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.
There are many proposed solutions to the paradox. The primary one is that life is not abundant and technological civilizations are exceedingly rare. We could be the only one. There’s also the Great Filter solution, which states that some critical step to becoming a spacefaring civilization that spreads throughout the galaxy is unattainable. A natural catastrophe of some sort, our own stupidity and war, the inevitability of an AI singularity taking out a civilization; many solutions to the paradox have been proposed, but we’re left wondering.
Another concept related to the Fermi paradox is the Kardashev Scale. It measures the technological advancements of species from Type 1 to Type 3. A Type 1 civilization can harness all of the energy available on a planet, while a Type 2 civilization can do the same for an entire star. A type 3 civilization on the Kardashev Scale has advanced so far that they can capture all of the energy emitted by an entire galaxy. It’s a framework for thinking about civilizations on extraordinarily long timescales.
There’s an underlying assumption to all of this thinking, and in a new research article, researcher Lukáš Likavčan examines them. Likavčan is a researcher at the Center for AI and Culture, NYU Shanghai, and at the Berggruen Institute. The research is titled “The Grass of the Universe: Rethinking Technosphere, Planetary History, and Sustainability with Fermi Paradox.”
The concept of environmental humanities is part of the background in Likavčan’s research. Environmental humanities is an interdisciplinary field in academics that examines the relationships between humans and environment. It combines environmental studies with humanities like history and literature. It criticizes our anthropocentric views of nature and tries to understand how we think about nature, how we represent it, and how we impact ecosystems.
“SETI is not a usual point of departure for environmental humanities,” Likavčan writes. “However, this paper argues that theories originating in this field have direct implications for how we think about viable inhabitation of the Earth. To demonstrate SETI’s impact on environmental humanities, this paper introduces the Fermi paradox as a speculative tool to probe possible trajectories of planetary history, and especially the “Sustainability Solution” proposed by Jacob Haqq-Misra and Seth Baum.”
Likavčan is referring to the paper “THE SUSTAINABILITY SOLUTION TO THE FERMI PARADOX,” in which researchers Jacob Haqq-Misra and Seth Baum presented an overlooked solution to the paradox. Their sustainability solution states that we don’t see any evidence of ETIs because rapid growth is not a sustainable development pattern. From this perspective, the Kardashev Scale is rendered futile. No civilization will ever use all available energy from its planet, star, or galaxy, because the growth required to reach that level of mastery is unsustainable.
“By positing that exponential growth is not a sustainable development pattern, this solution rules out space-faring civilizations colonizing solar systems or galaxies,” Likavčan writes in regards to the sustainability solution. He elaborates on the solution by re-thinking three underlying concepts: technospheres, planetary history, and sustainability.
Likavčan says that the technosphere is only a transitory layer. It won’t continue to grow until every civilization builds a Dyson sphere around their star to become a Type 2 civ on the Kardashev Scale. That’s simply not sustainable. We’re biased towards that thinking because from our perspective, we’re expanding into space and the future seems bright and almost unlimited. Behind us are centuries of colonial expansions and decades of stunningly rapid technological progress, so it’s almost automatic to think it can continue. But alarm bells are ringing. Continual technological progress may very well be unsustainable.
“As the authors state,” Likavčan writes regarding Haqq-Misra and Baum’s sustainability solution, “the formulation of the Fermi paradox contains a biased presupposition based on the observation of only one planetary community of intelligent species (i.e. humans), which is in turn based on a warped understanding of human history, which assumes that history unfolds in a progressive series of civilizational, colonial expansions.”
In this case, our efforts to detect other civilizations through their technology is unlikely to be successful. “The technosphere is a transitory layer that shall fold back into the biosphere,” Likavčan writes.
We need to rethink our assumptions about our planetary history, too, according to Likavčan. We assume that what has played out on Earth is “normal” and widespread. The human community on our planet is not a single occurrence. Instead, it plays out everywhere that life evolves on a suitable planet in the right location around a suitable star.
Here Likavčan points to the sci-fi author Stanislaw Lem. In his novel Solaris, one of Lem’s characters says, “Us, we’re common, we’re the grass of the universe, and we take pride in our commonness, that it’s so widespread, and we thought it could encompass everything.” This is the “grass of the Universe” metaphor.
“The metaphor of the “grass of the universe” is central to this paper, as it recognizes the crucial environmental implication of the potential existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe—namely that the history of the human planetary community on Earth is not a singular occurrence, but potentially unfolds throughout the cosmos in many permutations, conditioned by the setting of given star system and the inhabited exoplanet(s),” Likavčan writes.
We don’t how true this may or may not be, but we can recognize it as an assumption and open our thinking to other possibilities.
The sustainability solution to the Fermi paradox outlined by Haqq-Misra and Baum says that “… human civilization needs to transition to sustainable development in order to avoid collapse.” There seems to be some inherent wisdom in that statement. It may even be axiomatic. But for Likavčan it may not be enough.
Here we encounter the concept of genesity, introduced in a 2022 paper. It goes beyond our notions of habitability, which largely rely on the presence of water, with energy from a star, and including the CHNOPS elements (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur), deemed critical for life. “Finally, in an effort to be more inclusive of life as we do not know it, we propose tentative criteria for a more general and expansive characterization of habitability that we call genesity,” the authors of the 2022 paper wrote. Genesity is basically life as we do no know it.
This all adds up to a different understanding of advanced civilizations that can somehow survive, including our own if humanity is fortunate. The planet is primary, and any technosphere will have to be harmonious with planetary conditions.
“In this light, the Sustainability Solution to the Fermi Paradox contains a philosophical takeaway: it tells a story of the convergence of the technosphere with the planet’s pre-existing conditions, rather than the story of replacement or dominance,” Likavčan writes.
Instead of humans being primary, or even existing life being primary, it’s planets that are primary. So a technosphere is only sustainable when it expands or strengthens a planet’s genesity. That puts efforts like SETI, and our understanding of our own civilization’s trajectory, in a new light.
“Since the planets assume the central role in this normative framework, this paper proposes to follow innovative moral philosophies, such as planetocentric ethics,” Likavčan explains.
From that perspective, the only successful technosphere is one that folds back into the biosphere, making it very difficult, even impossible, to detect. Does that means it’s time to shut down SETI and any similar future endeavours? Of course not.
It’s about rethinking our underlying assumptions. To do that, Likavčan proposes some avenues for further research.
We need a better understanding of how technospheres might fold back into biospheres. Not just in our case, but from a wider perspective. We also need to do more work into planetary histories and try to ascertain what parts of ours might be more generic and what parts might not reflect other planets with biospheres at all. Lastly, we still don’t know what life as we don’t know it might look like. Will evolution always produce “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful,” as Darwin said.
Our predicament is that we have so little information to go on. Naturally, we look around us and use our circumstances here on Earth as a springboard.
However, as we go about our business, it’s important to sometimes examine our underlying assumptions, as this paper shows.