With all due apologies to Professor Stephen Hawking, I rather doubt any alien civilization that has achieved interstellar travel would find Earth and its inhabitants to be of any interest. It is human vanity alone that creates the image of aliens just itching to cross the vast distances between stars to admire (or invade) us. While Fermi was aware that Einsteins General Relativity established the speed of light as an unbreakable limit, Fermi, like so many Star Trek fans would later do, assumed that someone would find a way around that limit. But science fiction is always presented as people just like us, only with superior technology. Indeed Gene Roddenberrys elevator pitch for Star Trek was Wagon Train to the stars, derived from the successful series Wagon Train that showed contemporary people solving contemporary problems but set comfortably remote in the old west so as not to offend anyone. But the historical reality is that each advance in technology changes us; our awareness, our behavior, our perceptions. An alien civilization advanced enough to leap between the stars will have so little in common with us that contact becomes pointless. Do you stop and visit every anthill you pass as you drive to Las Vegas? Of course not; you have far more important things to be doing. That being said, there is another possible solution to the Fermi paradox aside from the very real issue of gamma ray bursts. And that is or tinkering with the code of life itself. Sooner or later every advanced civilization will achieve the ability to rewrite their genetic programming, and if our own early efforts are any measure, they will make mistakes, possibly ones leading to their own extinction (as could become the case with the Epicyte gene). This is a crisis point that every advanced civilization will encounter as they evolve, and precious few may survive it. wrh
Posted on: Fri, 12 Dec 2014 15:29:39 +0000
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