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4 days ago
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A Theory Says We Can't Find Advanced Aliens Because They're Not Trying to Be Found
The Fermi Paradox ponders an endlessly fascinating question: If so many worlds exist in the universe, why haven't we detected any sign of extraterrestrial life? A possible reason, called the 'Sustainability Solution,' argues that the search for technosignatures necessitates a particular human bias, suggesting that rapid growth is the only means of society expansion. A new paper reexamining this solution suggests that many societies may face collapse due to the unsustainable aspect of an ever-expanding species, and so many of its technologies could be indistinguishable from nature itself. For more than 40 years, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) organization has turned its gaze toward the cosmos in search for an answer to one of humanity's greatest questions: Are we alone? Often taking the form of the 'Fermi paradox'—a 75-year-old thought experiment that explores why there are so many worlds, yet seemingly no alien civilizations—this grand question has inspired a lot of possible solutions. Maybe life is much rarer than we imagine? Maybe it's incredibly difficult to evolve into a modern civilization like ours? Or maybe aliens are speaking in a language we simply don't understand. However, there's one possible solution that eerily speaks to our current moment. Known as the 'Sustainability Solution,' this idea posits that endless economic growth may simply be impossible to sustain, so alien societies either adapt by creating sustainable civilization in harmony with their host planet, or they simply die out. First proposed by Pennsylvania State University scientists Jacob Haqq-Misra and Seth Baum in 2009, the 'Sustainability Solution' suggests that if aliens do exist, they likely wouldn't create the technosignatures we often attribute to advanced civilizations, such as Dyson Spheres or interstellar spacecraft. Instead, these structures (part of the 'technosphere') would blend with the natural world, making them difficult to distinguish. In a new study uploaded to the preprint server arXiv, New York University researcher and philosopher Lukáš Likavčan revitalizes this solution to the Fermi paradox as a lens through which to view humanity's own development. The paper re-conceptualizes technology, history, and sustainability on a planetary scale. 'The ecological limits constrain the topology of viable planetary histories to those evolutionary trajectories where the technosphere successfully folds back into the biosphere,' Likavčan wrote. 'The major result of this reconceptualization is the problematization of the analytical import of technosphere as a category denoting some new geological layer—it seems to be more of a transitory armature of the biosphere's evolution and less of an emerging permanent layer.' Humans play a strange, transitory role in this conceptualization. Of course, being primates, we are of the biosphere. But our creations—at least, as argued by this theory—become part of the theoretically detectable technosphere (whether this region is a permanent fixture or a temporary arm of the biosphere is up for debate). Drawing on a sample size of one (i.e. human civilization), it's easy to think that progress will continue unabated until we become masters of our own Solar System and beyond. However, as Haqq-Mistra and Baum originally stated in 2009, this 'Sustainability Solution' questions the assumption of the unimpeded exponential growth of such civilizations. 'It is still possible that slower-growth ETI civilizations exist but have not expanded rapidly enough to be easily detectable by the searches humans have yet made,' the original authors wrote. 'It is also possible that faster-growth ETI civilizations previously expanded throughout the galaxy but could not sustain this state, collapsing in a way that whatever artifacts they might have left have also remained undetected.' Additionally, Likavčan's idea of 'folding back into the biosphere,' means that advanced civilizations might instead create technologies that are essentially biological in nature in order to remain in balance with their finite resources. To support this point, Likavčan quotes Canadian sci-fi author Karl Schroeder, who wrote that 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature,' itself a reformulation of sci-fi Arthur C. Clarke's famous words that compared technology to magic. This could also explain why we haven't found civilizations while looking for technosignatures alone. Magic or no, the nature of the Fermi paradox makes it a 'we won't know until we know' kind of question. But the exploration of possible solutions can also provide a valuable lens through which to value our own society, its future perils, and how we might—against all odds—survive long enough to one day solve this perplexing question. You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
Time of India
19-05-2025
- Science
- Time of India
The overlooked miracle of life
By- Jug Suraiya All of us, even those who profess atheism, at one point or another have hoped for a miracle, an act of Divine Providence that could make our most heartfelt wishes magically come true. I wish i could be a topper in the board exams; I wish I could land a job in an MNC; I wish I could find my ideal life partner; I wish I would win a jackpot lottery. Our miracle list is almost as endless and as varied as we. But as we hope, and even pray, for a miracle, we overlook the greatest miracle of all, which is ourselves, the fact that we exist at all. If you're fortunate enough to live in a place where there is little or no atmospheric and light pollution, and you look up at the night sky you'll see some 2,000 stars, each of which is like our Sun. This is only a minuscule part of our galaxy, the Milky Way, which has an estimated 60 billion stars and is one of anywhere between 200 billion and three trillion galaxies in the universe, each with billions of Suns, which in turn have their own orbiting planets. In order to sustain life even at the most basic level, a planet must be in what is called the Goldilocks Zone, neither too hot nor too cold. Moreover, habitable planets must have water, from which primordial life springs. Scientists – using the Drake Equation named after astronomer Francis Drake, who in 1960 initiated the first organised search for extraterrestrial radio signals – have estimated there could be as many as 60 billion habitable planets in our galaxy alone, and in the universe as a whole as many as 50 sextillion. That's five followed by 22 zeros, or one million billion. However, the calculus of the Drake Equation falls foul of the Fermi Paradox, named after the Italian-American physicist hailed as 'the architect of the nuclear age', Enrico Fermi. Seeing a magazine cartoon depicting extraterrestrials rummaging through New York City's garbage bins, Fermi reportedly said, 'Where is everybody?' Why is it that SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, launched in 1960, hasn't made contact with a single intelligent life form from elsewhere in the universe? Could it be that such beings deliberately avoid us, seeing the mess we've made of our own planet through environmental degradation and wars? Or is it that we are truly alone in the unimaginable vastness of the cosmos? Marvelling at the complexity of life on Earth, from bacterial, single cell microorganisms to scientists, astrophysicist Fred Hoyle compared it to the statistical probability that a storm sweeping through a junkyard would create a fully functional Boeing 747. Who, or what, is the cause of this miraculous phenomenon that we take for granted and call life? Religion would have us believe it is God. Science would nudge us toward the Big Bang Theory and Darwinian evolution. The greatest wonder of wonders, the greatest miracle of miracles is that there is something at all – the universe, earthworms, us – rather than nothing, existence rather than non-existence. Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email Disclaimer Views expressed above are the author's own.
