The Fermi Paradox Read online

  The Fermi Paradox:

  100 solutions and the survival of mankind

  by

  Alexander Popoff

  The truth is out there:

  out of this Universe,

  out of this time.

  The Fermi Paradox: 100 solutions and the survival of mankind

  Copyright © 2016 by Alexander Popoff

  All Rights Reserved

  cover image credit: NASA

  www.alexanderpopoff.com

  Published in the United States in America

  Also by Alexander Popoff:

  The Dyatlov Pass Incident

  Dinosaur Killers

  The Fermi Paradox:

  They are here and control us

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction:

  The Equal Start Hypothesis

  The intelligences in our Universe started at about the same time.

  CHAPTER 1

  Fermi Paradox and Dinosaurs

  Dinosaurs on the Moon

  Fermi Paradox

  CHAPTER 2

  100 Fermi Paradox Hypotheses

  CHAPTER 3

  The Battle for the Future

  Only a few will survive.

  CHAPTER 4

  Alien Bugs

  Alien Nutty Professors

  Alienoses are diseases communicable from extraterrestrial organisms to humans.

  CHAPTER 5

  Von Neumann Machines

  vs.

  Popoff Machines

  CHAPTER 6

  Mega-Intelligences

  These are mature intelligences managed to abandon their dying home universes.

  CHAPTER 7

  Global Language

  Clash of global swarms and global intelligences

  Common Language

  CHAPTER 8

  Alien Invasion &

  Independence Day Myth

  Why aliens attack Earth naked?

  CHAPTER 9

  Existential Risks or Bust

  Roots of the Future

  Dead Hand

  Aliens on the Moon and Mars

  CHAPTER 10

  Homo Futurus

  Universal Man

  Progressors, uplifters, and star trekkers

  Do we live in a designer Universe? Are we a designer civilization?

  FUNDAMENTAL CONUNDRUM

  Why doesn’t a Superior Intelligence contact humans openly?

  1. If there are advanced alien intelligent creatures in our Universe, why aren’t they already on Earth?

  2. Why don’t we observe activities of alien civilizations in the cosmos: robotic space probes, accidents, astroengineering, star wars, spaceships, communications, signals, or radio wave leakage?

  3. What is the UFO phenomenon? There are countless reports of UFO sightings, abductions, and encounters with alleged alien creatures. In the U.S. alone, more than six million people claim to have been taken up into UFOs. Still no conclusive and definite evidence is yet available that would prove the existence of UFOs as real extraterrestrial spacecraft.

  Why don’t superior intelligences from our Universe, other universes, from the supposed other dimensions, or from wherever they are contact us in an open manner or officially?

  For the mega-civilizations, we are like a Monopoly game on the table, next to the sandwiches and the beer: we are totally visible, accessible, manipulable, and contactable.

  Introduction:

  the equal start hypothesis

  Numerous solutions have been proposed (by both academic and independent researchers) to the grand question of why there is no hard evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. There is every reason to believe that our Universe should be teeming with aliens. The great number of proposed hypotheses, which flood the pages of books, magazines, academic journals, newspapers, and the Internet, indicates that there is still no satisfactory explanation of this major riddle.

  However, if we assume that for some reason the space civilizations in our Universe started at about the same time, we get a very elegant resolution to the Fermi paradox: the Universe is teeming with living beings, but since they are at almost the same level of development, most of the numerous intelligent races still have not contacted or have not found evidence of the existence of other advanced creatures. They, just like humans, are making their first steps into deep space. The leading intelligences already travel across the neighborhood of their star system, but they face a lot of problems: financial, biological, technological, and so on, which limit their space expansion activities.

  What could be the reason for such an equal start to intelligence?

  The equal start hypothesis presupposes a factor or factors providing such an equal start. It could be something that “forbids” the emergence of sophisticated life before a certain point in time, like frequent gamma-ray explosions, frequent impacts from large meteorites, comets, and asteroids, massive volcanic eruptions, huge amounts of dust sweeping into the solar systems and reducing the light penetration, unfavorite climate conditions (too cold, too hot, too wet, or too dry), and other devastating natural events on a universal and galactic scale. In the early Universe, catastrophic galactic and planetary events were so common that life rarely had the time to evolve. Even if primitive life becomes widespread, for billions of years it could not make the step to higher life forms and intelligence.

  We could also suppose that there is a still-unknown natural evolutionary mechanism, which provides such an equal start to complex life and high intelligence.

  However, there is also a more complex explanation. There are clues and evidence that life in our Universe is orchestrated.

  All life in our Universe is based on hard competition in order for Nature to accelerate evolution, thus providing (bio)diversity, quality, and quantities of civilizations. The intelligent races can compete, cooperate, and progress successfully only if they are at about the same level of development. The later-emerging space civilizations could hardly survive a real competition with sentient beings, who would be far ahead of them.

  Accurate timing is very important for complex systems; it is of even crucial importance, because instead of a Universe filled to the brim with fit intelligent races, there might be one or only a few of them, which would never reach such a high level of development as a legion of hard-competing civilizations would.

  The idea that some creative, conscious artificer invented the cosmos and the intelligent creatures is very ancient. Hindu tradition sees the Universe as a vast dream of God, who is playing with the world and its inhabitants. Throughout human history varied images of the Almighty have been created—such as a benevolent shepherd, the father of all living beings, a super-advanced alien visitor, a dreamer whose dreams we are, a craftsman with supernatural powers, a playing child, an old wise man, a supernatural super-being, a harsh demiurge, and so on. An a priori argument for the existence of God asserts that as Existence is a perfection through evolution, so God inevitably must exist and He is the most perfect being. He is the Supreme Being, ergo, the Supreme Ruler.

  Some contemporary scholars claim that God exists and that He is a creature just like us, but He was perfected through much longer evolution.

  For most of today’s scholars God is an unnecessary hypothesis.

  There are modern scientific theories, hypotheses, and present-day myths (in some cases science, myth, and religion are mixed up) that claim that the world is ruled by supreme alien races, some sort of Artificial Intelligence or a supercomputer, (living) intelligent fields, creative conscious energy, that Earth itself is conscious, and so forth. Rupert Sheldrake asserts that morphic resonances influence and control everything in the Universe. A morphic field is a field of pattern, order, form, or structure, o
rganizing the forms and the development of living organisms, sapiens, molecules, atoms, and all the rest.

  Albert Einstein also stated his position on this tricky matter: “…each man explains in his own way the fact that the human will is not free…Everything is determined…by forces over which we have no control…for the insect as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance…intoned in the distance by an invisible player.”

  But for now, there are only three primary groups of plausible theories on that controversial subject of the genesis and control of the Universe and of intelligence:

  1. Universe, life, and intelligence are a result only of chance events and evolution by natural selection. There is no ruling superior intelligence or deity (whatever it is);

  2. A supreme agent (natural or artificial consciousness, a deity, a kind of force, or a superior sentient being—natural or artificial) created the Universe through manipulation of physical matter and energy, and it is still in control. That external agency is assisting the development of life and intelligence;

  3. According to some recent ideas, the situation may be a combination of the previous two groups of theories: energy, matter, life, and intelligence are subjects of a creative, external guiding agency, chance events, and of evolution through natural selection. The evolution is both natural and assisted.

  Humans started assisting evolution of life on Earth thousands of years ago through selection of plants and animals. We will play a significant role in the evolution of the species on Earth and beyond through emerging modern technologies like genetic engineering. Humans will assist even their own evolution.

  The fine-tuning of our Universe for intelligent life has received a great deal of attention in scientific literature.

  One hypothesis is that the Universe may have been designed by an extra-universal intelligence. Researchers believe humans will in time be able to generate new universes.

  The artificer idea leads to the possibility that the designers are themselves product of an evolutionary process in their own universe. However it also raises the question of where that universe came from, leading to an infinite regress. Who or what created the first universe and the first creator?

  The initial universes could be a product of some natural evolutionary process of energy and matter, and after many cosmological cycles of evolution there were created advanced creatures capable to improve and control the existing universes, life and intelligence. And eventually, the superior space race could create new universes, life, and intelligence.

  Probably “natural” universes happened many, many universes back in time. The most advanced intelligences would be able to create designer universes that much better reflect their ideas about life, intelligence, and evolution.

  Some researchers proposed the notion that the fine-tuned universes inherited their characteristics from their parent universes result of a long process of cosmological natural evolution, a process analogous to biological natural selection.

  Such theories relies on information transfer from the parent universe to the baby universe.

  The theory of Lee Smolin surmises that a collapsing black hole causes the emergence of a new universe, whose fundamental constant parameters (masses of elementary particles, Planck constant, elementary charge, and so forth) are the same or may differ slightly from those of the universe where the black hole collapsed. Each universe could give rise to many new universes. The theory contains the evolutionary ideas of reproduction and mutation of universes.

  But there is also another possibility of how the universes inherit their characteristics. The universes could inherit from previous universes a vector, from Latin vector, “carrier,” a natural structure and mechanism, which organizes all living and non-living structures in the evolving universe. The vector is a vehicle for new universes to receive characteristics and models of development from preceding universes. The previous evolutions, which happened billions of times, left evolutionary patterns in the vector; the development of the humans before us is written in our genome. Our genes make us. The vector makes the Universe, life, and us.

  Even designer babies need a DNA. The designer universes need a vector.

  The vector and our space-time are one inseparable entity, just as humans and their genes are inseparable.

  The Universe is developing strictly according to a model written in the vector. Humans are developing strictly according to a blueprint written in their genome.

  The vector contains information for the future development of the species in our Universe, memorized during previous evolutionary cycles. Our ontological and biological future is the past of previous evolutions.

  Creation by superior intelligences and natural selection go hand in hand.

  The vector runs the Universe through all phases of its natural life—from birth to death. The entropy of the unfolding Universe is increasing. This means that more and more energy becomes unavailable for conversion into work. The Universe is “running down.” It is a nonreversible mechanism; our world has limited resources and a limited lifetime. After the normal life period of the Universe is over, it turns again into energy.

  After a life cycle is over a new one begins, and the supposed end product of the Universe—a super-being, a great number of grand civilizations, or something else—has to move into another universe in order to survive. The adopting universe (man-made or natural) should have different natural laws, more suitable for such advanced beings.

  The space races will start a quest for the vector because it holds the biggest ever secrets and the wisdom of the Existence, the past and the future of our Universe, and the key to their survival because the Universe is getting closer and closer to its heat death.

  The key question here is: why do not they—the superior mega-intelligences from previous evolutionary cycles of our Universe, from other universes, from the supposed other dimensions, or from wherever they are living—contact us officially? Why do not they give us a helping hand, saving billions of human lives from diseases, crime, wars, and calamities—man-made or natural? They have their good reasons for not doing what we would expect from them, which I try to explain in this book.

  The general idea of a cyclic or oscillating universe goes back to times immemorial. Ancient people thought that the universes are like the legendary phoenix which lives five hundred years, burns itself on the funeral pyre, and rises alive from its ashes to live another period; with every new life cycle the unfolding universes become more sophisticated and produce more advanced offspring.

  The extra-universal intelligences are much, much older than our Universe. We can’t even imagine the level of development and the omnipotent power of such intelligences.

  CHAPTER 1

  FERMI PARADOX AND DINOSAURS

  The dinosaurs became extinct because they

  didn’t have a space program.

  —Larry Niven, science fiction author

  Could dinosaurs have landed on the Moon sixty-five million years ago, if they had not been wiped out?

  It is often speculated that several bipedal dinosaurs were in a good position to develop intelligence, civilization, and sophisticated technologies, enabling them to start exploring the Galaxy 65 million years before us, if they had not been killed off by some natural disaster. It is also supposed that dinosaur-like creatures on other planets were not wiped out by a chance event, and that they have been traveling all across the Galaxy for many millions of years now and are already colonizing it.

  Ian Crawford, an astronomer in the department of physics and astronomy at University College London, states in his article “Where Are They? Maybe We Are Alone in the Galaxy After All,” published in Scientific American, July, 2000, that without their extinction, the result of a chance event, evolutionary history on Earth would have been very different. Many scientists believe that if dinosaurs had continued to evolve, they probably would have evolved human-sized brains and would have created an advanced civilization.


  DINOSAURS ON THE MOON

  Dr. Dale Russell of the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Ottawa, Canada, coined the word dinosauroid, an intelligent creature that evolved from the dinosaurs. He claims that some dinosaurs had all the ingredients for success that we see later in the development of apes, and that they were well on their way to becoming sentient species.

  Dr. Russell and Ron Séguin, a taxidermist (a craftsman who stuffs and mounts the skins of animals for display) and model maker, even sculpted a fancy model of the supposedly brainy dinosauroid. It depicts what might have happened if Troodon, a dinosaur species, had not died out at the end of the Cretaceous period but had instead continued to evolve.

  Dr. Russell calculated that Troodon had an encephalization quotient that was small compared to Homo sapiens, but was nearly six times larger than the known dinosaur average. Most dinosaurs had an encephalization quotient similar to those of modern reptiles. Brain-to-body weight ratio (the encephalization quotient) is a rough estimate of the possible intelligence of an organism.

  Dr. Dale Russell extrapolated that if Troodon had survived the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction sixty-five million years ago and retained the same body size, its modern-day descendants might have a brain volume of 1,100 cubic centimeters, which is very close to the female human brain volume. The volume of the adult human brain is around 1,130 cubic centimeters in women and 1,260 cubic centimeters in men.