Evan Dot Pro, James Clark, Jeremy Madden, Jim Burke, Marcel Smits, Micah Purcell, NasaOceanGuy, Nordspace, OneStepForAnimals.org. Please follow my nephew at vbrick6994, Rain Kaidu, Richard Williams, Sean Sargent, Stephen Foundland Monday, Team 49, Telescopes Canada, Vlad Shiblin, Wolfgang Klotz, Zelda, oh my god, Proof of Aliens, who support us at the Master of the Universe level, and all our patrons. All your support means the universe to us. So I've been very busy during this summer hiatus, mostly gardening and forestry work, but I've also been consuming a ton of media. So I just wanted to bring you up to date on the stuff that I've been watching, playing, reading, in case you also are interested in some of this stuff. So on the reading side, I finished the third Joe Abercrombie series, the First Law series. I finished the third book, which was terrific. They're such a great series. So if you're looking for a more of a low fantasy series, I do highly recommend those. I have been playing Path of Exile. The new season of Path of Exile 1 just came out, just launched on Friday. And as always, I'm playing in Ruthless mode, which is the — it's not harder mode, but it's like harder to make things work mode. And so you sort of have to take more time and have sort of a deeper game knowledge to be able to make it work for you. But I really enjoy Path of Exile. Is it like my perfect game? I've said that about RimWorld too, so I don't know. So I'm now reading the eighth Dungeon Crawler Carl book, which is called A Parade of Horribles. And it is excellent, and it is always a gong show. I'm really enjoying it. We just wrapped up season nine of Rick and Morty, and it was an excellent season. I really enjoyed it. And I'm really excited that the new season of Star Trek Strange New Worlds has just begun last week. And so the second I wrap up this recording, my wife and I are going to go and watch the new season of Strange New Worlds. So let me know what you're watching. Put your shows, your games, your books down in the comments below, and then I will try to consume as much of that as I can. All right, we'll see you next time.