The human race is doomed never to find extraterrestrial life, because we are about to wipe it all out in a manner that is unintentional, yet horribly unavoidable.
That’s the conclusion reached by physicist Alexander Berezin from the National Research University of Electronic Technology (MIET) in Russia, in a new and admirably parsimonious solution to Fermi’s Paradox.
Fermi’s Paradox is named after Enrico Fermi (1901–1954), an Italian-American physicist who created the world’s first nuclear reactor. Along with fellow physicist Michael Hart, he did some back-of-the-envelope calculations and raised a disturbing and apparently intractable issue at the heart of the subject of extraterrestrial life – or, rather, its absence.
There are, the pair stated, billions of stars in the Milky Way – never mind the rest of the universe – that are similar to the Sun, with some of them considerably older. Given this, there is an extremely high probability that Earth-like planets also exist in abundance and some of these, therefore, must host intelligent life.
So far, so logical. But, the scientists continued, if this is so, then some of the intelligent lifeforms must have developed interstellar travel – because humans are working on it, and humans, in this set-up, can’t be anything special.
Ergo, even at a slow pace, some of these civilisations should have completely crossed the Milky Way by now.
Ergo, where is everybody?
There has been no shortage of attempts to resolve the problem. Possible explanations have included the idea that we humans aren’t using the correct search techniques so keep missing ET; ET has worked out ways of hiding from our searching stares; the universe is so old that whole ET civilisations have risen and eventually gone extinct without overlapping; and the face-palm-inducing suggestion that all advanced civilisations are so busy listening for the signals of others than none have remembered to actually broadcast one.
Berezin, however, dismisses these arguments because they “invoke multiple rather controversial assumptions”.
In a paper published on the academic pre-print site Arxiv (and, thus, awaiting peer review) he advances his own tightly reasoned solution to the matter. It is not, however, something he does so much with pride as with deep sorrow.
“I argue that the Paradox has a trivial solution, requiring no controversial assumptions, which is rarely suggested or discussed,” he writes.
“However, that solution would be hard to accept, as it predicts a future for our own civilisation that is even worse than extinction.”
Just let that sink in for a moment: worse than extinction.
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