Advanced Civilizations Could be Indistinguishable From Nature
20th December 2024
Sometimes in science you have to step back and take another look at underlying assumptions. Sometimes its necessary when progress stalls. One of the foundational questions of our day concerns the Fermi Paradox, the contradiction between what seems to be a high probability of extraterrestrial life and the total lack of evidence that it exists.
What assumptions underlie the paradox?
The Fermi Paradox is based on the fact that our galaxy is home to hundreds of billions of stars, with many or even most of them likely hosting multiple planets. The sheer number of planets urges us to conclude that life should be abundant, and that some of this life must have evolved into sentiency like us. Even if only a small percentage become technological space-faring civilizations, there should still be many of them. The paradoxical part is that if this is true, there should be evidence. We should see some indication that they’re out there, or they should’ve even contacted us by now. But we don’t.
Feel free to read the rest of the article, but be aware that this is an example of The Aggregation Fallacy–treating a huge amount of instances as just ‘data’ and drawing conclusions from correlations without taking into account the variations in the underlying instances.
It is entirely possible that higher-order life on Earth is unique because of two highly improbable occurrences: The cell nucleus and mitochondria. Investigate those two and I think you’ll agree.