Study of the Fermi Paradox Leads Researchers to Conclude That We Humans are Likely the Only Intelligent Species in the Universe

June 26, 2018 – In the British magazine The Week yesterday an article put the odds of us being the only intelligent life in the Milky Way between 53 and 99.6%, and 39 to 85% in the observable Universe. The scientists at Oxford University, in studying the Fermi Paradox which asks how we can exist as an intelligent species with nary a sign of any other intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. When physicist Enrico Fermi first postulated about intelligent life in the Universe using our existence as the model, he asked shouldn’t life produce similar intelligence countless times elsewhere in the vastness of the stars and galaxies? He then asked the question, if intelligent life is likely prolific elsewhere why do we see no evidence of it when we look up into the sky?

Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, in a new study, entitled “Dissolving the Fermi Paradox,” believes Fermi’s questions have been asked and answered. The researchers first reevaluated the Drake Equation which uses a mathematical formula to derive a rough estimate of the likelihood of observable alien intelligence elsewhere first by calculating the number of stars that form in the Universe per year, the subset of those with Earth-like planets, a further subset where life emerges, an even smaller fraction where life evolves intelligence, and then the smallest fraction of that life becoming technologically advanced to be detectable over a period of time when looking to the stars. It should be stated that the equation is no more than a best guess based on our collective ignorance to date.

But we are beginning to lift the veil of our ignorance on what is out there as our surveys of the night sky find exoplanets. Since the launch of the Kepler spacecraft, we have discovered thousands of them even though the parameters of the spacecraft’s cameras are quite narrow in scope. With the recent launch of TESS, we will be looking at a much larger swath of the night sky. And after TESS will come the James Webb telescope which undoubtedly will push the number of discovered exoplanets from the thousands today to the hundreds of thousands in the next decade.

Finding Earth-like exoplanets is already routine from Kepler’s survey. Some of these planets circle their parent star in the Goldilocks Zone where water can exist on the surface in all three states, gas, liquid, and solid. And since on Earth water is essential to the origin of life, it suggests that on many of these alien worlds life must also exist.

Even here in our own Solar System, evidence from Martian orbiters and rovers has shown that primordial life may have existed there in the past, or may exist today somewhere beneath the surface. Going a little further out to the gas giant outer planets we may even have reason to believe that life can evolve outside our own Goldilocks Zone with the detection of organic molecules in geysers of water erupting from icy moons circling Jupiter and Saturn. This sort of suggests that our estimates of life’s abundance may be understated in the existing Drake Equation.

But technologically sophisticated intelligent life is something else. The Oxford study’s focus in re-examining the Drake Equation applied additional uncertainties to its assumptions. The end result concludes “no reason to be highly confident that the galaxy (or observable Universe) contains other civilizations.”

Why is this?

Last year, Ross Pomeroy of RealClearScience, asked why we haven’t found aliens and came up with 12 possible reasons which I have roughly replicated in the list below.

1. Like the Oxford researchers, his first reason is there are none in the Universe.
2. If life does exist it probably is largely microbial elsewhere or hasn’t evolved to be intelligent.
3. If intelligent, the life lacks advanced technology.
4. If intelligent, life has self-destructed, so if it existed we are out of synch with it in our timeline. (Pomeroy doesn’t mention artificial intelligence as a self-destructive force.)
5. If intelligent, it has been destroyed by all the deadly forces the Universe can bring from asteroid collisions to supernovas to solar flares and gamma-ray bursts.
6. If a technical intelligent species has emerged because of the size of space its signals haven’t yet reached us. Considering that our signals have yet to reach very far into neighbouring space, why would we assume others have been doing it far longer.
7. Our search for an intelligent technologically advanced alien civilization has just started so it is highly unlikely that we have given ourselves enough time to find them.
8. We are listening on the wrong bandwidth and missing alien signals that could already have arrived.
9. The alien intelligence may have long surpassed radiowaves as a means of communicating.
10. The aliens out there aren’t chatty Cathys. For the most part, they may be just listening like the radio telescope receivers we have here on Earth.
11. We are not being contacted because an advanced alien civilization has rules about contacting primitives.
12. And finally, the aliens are already among us but keeping themselves concealed so that they can observe us undetected.

And then, of course, there is the notion that we may not be able to recognize an alien life form even if we were to visit a distant planet and explore it. The only biosignatures we know are based on DNA. To assume that life can only have started from one kind of self-replicating complex molecule seems facile.

We also associate life with the gases and thermal atmospheric environment that is ours or similar to it. Yet we speculate that life could evolve from silicon with alien creatures breathing ammonia. Would we even know what that life would look like?

In the June issue of the journal Astrobiology, NASA scientists have published five new papers in which they try to come to terms with just how different biosignatures may be throughout the Universe, recognizing that our limited perspective where we focus on Earth-like planets could be dead wrong. Consider the likelihood that some form of life could be lurking under the icy crust of Jupiter’s moon, Europa, or in the upper atmosphere of Venus, or in subsurface water-ice realms on Mars, and you begin to see just how biased is our perspective.