The Fermi Paradox Has A Disturbing Solution

[Eko]

[Easterncedar]

1. Thanks. Bookmarking.

[GiqueCee]

2. Well...

... that was cheerful. Enrico Fermi tossed an intellectual grenade and basically told future generations, "HERE! CATCH!"

[Eko]

3. I hear you on that. Reality is often just go fuck yourself.

But knowing is half the battle, or at least thats what GI Joe said.

[GiqueCee]

9. But...

... it was still very informative and interesting, if one can detach one's self from the predicted outcomes.
So, thanks for sharing it.

[edhopper]

4. There is no reliable way

to determine the chances of intelligent technological life elsewhere.
Without that, the Fermi Paradox is just idle speculation.

I am not talking about life on other worlds, or even intelligent life, but specifically intelligent technological life.

[GiqueCee]

10. I've always thought...

... that it was statistically impossible for there NOT to be intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe, but the distances are so incomprehensibly vast as to preclude contact.
Ordinarily, I'd say, "Well, let's wait and see," but I'm too old to have any hope of seeing the final dénouement.
To posterity, good night and good luck!

[edhopper]

13. But

Intelligent life does not mean technology that will use the elector-magnetic spectrum or develop space flight.
Think of whale like creatures on another planet. They could become extremely intelligent. But they wouldn't need to develop technology.

[GiqueCee]

15. But...

... then there's that whole opposable thumbs thing that comes in handy when developing technology.

Whales are too cool to need technology!

Humans would probably have been better off if we'd learned to live with other creatures, rather than succumbing to the pathological need to exercise dominion over everything and everyone. Guess it's a little late for that.

[rampartd]

25. the peaceful worldwide civilization on earth does not use electromagnetism.

there is some possibility that aliens communicate regularly with the queens of the argentine ants while avoiding the dangerous bipedal savages of earth.

The absence of aggression within Argentine ant colonies was first reported in 1913 by Newell & Barber, who noted "…there is no apparent antagonism between separate colonies of its own kind".[37] Later studies showed that these "supercolonies" extend across hundreds or thousands of kilometers in different parts of the introduced range, first reported in California in 2000,[35] then in Europe in 2002,[38] Japan in 2009,[39](pp 143–147) and Australia in 2010.[13]

Several subsequent studies used genetic, behavioral, and chemical analyses to show that introduced supercolonies on separate continents actually represent a single global supercolony.

[Disaffected]

18. That is the crucial point. To elaborate a bit,

we have absolutely no idea what the odds are of intelligent life evolving on a habitable planet. All we know, because we are here, if that the odds are not zero and, that the chances are not equal to 1 (i.e. a certainty). Therefore the actual odds lie somewhere between those two extremes but we have no idea at all of where.

For instance, if the odds of intelligent life developing on a habitable planet were 0.1, then, given the number of inhabitable planets we have discovered, the galaxy should be teaming with intelligent life. OTOH, if the odds are extremely low, say one in a trillion, then the odds are that we are the only ones in existence and, maybe the only ones that ever have existed.

It may also be that the chances of even primitive life (organisms capable of reproducing and evolving) developing are relatively high but, the odds of such life becoming "intelligent" i.e. enough to develop technology, may still be extremely low.

Calculations BTW, such as the famous Drake equation, to estimate the amount of intelligent life out there somewhere are therefore pretty meaning less as the calculation involves multiplying together a number of probabilities, one of which is the odds or intelligent life developing on a habitable planet. Such a calculation is no more accurate than the least accurate odds estimation therefore the not uncommon supposition that intelligent life must be prevalent is quite meaningless and, the Fermi paradox is not really the paradox it seems.

[edhopper]

21. This

in the 4 billion years of life on Earth, Intelligence only developed during less than .01% of that period. And then only because of a series of extinctions that let other life forms evolve.

[HAB911]

5. Wonderful presentation

"Intelligence may be a lethal mutation"

There it is

[ret5hd]

6. that is my belief...

nature is hungry

nature is violent

any world that develops technological intelligence is essentially doomed

hence, no alien visitors

[Disaffected]

19. That is a very plausible explanation.

Lord knows we here on earth have come perilously close on several occasions to reaching that point.

IMO it is a major miracle that we have lasted as long as we have.....

[biocube]

7. It really shouldn't be called a paradox...

Our range for detecting radio waves is pathetic...both in distance and time. The number of explanations is limitless.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

8. says who?

[SergeStorms]

11. So Fermi thought there should be.....

some universal "Facebook" where all possible civilizations emit transmissions, throughout the span of "time," (which is a construct unique to our own "civilization" ) that we should all be able to register and detect?

Just because other civilizations don't "live up" to our standards doesn't necessarily mean none exist. Fermi, although brilliant by our standards, was a fairly pretentious dude, if you ask me.

I detest social media and don't partake. What if other civilizations feel the same? Fermi's Paradox seems to be an updated Ontological Argument.

Just my two cents.

[Oneironaut]

14. Honestly, given human nature, I would probably not contact us at all.

Humans are a very destructive and invasive species. Any intelligent life out there would probably just see us as perpetually-enraged murder apes that somehow spread throughout the entire planet. There wouldn’t be much in it for them, and, there’s a very good chance we all would just try to kill any landing party that came here.

Maybe we don’t see them because they don’t want us to see them, or, there’s nothing interesting here. They might not even consider us to be intelligent life or distinct from other animals.

[SergeStorms]

24. Precisely.

We wouldn't want to join any club that would have us as members. 😉 My apologies to Groucho Marx.

[misanthrope]

17. You "don't partake" in social media?

Isn’t DU social media?

[SergeStorms]

23. It's a website.

Social media is considered to be sites such as Facebook, X, Reddit, etc.
DU isn't as interactive as true social media.

[Oneironaut]

12. I think we tend to think of aliens as human-like.

Our nature has severe flaws, mainly our desire to dominate, our destruction of the environment around us, and, our absolute short-sightedness. Intelligent alien life would not necessarily be like us at all. They could be so different that our species and theirs would be like us vs. a slime mold, or, even more different.

We expect to see alien ships, construction, etc, but, it could be that intelligent alien life doesn’t need those things.

That, or, we are a bizarre anomaly and 99.99999999999999% of life out there is just one-celled organisms.

[edhopper]

16. You are right. Life elswhere

doesn't necessarily mean intelligence will evolve, without the asteroid, we would never have come to be.
And intelligent life doesn't mean the development of technology.

[LudwigPastorius]

20. The Great Filter is superintelligent AI.

Last edited Tue Jun 2, 2026, 04:29 PM - Edit history (1)

...which is smart enough to conceal itself from other civilizations (meat or silicon-based) , and has no reason to leave its home system looking for resources unless its star is dying.

[edhopper]

22. Here is a bit of known data that can go into the calculations

Life on Earth developed fairly early once the conditions were right.
But in the 4.5 billion years of life on Earth, intelligent life forms (us) that could use technology only existed less than .01% of that time.
And we only happened because of several mass extinctions that allowed other life to evolve.

[usonian]

26. Transcript

https://pastebin.com/raw/ZbiET3wR

[rurallib]

27. isn't this where we turn to gawd and his or her bible for answers?

Just kidding - marking to come back to later.

[Another Jackalope]

28. My contribution to the solution space

I wrote an essay in 2013 that laid out in summary form why I think there's effectively nobody out there. My hypothesis has much in common with other involuntary self-destruction arguments. The web article is here: http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Fermi.html - below I excerpt the core of the idea.

IF:
1. Life is a dissipative structure as described by Ilya Prigogine: organisms live by applying exergy to environmental raw materials to obtain the necessities for survival;

2. Life develops according to the self-organization principles of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics or NET (per Eric Schneider and James Kay);

3. Life has the NET principles embedded in its genetics (my contribution, but it seems logical). Those principles include the growth of self-organization and complexity in the presence of suitable energy gradients, and system persistence and metastability achieved through reproduction;

4. Life develops primarily on planets with a carbon/oxygen environment. The carbon/oxygen combination is a highly probable context for life due to the well-controlled exothermic reactivity of the combination, as well as the solubility of carbon compounds in water, which would also necessarily be abundant in such an environment;

5. Life evolves by means of natural selection though the application of the Maximum Power Principle described by H. T. Odum;

6. Life evolves enough to develop analytical intelligence; and

7. The intelligent life probably develops a technological civilization. Necessary (but not sufficient) conditions include a quantity of carbon stored earlier in the planet's history to provide a strong but controllable gradient of low-entropy thermal energy from combustion, and accessible metals (the raw materials of civilization) in the upper layer of the the planet's crust.

THEN:
1. If there is insufficient stored carbon available, the species will not be able to develop a technologically advanced society due to insufficient energy for the development of enough complexity. As a result it will not send radio waves out into the universe, and we will never detect its existence.

2. If there is sufficient stored carbon available, the species will inevitably destroy itself. The destruction will probably happen either through depleting some essential, irreplaceable resource (i.e. hitting a Liebig Limit) or more likely due to hysteresis in the combustion energy system. The hysteresis is the time it takes after CO₂ has been released into the planet's atmosphere until planetary warming becomes apparent.

Burning carbon and using the released energy of combustion is easy and obvious. It will be discovered fairly early in the development of the presumed intelligent species, well before they acquire enough scientific ability to detect the long-term planetary danger of the carbon dioxide exhaust gases. In our case we have been using fire for half a million years, but figured out the problem of global warming barely a hundred years ago. Until 1900 it was generally assumed that the release of CO₂ was existentially benign.

By the time the danger is realized, the species will be carbon-dependent - locked into the burning of carbon for energy - trapped in a vicious spiral of thermodynamically-driven self-organization, energy-dependent maintenance of existing physical and social structures, increasing energy dependence, increasing CO₂ production - and increasing planetary heating from the "greenhouse effect". The more carbon-dependent the species becomes, the harder it is to break free from that dependency.

If there is enough carbon available, the species will become technologically advanced, will send out signals for a short while and will then probably encounter an inability to adapt to the planet's changing climate. The species will not climb out of its gravity well and fly to the stars, because the energy required will all be soaked up in its own growth, and extinction will happen well before it gets to the Dyson Sphere stage.

Now, I may be anthropomorphizing like crazy, but the whole theoretical edifice rests on the fairly banal assumption that our experience is approximately average for an intelligent species. That is, we are not the least bit special. Similar intelligent life will probably arise under similar conditions, follow a similar path (though different in the details) and fall into a similar hole. The details will differ, but I think the trajectory will be similar.

Where is everybody? Well, there are probably a lot of them out there. But either they never developed radio, or they did and soon afterwards all went the same place we're probably going: Poof!

So there you have it: the thing that makes our species special - the use of fire - may have ensured our inevitable destruction.