The Fermi Paradox Read online

  Several dinosaur species were very manlike: they stood around two meters high on their two hind legs and had a relatively large braincase, stereoscopic vision, and hands with opposable thumbs. Their forelegs with three slender, flexible fingers were ready for use as hands. They were well organized, hunted in groups, and coordinated their attacks. Some dinosaurs were nearly warm-blooded, an important step toward intelligence.

  Dr. Michael Magee coined the term Anthroposaurus sapiens for intelligent dinosaurs. They are also called Troodon sapiens, dinomen, dinosapiens, lizard humanoids, saurornithoides, lizard men, reptoids, bioraptors, avisapiens, humanoid dinosaurs, saurians, dinosauropods, reptilian humanoids, sapient dinosaurs, reptites, dinosaur hominids, draco, smartasaurus, dinosaur men, and so on.

  It is interesting to note that some dinosaurs bear a striking resemblance to descriptions of aliens given by witnesses of UFO encounters: they had large, elongated eyes; lack of ears; long, clawlike fingers; reptilian nostrils and skin. The reptoids are the most common alien species after the so-called Grays. Some researchers assume that the reptilian/dinosaurian visitors from outer space are not extraterrestrial in origin but rather surviving descendants of an intelligent race of dinosaurs that roamed the Earth during the Cretaceous and Jurassic periods. According to this belief, the hypothetical dinosaur civilization could have started on Earth during the Cretaceous period and would have had at least 65 million year head start on humans.

  In the recent years, the idea that intelligence history on Earth would have been very different without the extinction of the dinosaurs has become a very popular belief. But did the dinosaurs have all of the attributes considered necessary for intelligence in the intelligent mammal? Was it really possible for dinosaurs to outsmart mammals, dominate our planet, and start colonizing the Galaxy 65 million years ahead of us? According to many recent articles and books written by academic scientists, independent researchers, and nonprofessionals—yes! Some of them even suggest that we must look for dinosaur fossils and technological artifacts on the Moon and Mars.

  But there is a very big problem with a supposed dinosaur civilization at the end of the Cretaceous: the method of breeding.

  Because of the extensive fossil record of extinct dinosaur eggs, eggshells, and embryos, it is well established that dinosaurs laid eggs, and like most living reptiles and birds, built nests. The nests have been excavated in soils and in wet sands. In order to provide temperature stability and elevated humidity, the eggs were covered with sand, soil, or rotting vegetation, which produced fermentation heat. Most dinosaurs were simply too big to sit on their eggs.

  The typical reptilian reproduction model is oviparous—the eggs are hatched outside the maternal body.

  The principal disadvantages of dinosaur reproduction compared to mammalian are:

  1. The nutrients inside the egg are very limited compared to the continuous supply that mammals receive inside the womb;

  2. The oxygen supply is much lower as well;

  3. The temperature of the reptile embryo is dependent upon the environment, while the body heat of the mammalian fetus is constant;

  4. Dinosaur newborns don’t get the mammalian highly nutritious food—milk.

  There is a small group of modern and extinct reptiles, which are almost viviparous (live-bearing), but their embryos still develop in shells. They are nourished only by the egg yolk. Such reptiles retain the eggs in the body for most of the developmental period. Hatching occurs shortly after the eggs are laid.

  A few MODERN reptiles have developed a simple placenta, a structure similar to the placenta of mammals: several Australian snakes and lizards, the common European viper, and some lizards.

  The developing sophisticated brain needs more oxygen, more nutrients, a constant temperature, and more time.

  The mammalian fetus develops inside the maternal body and can receive the continuous, generous supply of oxygen and nutrients needed to build a complex brain. The milk of mammals contains all essential nutrients, important antibodies, and white blood cells. This is a perfect food for infants and for their energy-hungry developing brains.

  Mammals are born in a much more advanced state than egg-laying animals; this is a result of a longer gestation period, along with the other factors.

  Eggs hatch between 60 and 105 days after they are laid. Elephants give birth after a 22-month (about 660 days) gestation period. The human baby develops inside the mother’s womb over about 266 to 270 days. The human brain develops from three to four and a half times longer in a much better inner environment than the dinosaur brain. The mammalian fetus and newborn get food that is high in nutrients for their growing, unfolding brains.

  Another dinosaur drawback is the miserable brain-to-body weight ratio, also known as the encephalization quotient. Homo sapiens has an enormous size of the brain as compared to the body. The larger the brain is relative to the animal body the more brain might be available for more complex cognitive tasks.

  The encephalization quotient is highly controversial, for a good reason.

  The simple ratio of body weight to brain weight is highly misleading. Human and mouse ratios are almost identical. In small birds, the ratio is even much larger than that of any human. Are birds more intelligent than humans?!

  Many small mammals and birds have larger brains in proportion to their body size than human beings do.

  The brain weight in vertebrates does not increase linearly with body weight, but rather exponentially. In order to remedy the inconsistencies in the simple ratio method, scientists add an empirically determined exponential constant.

  If we take into account one more factor, the reproduction of the animals (viviparous or oviparous), the encephalization quotient makes more sense. To put it simply, the animals hatched from eggs are more stupid than the live birth animals.

  Oviparous animals are birds, reptiles (snakes, lizards, turtles, and crocodiles), amphibians, fish, anthropods (crabs, insects, spiders, and scorpions), and most surprisingly, five species of the most primitive mammals: four species of echidna and platypus.

  There are no brainies on the list of the egg-laying animals.

  Even the warm-blooded dinosaur descendants, the birds, are famously unintelligent compared to mammals. Birdbrain is a byword for a stupid thing.

  Warm-bloodedness does not help much toward intelligence if one hatches from an egg.

  In short, the brain of live birth mammalian animals is evolutionarily higher than the brain of animals that reproduce through egg-hatching and it is also far more sophisticated. The dinosaurs laid eggs, and their brains couldn’t develop enough to outsmart mammals. Thus, the dinosaurs couldn’t land on the Moon in the Cretaceous period.

  But as a matter of fact, some reptiles did evolve intelligence and a great civilization, and they are now investigating the Solar System via robotic probes and manned spacecraft. And their artifacts are even on the Moon. Therapsids are reptiles from the Permian and Triassic period (from 286 to 208 million years ago). They are considered ancestors of mammals, and thus of humans. So we are the surviving “reptoid-men” which are planning to colonize the Galaxy.

  The Cretaceous mammals were evolutionarily higher species than the dinosaurs and their successors. They had much greater potential, and life on Earth proved that.

  FERMI PARADOX

  Considering dinosaur reproduction, the idea of dinosaurian astronauts from Earth colonizing the Galaxy in the Cretaceous period seems quite fictitious. Could similar species, which evolved on other planets hundreds or tens of millions of years ago and created great civilizations, travel into deep space? If yes, why don’t we observe their activities? Why don’t they contact us? Why don’t they visit the Earth? Here we stumble across the Fermi paradox (also called the Fermi principle): this is the apparent contradiction between the remarkable uniformity of the Universe, which presupposes sustaining a great number of advanced civilizations that should have been thriving for millions of years, and the obvious absence of extrate
rrestrial intelligent beings.

  Enrico Fermi was a major player in the Manhattan Project, which produced the first atomic bomb.

  A team of scientists led by Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, and J. Robert Oppenheimer developed a nuclear explosive device, and in 1945, the first atomic bomb was successfully tested south of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

  The Nuclear Age had begun.

  After the Second World War, the “iron curtain” descended across Europe. The Cold War and the race for nuclear arms began.

  In August 1949, the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb. The Soviet scientists were among the leaders in nuclear physics before the war, and now it was only a matter of time before the creation of the hydrogen bomb, which was expected to be a thousand times more destructive than the atomic bomb.

  The Soviet Union already had atomic bombs and was on the verge of producing a hydrogen bomb. But could rockets deliver nuclear weapons across continents? The Soviet researchers, despite the problems imposed by war, developed and produced in large quantities the devastating 130-millimeter rocket known as Katyusha. From 16 to 48 rockets were fired from a launcher mounted on trucks.

  At that time, among the huge achievements in rocket propulsion were the German liquid propellant V-2 rocket and the first operational liquid fuel rocket airplane, the Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet fighter. V-2s were fired successfully against England. They moved toward the target at a rate faster than the speed of sound, and their screaming descent was heard only after the explosion.

  After the war, the United States and the Soviet Union captured many V-2s and used them in the research and development of their intercontinental ballistic missiles, which were capable of delivering nuclear weapons at ranges of thousands of miles.

  With these new technologies space exploration was already feasible and imminent. On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1.

  Rocket development soared, driven on by two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union.

  The Space Age had begun.

  In the summer of 1947 in New Mexico, the famous Roswell crash incident occurred. Unusual debris from a downed object, supposedly an alien spaceship, was found on a ranch.

  The press made a big fuss. Public imagination was already prepared for extraterrestrial spacecraft due to pulp science fiction magazines, some of which had huge print runs for their time. All kind of space civilizations were fighting on the pages of numerous publications. Fictional alien invaders never stopped trying to destroy or at least conquer the Earth. It was the golden era of the grand masters of science fiction: Hugo Gernsback, John Campbell, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Isaac Asimov, Edmond Hamilton, Robert Heinlein, Arthur Clark, Van Vogt…

  Many ordinary people also believed in aliens. In 1938, a radio play based on a version of the science fiction novel War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells announced an assault on New Jersey by hostile Martian invaders. Thousands of panicked people in New York and New Jersey—not realizing that they were listening to a radio play and the announcements were only a simulation—fled their homes, creating traffic jams in order to avoid an imminent gas attack by the Martians. Eyewitnesses claimed they could smell poison gas and see terrible flashes of light. Dozens were sent to the hospital for shock, hysteria, and injuries.

  United States authorities were very concerned about the Roswell crash and the many flying saucer reports. What were they: new generation Soviet aircraft spying on American nuclear secrets, escaped Nazis with secret flying saucers looking for revenge, alien spaceships?

  There were rumors that German scientists had worked on secret wonder weapons and disc-shaped aircraft. By the end of the Second World War, German scientists had created powerful and reliable rocket engines for aircraft and guided missiles. More than 1,100 V-2s were successfully fired against England. But who produced in large quantities these strange aircraft that looked like giant flying saucers?

  The American government and the military authorities needed to find an explanation for the huge number of reported sightings of unidentified flying objects. They had to determine: first, could these objects pose a security threat, and second, if there was advanced extraterrestrial technology, how to utilize it—before the Soviets did!

  In 1950, President Truman approved the thermonuclear bomb project. A group of physicists, most of them veterans of the Manhattan Project, reassembled at Los Alamos, New Mexico.

  Enrico Fermi loved to ponder scientific questions over lunch. The Roswell crash and flying saucer sightings were discussed as well.

  The story goes that Fermi formulated his famous paradox in the summer of 1950 during a luncheon conversation with Edward Teller, Emil Konopinski, Herbert York, and other companions.

  Later, Edward Teller—a participant in the production of the first atomic bomb, and subsequently known as the “father of the hydrogen bomb”—recalled that the conversation was only vaguely connected with astronau­tics. According to another companion, they discussed some UFO reports and a cartoon published by The New Yorker, showing extraterrestrials with their flying saucer, stealing municipal trash cans.

  After the luncheon the talk continued. Teller recalled that the discussion had nothing to do with astronomy or extraterrestrial beings, but was rather on ordinary, down-to-earth topic. In the middle of the conversation, Fermi asked quite unexpectedly, “Where is everybody?” The result of his question was general laughter, but everyone around the table seemed to understand that he was talking about extraterrestrial people.

  Pondering the alien hypothesis, Enrico Fermi—one of the chief architects of the nuclear age and a well-trained scientific mind (and Nobel Prize winner)—reasoned that all technological civilizations would discover nuclear reactions, and with rockets based on this relatively simple technology, they could travel across interstellar distances at 10 percent of the speed of light; thus, space civilizations could theoretically colonize our Galaxy. So, if there are extraterrestrials, why haven’t they come to Earth? “Where are they?”

  Enrico Fermi was the first to formulate the notion that if there are much older technological civilizations in our Universe, they should already be on our planet, too.

  There could be billions of civilizations in our Universe at about the same evolutionary and technological level as the human civilization but which still cannot travel between the stars.

  These fellow space races still cannot visit the Earth.

  CHAPTER 2

  ONE HUNDRED FERMI PARADOX

  HYPOTHESES

  I have learned to use the word impossible with the greatest caution.

  —Wernher von Braun

  Here is a list of notions explaining the Fermi paradox. At least some of them are pure nonsense. But we should be very careful about judging the propositions because hypotheses that now seem to us loony or too science-fictional could come true.

  1. Intelligent species have a very short period of existence because they develop self-destructive technologies and inevitably kill themselves. Possible means of extermination are based mainly on scientific discoveries.

  With current technology, humans can destroy themselves in nuclear war. Tomorrow, they could also use advanced military robots, antimatter bombs, nanotechnology, self-replicating machines, biological weapons, genetic engineering, and other novel devastating technologies. The list of weapons of mass destruction will grow over time.

  High-tech terrorism likewise could put an end to developed civilizations.

  A nanotechnological catastrophe, out-of-control self-replicating devices, industrial accidents, man-made global warming, physics experiments, accidental designer viruses contamination, etc., could also destroy a civilization.

  Sir Martin Rees, the British Astronomer Royal, estimates in his book Our Final Hour that the possibility of human extinction before the year 2100 is around fifty percent.

  Mike Treder, executive director of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, states, “Perhaps the most disturbing asp
ect of the Fermi Paradox is what it suggests for the future of our human civilization. Namely, that we have no future beyond earthly confinement and, quite possibly, extinction.”

  This Doomsday argument does not require a space civilization to self-destruct entirely, but only drastically to restrict its evolutionary potential and to become once again non-technological, or to inhabit a severely damaged ecosphere, which would inhibit its development.

  The self-destruction of civilizations is not confined to planets; even if the destructive event originated on a specific planet, it could become a problem of galactic proportions. Zillions of self-replicating machines from civilizations that perished long ago could scavenge matter and life on their journeys to make copies of themselves, growing exponentially in number and rapidly spreading throughout the Galaxy and inevitably coming closer and closer to the Earth.

  2. Humans are among the few sentient civilizations in our Universe. The Rare Earth hypothesis states that Earth is unique and that complex life is uncommon in the Universe. We are the only civilization in our Galaxy. The other galaxies are too far away for the few intelligences in the Universe to communicate with or visit each other.

  Some researchers even assume that the human civilization is the only one in the Universe.

  The term “Rare Earth” originates from Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe, published in 2000, a book by Peter Ward, a geologist and paleontologist, and Donald E. Brownlee, an astronomer and astrobiologist, both faculty members at the University of Washington.

  The Rare Earth hypothesis suggests that the origin and evolution of complex life and intelligence requires a host of billions years lasting fortuitous circumstances, such as a galactic habitable zone, a central star and planetary system having the requisite character, the circumstellar habitable zone, a right sized terrestrial-type planet, liquid water, a gas giant guardian planet, large natural satellite, a magnetosphere, plate tectonics, the right chemistry of the lithosphere, atmosphere, and oceans, rare bolide impacts, etc. The appearance and evolution of an intelligent civilization may have required yet further events, which are extremely unlikely to have happened.