Where are they?
Most sci-fi readers and writers are familiar with the Fermi paradox, summarized by the question in the title, and the associated Drake equation that tried to resolve it. For those who are not, let me review that history first before going on to discuss a different take on the Drake equation that I found interesting.
The Fermi paradox first appears in my sci-fi books in the second book of the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy.” In Sing a Samba Galactica, Earth colonists on New Haven, an E-type planet in the 82 Eridani system, have evidence for some local ETs and try to figure out how to communicate with them. Here’s the excerpt:
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They had an informal meeting in the bachelors’ dining area. Takahashi watched as Malenkov, ever the showman, pinged his beer mug with a laser pointer and then stood on top of a chair.
“At Los Alamos, in 1950,” he began, in his best orator’s voice, “the great Italian physicist Enrico Fermi asked Emil Konopinski, Edward Teller, and Herbert York, as well as other physicists working on the atomic bomb project, this provocative question: If life is so common in the universe, where are they?”
Malenkov waited for some chuckles to subside, gulped some beer, and continued.
“Fermi noted there are plenty of stars older than our sun. If life were so plentiful, it would have begun on planets around these stars billions of years before it began on Earth. In that case, shouldn’t Earth have been visited or colonized by a race much older than our own? Even with slow means of space travel like what we used to come to New Haven, a civilization with a will to homestead could settle a large fraction of the galaxy in a million years or so.”
Malenkov looked out at his audience. Takahashi, sitting in the cafeteria’s front row, smiled at him. So which one of us is Holmes and which one Watson?
“This is Fermi’s Paradox. 20th century scientists Frank Drake and Carl Sagan explained it away by pointing to the tremendous distances of interstellar space. They suggested such civilizations would turn to radio communication, but we all know by personal experience it’s hard to hold a conversation with time lags of many years. In brief, although we may not resolve Fermi’s Paradox, we have a chance to make it an irrelevant question in the sense that we have a plan for making contact with the first sentient extraterrestrials known to Humans.”
It was Takahashi’s turn. He didn’t grandstand like his friend. He described a simple plan….
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(Here’s a BTW of possible interest: Emil Konopinski finally taught me classical electromagnetism at Indiana University (Joe Weber, an early pursuer of gravitational waves, was also a brilliant researcher but a terrible teacher—he left me hating classical E&M). Professor K was Fermi’s last student and a great guy who never once mentioned this wee bit of history. I would have enjoyed discussing the topic with him!)
What the Drake equation did was in some sense justify the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program by describing a way of calculating how many civilizations would be broadcasting radio waves across the galaxy that SETI could intercept. I guess you could turn it around and say it describes how many might be listening to our broadcasts! How THEY would interpret something like The Walking Dead and heavy metal bands or would react to our DNA experiments described in Jurassic Park, which was on every cable channel when that movie sequel Jurassic World came out, is a different question. But we might intercept entertainment programs from them too, so one can argue that the information content of electromagnetic signals could be suspect.
The Drake equation contains seven factors. The first factor is an estimate on the rate of how many stars are born each year. The second was the number of existing stars having planets. For years, we only knew the first factor and guessed at all the others. Now we know the second factor is much larger than one (Earth’s Sol)—Kepler and other sensors and a lot of hard work by scientists have produced a list of over 3000 exoplanets (planets not in our solar system), and some of these are in zones where liquid water can exist (considered necessary for the creation of life), that number being the third term in the equation.
Let’s summarize this by saying we now know three terms in the Drake equation are non-trivial, i.e. Earth isn’t the only planet satisfying the conditions. They’re still pretty fuzzy, and the other four terms are still anyone’s guess. But Adam Frank, an astrophysicist, and Woodruff Sullivan, an astronomer, took a different tack in the May issue of the journal Astrobiology, as described by Frank in his article “Yes, There Have Been Aliens” (NY Times, 6/12/16). What they calculated was the chance that NO civilization beyond ours has existed. To quote from the Times’s article: “Specifically, unless the probability for evolving a civilization is less than one in 10 billion trillion, then we are not the first.”
UFO enthusiasts, or people who fear events like those portrayed in the Independence Day movies might occur, won’t be satisfied with this answer, of course. These people and many others want to know if anyone is out there right now, or maybe have direct evidence that Earth has been visited in the recent past (all those UFO reports). I think this calculation is novel, though. In particular, if we ever make treks to nearby stars, we might find evidence of technological civilizations existing long before humanoids stopped dragging their knuckles and walked erect upon our planet. That scenario of finding an ancient civilization is common in many sci-fi novels (Samba has one). Sci-fi writers now have more justification for writing such a scenario, and sci-fi readers will continue to enjoy what these writers can imagine.
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