"Dark Forest": A new answer to the Fermi Paradox

Art is: UFO Over City by Randy Haragan.


Where are all the aliens?

That's the basic premise behind the Fermi Paradox. I've blogged about it before, but here is the upshot.

Physicist Enrico Fermi, who directed the first sustained nuclear reaction, once made the following commentary on the idea of alien life (paraphrasing): Given the number of stars in the known universe and the seeming ubiquity of the elements necessary for life, there should be numerous alien civilizations. Despite that, we've yet to find any substantial signs that we are not alone. So where is everyone?

Chinese science fiction writer, Ken Liu has a possible answer. It comes from his 2008 novel, The Dark Forest. In the novel, the argument is laid out like this:

-All life desires to stay alive.
-There is no way to know if other lifeforms can or will destroy you if given a chance.
-Lacking assurances, the safest option for any species is to annihilate other life forms before they have a chance to do the same.
-Thus wanting to stay alive, everyone stays quiet so as not to give away their presence.

I can't say he's wrong. The logic is sound. If nothing else, the notion presented by Dark Forest helps us check a few of our preconceptions. In order for writers to create stories about aliens, there needs to be a reason for aliens to come into contact with humans in the first place. The easy and rather exciting way is to make them hostile. We have a good old, "us vs them" alien invasion story against extraterrestrials operating on similar principles outlined by Ken Liu. These principles are emboldened by our own experiences here on Earth, witnessing what has happened to less-developed cultures encountering more industrialized civilizations.

The more optimistic writers make an appeal to ethics. We would like to think that war is a disease of infancy and as a civilization grows more advanced, they put aside the anti-intellectual and counterproductive action of violence. While logical in its own way, I believe it also stems from an inner hope that we might encounter highly advanced beings who could help us fix all our ills. Maybe a sort of "ET rapture" desire. This may be wishful thinking.

Again, I can't say Ken Liu is wrong. Where I part company with him slightly is the Darwinian notion that life will always operate in a mode of "kill-or-be-killed." Even now, we as a species are moving away from that kind of thinking. Yes, believe it or not, even after all of my lamenting the swirling toilet that is society...and I still believe there are reasons to think that...I must yield to certain facts, one of them being that we actually live in the most peaceful time in human history. Arguably, that is. Think about, if we were truly ruled by "kill-or-be-killed", would we not have gone after nations such as Iran or North Korea by now? Instead, we more often seek to avoid calescent encounters. For all the rhetoric, we do weigh costs in blood, treasure, and spillover consequences.

As intellect evolves, might this not be common? Again, I'm comparing this only to our own experience for really, what else do we have? But that means we must allow for civilizations that developed under circumstances we could not even imagine.

I think there are many other answers for the Fermi Paradox, several of them actually being rather mundane and unexciting.

Maybe one of them is that given the state of humanity, aliens have chosen to stay away from us.


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