The Fermi Paradox is the ultimate conundrum, isn’t it?

The dwindling number of us moderns that still look up at the stars at night with wonder must ultimately feel the same as Fermi himself famously did back in 1950 when his exasperation asked:

So, where the hell are they then?!

The theories about intelligent extraterrestrial life still remain stuck in a suspension of disbelief, satellites to the larger theological questions like the existence of God or the scientific paradox of the Big Bang. We can’t prove or disprove such complex things so we do what we humans are adept at.

We spin fictions.

And yet the logic is haunting isn’t it? With the trillions of planets just in our galaxy alone, surely, after you apply the probabilities of life-spawning-planets, to life that survives to become sentient there, to sentient life that builds a complex technological society at least equal to our own etc. etc., it’s just reasonable to assume that that there should be thousands of advanced civilisations in our Milky Way alone.

There should be ample evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life.

But if we define ‘evidence’ as an observation, a signal, an anomaly from deep space that is undoubtedly artificial, that is then successfully recorded and verifiably peer reviewed by as many astronomical bodies and independent experts across the planet as possible, then we must conclude we come up horribly short.

Even with SETI (The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) and many other enthusiasts having passionately searched for such evidence for generations, so far we haven’t heard a peep. There are plenty of conspiracy theories of government suppression of UFOs but as passionate as these theories are, they remain fictions, sans evidence.

There are loads theories that try explain this disappointing state of affairs of a quiet universe. Space.com’s article 12 Possible Reasons We Haven’t Found Aliens does a good job of laying most of the popular ones out, but there are only two that hold water when scrutinized from a less anthropomorphic viewpoint – and it is the amalgamation and extension of these two theories that we may appreciate a third.

But let’s break those two down a little:

Intelligent life self-destructs.

It’s implied here that along a long enough technological timeline, a civilisation will eventually wipe itself out. Dystopian fiction and movies (my life’s dark love affair and if you’re like me you know these stories well) are replete with very creative, potential dark endings. Artificial intelligence wipes us out with a singularity event, or killer robots (The Terminator 1,2,3,4,5…), or mindless enslavement – take your pick. Or too many psychos pressing red buttons of nuclear launch codes (Dr Strangelove), or manmade ultra-virulent plagues that wipe us out (The Stand, The Silo Series) or turn most of us into bloodthirsty zombies intent on eating the few runners that have survived (The Day of the Dead, The walking Dead and a thousand others. Planet killing meteorites that we stupidly ignore (Don’t Look Up), sudden ice ages we unwittingly engineer (The Day After Tomorrow), or the world just inexplicably goes to hell (Mad Max). The list goes on.

I’ve scratched just the tip of the iceberg here but all these stories explore how we end civilisation, decimating human kind to the edge of extinction, essentially removing ourselves from the cosmic address book.

But the biggest, real historical threat that we’ve faced and that is alive and well since the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945 killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, is the Atomic age. Since then, we’ve come close a few times to test driving this civilisation ending power, but thankfully, so far, MAD (the seemingly ubiquitous, self-preservation of Mutually Assured Destruction) has allowed us to dodge this collective bullet only to contend with a much larger one.

We are now on the precipice of the next great threat to our survival – Artificial Intelligence.

If we don’t solve the alignment issues before Artificial General Intelligence is achieved (where an AI system becomes smarter by an order of magnitude at anything a human can do) or adequately integrate ourselves with the technology to avoid a clear speciation event (where an AGI branches off and evolves way beyond us, leaving us in its dust) an AGI may unintentionally end humanity as we know it. AGI will arise before the end of the 21^st century – it really is a matter of when, not if. If we survive that long, and there’s no reason to suggest we won’t, humanity and AGI, or AGI alone will live on with technological capabilities that will seem magical if not Godlike to us now…

Which brings us full circle to the next theory of why we haven’t caught ET’s phoning home.

Alien technology may be too advanced.

Regardless of our egoistic chest pumping, we, like any other living creature on Earth, are limited beings – in both sense and cognition.

As smart as we humans are, an advanced civilisation that is ahead of us by a mere five hundred relative years (not a blip in a blip of cosmic time) would be so advanced that they would likely be largely undetectable, unrecognisable. Imagine if we could meet our descendants from the year 2523 (if the notion of a year is still applicable then)? If the past two hundred years is anything to go by, they’d seem pretty alien to us I can assure you.

The point is that we don’t have the wits to know where or how to look, or the technological sophistication to detect extra-terrestrials out there, who might be staring us in our blind and dumb faces right now. We can search for electromagnetic signals, or pollution in alien atmospheres, and I believe we will one day find very convincing evidence of a dead alien civilisation, but we won’t get a chance to meet them as we won’t be able to travel there and they’ll likely be extinct.

So if we take these two theories together, what happened to them, the intelligent aliens out there that do survive, is what is likely going to happen to us.

They turned inwards beyond the dimensions of the physical universe as we understand it.

Christopher Nolan’s movie Interstellar is one of the great recent science fiction stories to seriously posit the likelihood of human civilisation evolving to bend space and time – and to become something beyond the physical. Dune had a go at this as well with the folding of space, travelling without moving through artificially evolving consciousness with the spice Melange. But humans in both stories retain their relatively modern characteristics. They remain physical beings very much still deposited in the physical universe.

That black hole at the end of Interstellar, that almost destroys but ultimately saves our dear heroes, is a symbol of an advanced intelligence that we cannot peer into much less understand. Our current physics doesn’t allow us to see beyond the event horizon of a black hole since not even light can escape its infinite gravity, so we remain limited, and can only guess at the physics that breaks down around it.

Black holes are that symbol of the paradoxical consequence of an advanced civilisation harnessing an infinite technological power – exiting the known into the unknowable.

With the dawn of artificial intelligence, it is undeniable that our global village is collectively, rapidly, turning ever inwards. We aren’t looking up at the stars anymore – we’re looking into screens projecting human generated fictions. Through the internet, and social media, most people on the planet, phone in hand, are the first collective, global, cybernetic generation.

And there’s no putting the genie back in the box. There won’t be any slow down to the advancement of artificial intelligence and as this technology evolves, as we inevitably physically integrate more complex technologies into our bodies, and nervous systems and minds through implants, nanotechnology and genetic engineering, it is more likely we will continue this inward drive, this love affair with the human imagination and story.

Then travelling through space to distant, mostly dead and dangerous worlds, will then seem rather quaint and unnecessary to most of us in comparison to the rich worlds we can create for ourselves.

If our current focus is anything to go by, for every person that does stare up at the stars in wonder, fascinated by the question of extraterrestrial life and travelling to distant worlds (even though faster than light speed remains a serious limitation), there are a thousand that are looking down at the their mobile phones, plugged into their tablets and laptops and gaming consoles and VR headsets, all utterly absorbed and content to stay right here and explore, be entertained, escape into the mushrooming digital universe of our own creation.  And as we evolve these technologies to replicate and enhance and augment reality further, the allure will only grow.

We need only survive our future fictions.

Maybe then, at some point in the not too distant future, when we reach a singularity of sorts, we’ll finally meet those illusive aliens, in whatever form a face to face would look like, who might ask us:

What took you so long?