Even the few leads we have keep failing to provide anything concrete. None of our probes have found anything defintively answering whether there is life on Mars. And until we can get a probe out to one of the Jovian moons to actually begin investigating, we can't get a clear answer on whether Europa, Enceladus, or Callisto have anything in their liquid oceans.
The "wow" signal of 1977 seemed promising, but the technical limitations of the Big Ear telescope make it hard to verify for sure. The discovery of "Tabby's Star" fueled speculation about an alien megastructure due to its unusual fluctuation in brightness, but this hypothesis was quickly met with skepticism by scientists.
While we don't have a clear answer, there are several interesting hypotheses that have been offered as potential solutions.
The Great Filter
One of the most popular ideas explaining Fermi's Paradox proposes that every species faces a challenge which is exceedingly difficult, if not downright impossible, to overcome. This hypothesis has become known as the "Great Filter." Sooner or later, they will encounter this barrier, and from there, it would be simple Darwinian evolution. Any species that can adapt to this problem will survive, while any that can't are "filtered out."
Exactly what this filter is... that's a matter of debate. We can't even be sure if we've already passed it or if it's still coming. And that's, of course, assuming there's only one. If this hypothesis is true, there could be hundreds or thousands of potential filters affecting the evolution of life. Either way, the basic principle is the same. The filter, at the very least, reduces the number of species that evolve past it, if not wiping them out entirely.
The entire premise of Dead Space offers a pretty good example of one such threshold. The game's setup involves a future where humanity has used up its available resources and had to start finding other ways to produce energy. It's later revealed that this is actually a common evolutionary pitfall. Here, we see a proposal for a form the great filter could take- every time an intelligent civilization develops, they inevitably reach a point where they grow beyond their ability to sustain themselves.
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| The setup of Dead Space involves a future where humanity has grown to a point where it struggles to sustain itself, leading to the extreme practice of planet cracking for resources. |
The games even portray this as a big enough filter that it can actually be exploited. The entire life cycle of the series' main antagonists, the Brethren Moons, literally depends on other species getting caught in the great filter. Because when a spacefaring civilization struggles to find the resources to keep itself going, a seemingly infinite and easily replicable power source like the markers becomes very appealing.
The Dark Forest
The universe of Warhammer 40k has no shortage of things to be afraid of. Whether it's any of the other factions, inhospitable planets, spatial anomalies, ancient weapons of mass destruction, the incoming swarm of tyranids bent on consuming all biomass in the galaxy, the chaos gods who delight in messing with everyone, the possibility of accidentally creating more chaos gods just by feeling too much emotion, and a myriad of possible fates worse than death, there is a lot to be frightened by in the cosmos. This makes it a good demonstration of the rationale behind the dark forest hypothesis.
Put simply, the dark forest offers a very bleak answer to Fermi's paradox. It's not that alien life doesn't exist, it's because they're hiding out of self-preservation. This theory compares the cosmos to a forest populated by a variety of creatures, but each one deals with various threats that force them to hide to survive. Revealing themselves makes them vulnerable to potential threats.
Applying this rationale to a cosmic scale, the dark forest would argue that the galaxy is full of life, but it prefers to remain hidden to avoid drawing attention from potential threats. That fear may or may not be justified, but contact isn't worth the risk. This hypothesis also offers an even bleaker outlook as it calls into question whether we should even be making efforts to locate extraterrestrial life. If there is something to be afraid of, is SETI nothing more than us recklessly endangering ourselves and drawing attention from something we really don't want to notice us?
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| If the Dark Forest hypothesis is to be believed, than Eleanor Arroway is actively endangering humanity by risking the attention of bigger threats. |
Warhammer 40k may be a bit more on the extreme end, but it is a galaxy full of things most species would want to hide from, including each other. If you knew about the dangers posed by tyranids, drukhari pirates, and orks, you'd do well to hide from them if you could - especially if you lack the means to fight back. Sometimes you even have good reason to be afraid of your own faction - the Imperium isn't exactly above purging its own worlds and some space marine chapters really don't care about civillian collateral damage. In a world like that, is it really any wonder that a lot of civilizations would want to remain hidden?
The Dark Forest hypothesis suggests that alien civilizations are simply reluctant to reach out because they don't know the potential consequences. If we did make contact, how would we know we weren't opening the door to something really bad? What if we accidentally reached a brutal alien empire bent on conquering the galaxy and in doing so caused our own subjugation? What if we accidentally attracted a tyranid-like swarm that wanted to consume all life on Earth? And even if we didn't, how could we be sure that such dangers aren't out there somewhere.
Different Forms of Life
One of the more creative, yet quite plausible solutions to Fermi's Paradox is that we've simply failed to recognize life on other planets. Think about how aliens are often portrayed in science fiction media.
Aliens are often portrayed as humanoid. On the cheaper end, it might just be humans with weird costumes or hairstyles. Higher production values can allow for some more creative options, like unusual skin tones, unique facial features, extra limbs, bits and pieces of other creatures, or different heights. Sometimes, the writers might add to their alien qualities by giving them strange anatomy. But either way, it still comes down to using the human body as a baseline.
We see this all the time - Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, Marvel, Warhammer 40,000, Farscape, Mass Effect, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Avatar. All of them feature aliens modeled on the human body. Even the stereotypical cartoon alien - the green/grey figure with a big head and large black eyes, still uses a bipedal form, albeit one with its proportions altered.
And it doesn't take a genius to figure out why this is the case. It's a practical decision. Since we don't have genuine alien actors willing to appear in our movies and TV shows, we have to settle for casting humans in the role. And while makeup prosthetics can go a long way in the right hands, they still have to physically accommodate a human actor.
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| Sci-fi aliens often appear humanoid so they can be played by humans. If extra-terrestrial life exists, it wouldn't be constrained by such limitations. |
Now of course, there are other ways to portray aliens. CGI and puppetry can allow more flexibility when it comes to design, though a CGI model may still require motion capture and a puppet still needs to make room for the puppeteer. And they can be pretty expensive next to putting makeup on a human actor.
There's also another problem. Our only reference for what life looks like is our own planet. So naturally, when designing aliens, people often draw inspiration from terrestrial organisms. A popular example is to take inspiration from insects and arachnids. Some notable examples include xenomorphs, tyranids, Yanme'e, the "buggers" in Ender's Game, the "arachnids" in Starship Troopers, antlions, at least one variation of the Thing, rachni, zerg, and geonosians. Even LEGO got in on the act with their Insecctoids theme. All of these examples adopt traits from various bugs, with many of them even using a hive mind similar to ants or honeybees.
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| LEGO's 1998 Insectoids theme followed aliens with a bug motif. A lot of their vehicle designs took inspiration from insect and arachnid features. |
Other common ideas include sentient plants or fungi, lizard-people, and wormlike species. All of these follow the same pattern of taking inspiration from life on Earth. But what if that is exactly what's holding us back? Our failure to find any extraterrestrial life, let alone intelligence, is actually because it's so different from anything we would consider "life" that we can't recognize it.
It makes sense. After all, life that originated independently of Earth would logically have no reason to follow the exact same evolutionary path. Under the right conditions, there could be an extreme form of convergent evolution, where unrelated species develop similar traits due to similar environmental pressures, but it would hardly be an exact copy. There's no reason to think an independently-forming species would even conform to any of our biological classifications. Even the four main kingdoms (plants, animals, fungi, and unicellular life) might go out the window when it comes to alien ecosystems.
A classic example of such an alien would be H.P. Lovecraft's The Colour out of Space, an organism so peculiar and unlike anything anyone's ever seen that it can only be described as a colour, due to it somehow presenting a colour outside of the visual spectrum. We see the impact the entity leaves on the surrounding environment, how it seems to twist and slowly destroy living things, but we don't actually know what it is. Where did it come from? How does it work? What are its goals, if any? Is it even sentient? Does it act maliciously or purely on instinct? Why does one piece of it go back in the well when the rest of it is leaving? Nobody can find a definitive answer.
An entity that's barely identifiable when it's literally right in front of you and observed in real time would be hard to recognize on another planet, especially with our limited knowledge.
Another great example would be Stanlislaw Lem's novel The Invincible, as well as the video game adaptation of the same name. Both take place on a planet called Regis III, which has a peculiar ecosystem. Life, at least as it is understood by humans, appears in the oceans but is conspicously absent from land. Investigation of the planet reveals it to be a result of a process Lem called "necroevolution," where non-organic matter goes through similar evolutionary pressures to organic life.
In this case, self-replicating machines competed with local wildlife, and then fought each other over resources until the only ones that remained were the most adaptable. By the time the astronauts find them, they've been incorporated into the planet's ecosystem to the point where sea creatures have evolved to detect electromagnetic fields and avoid the coast.
Yet for a long time, this stumps the investigators, who struggle to wrap their heads around the notion of metal life forms and how to interact with them. Because the very notion of machines undergoing Darwinian evolution flies in the face of everything understood about biology. Such a phenomenon would be hard to observe, especially when we can't actually visit the planet in question.
Zoo Hypothesis
Reaching out to extra-terrestrial life comes with two underlying assumptions. First, it assumes they are in fact listening, and they are interested in responding. But what if only half of that was correct. That there were aliens listening to our signals, maybe even studying us? But for whatever reason they prefer not to reply? This is the Zoo Hypothesis. In a zoo, people will observe animals without directly interacting with them. On a broader scale, the Earth is treated like a zoo exhibit observed by aliens.
These aliens could be watching us right now, meticulously recording and documenting human history in the same way that a biologist might observe and document the bahaviour of wild animals. But, for whatever reason, they avoid directly engaging with us. There are plenty of reasons why they might decide not to make themselves known. Maybe they're concerned about the consequences of getting involved, or they see us more as specimens than people.
But one especially popular idea is they want to ensure humanity evolves on its own, and therefore go out of their way to avoid influencing our cultural development until such a time as we are deemed ready to meet them. For instance, when we reach a specific evolutionary milestone - maybe a big technological breakthrough or some sort of cultural shift.
And by now you might be noticing that this is starting to sound strangely familiar. Because yes, this is literally the foundation of Star Trek's Prime Directive.
Berserker
One of the more bizarre, though not entirely impossible, theories about the lack of aliens is the beserker hypothesis. This one argues the reason we can't find aliens isn't because they don't exist, but rather because there's something out there which keeps wiping them out. This one easily overlaps with the Dark Forest, as it gives an added incentive for other species to remain hidden, and to an extent, it can tie into the Great Filter.
However, there is a key distinguishing factor here. The Great Filter proposes a common natural barrier or evolutionary pitfall, and the Dark Forest suggests that species try to hide out of fear of each other. The berserker hypothesis proposes the existence of an external agent which is actively locating and destroying life wherever it appears, or at least destroying intelligent civilizations when they reach a certain point.
The culprit in this hypothesis is known as a Von Neuman Probe, a hypothetical self-sustaining and self-replicating machine that locates and destroys life whenever it is detected. Whether it does so maliciously or simply acts on programming instinct, the basic principle is the same. We can't find alien life because there is something which keeps destroying it.
Stanislaw Lem envisioned a smaller-scale version of this concept with the Invincible. Regis III should support life, yet it only does so in the oceans. We eventually learn that an ancient alien race brought self-replicating machines to the planet, machines which ended up competing with local wildlife and ultimately eliminated land-based creatures, leaving the remainder of the planet's life to develop in the oceans, where it was out of reach.
The microbots featured in The Invincible, referred to by the characters as "fllies" may only occupy one planet, but they provide a good example of just what makes the Berserker hypothesis so terrifying. Not only is there something intentionally preventing the evolution of life (albeit one that's acting on instinct rather than malicious intent), but its ability to self-replicate makes it nearly impossible to eradicate. The ability to make copies, which can make copies which also make copies, means the flies can reproduce faster than we can attack them. Even destroying the planet doesn't guarantee their elimination.
The Reapers of Mass Effect are a great example of berserkers. The whole setup of Mass Effect involves them taking over the galaxy and creating a system where species are harvested every 50,000 years. At the end of each cycle, they arrive, wipe out the dominant species, and use their biomass to produce a new reaper. They are also capable of producing a seemingly endless army to throw at their targets, not helped by an ability to turn captured and fallen enemies into additional soldiers.
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| According to Mass Effect, Fermi's Paradox is solved with the knowledge that intelligent civilizations are destroyed by the Reapers. |
While the berserker hypothesis often describes a machine, this doesn't neccessarily have to be the case. A similar function could be filled by a living organism. Take, for instance, the Brethren Moons in Dead Space, a species of moon-sized aliens who, like the Reapers, depend on other species' evolution to reproduce. They even have their own berserker-like technology in the form of markers, although these are designed to be copied by others rather than full-on self replicating. The end result is still the same, they systematically destroy the dominant species and use its biomass to create a new moon.
Warhammer 40k has several examples of organic berserkers. Tyranids and orks, for instance, have survival advantages that make them hard to eradicate. The former can keep building new units with consumed biomass, and the latter can reproduce through spores. Because of their highly adaptable nature, killing tyranids can result in them just coming back stronger. And even if you kill every ork on a planet, you can't keep track of where their spores might land.
Either one could work for the berserker hypothesis. Why are there no aliens? Maybe because the tyranids keep eating them, or the orks keep destroying or at least wearing them down in constant wars. Even the Imperium, a xenophobic regime that decries alien life, could be seen as an example due to their abundant supply of fanatical humans and eagerness to destroy xenos.
The big question with this theory is why we haven't found any evidence of these Von Neuman Probes, and there are some plausible explanations for this. Perhaps we have seen them, but lacked the necessary information to recognize what they were. Or they simply haven't found us, or we need to reach a particular evolutionary stage before they take notice. Or maybe, by some strange stroke of luck, we managed to fly under their radar without even realizing it.
Self Destruction Theory
In many science fiction stories, we often see dangers posed in the form of an external threat. Alien invasions have been a staple of the genre going back to H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. But what if the real danger was internal? What if, in fact, an intelligent species could be its own worst enemy? This is self-destruction theory, which posits that we can't find alien life because intelligent civilizations are doomed to be the instruments of their own destruction.
This certainly tracks with a lot of human history. One doesn't have to dig deep to find examples of us nearly wiping ourselves out, or at least getting set back to the Stone Age. Half the 20th century saw the world trapped in a Cold War as the most powerful countries pointed nuclear bombs at each other, only deterred by the threat of mutually assured destruction. Even now, as we struggle with human-created climate change and keep running into a political deadlock any time anyone offers a solution, it's not out of the question.
Science fiction has no shortage of hypothetical scenarios in which humans destroy themselves, or at least make enough mistakes to cause a societal collapse. The exact reason might vary, though often it comes as a result of humanity's worst qualities. Capitalism and politics are often attributed to the disaster.
Godzilla was originally created as a metaphor for humanity jumping into nuclear weapons without fully understanding the power they had. The original movie even explained his rampage was a consequence of careless nuclear testing. Even after the Cold War ended, themes of humanity destroying itself through nuclear war have persisted in titles like the Fallout series of games.
Another popular example is the creation of a machine which turns on its creators, often as a result of human carelessness or cruelty. The Terminator films center around an AI which, thanks to human programming, concludes that humans need to be eradicated to fulfill its directive. The apocalypse in Horizon Zero Dawn resulted from businessman Ted Faro investing in self-replicating war machines that could run on biomass and began consuming every living thing on Earth.
Gears of War is an interesting example. The games center on an ongoing war between the humans and an underground race known as the locusts, each bent on wiping the other out. The irony comes from the implication, and eventual confirmation, that the entire war is humanity's fault and the locusts only exist as a direct consequence of the earlier Pendulum Wars. In short, humans are doomed by their inability to escape their own violent nature.
What if this self-destructive tendency isn't unique to us, but happens sooner ot later to most intelligent species. At some point they reach a step where they inevitably slip up and become their own worst enemy. For instance, by destroying themselves in a nuclear war or building a killer AI.
Take, for instance, the Krell of Forbidden Planet. We learn that they were a highly advanced alien species that built some incredible technology, including machines that could increase a person's intelligence and create from pure imagination. However, as Lieutenant Ostro learns the hard way, this seemingly incredible feat backfired when it also gave physical manifestation to the species' base instincts, resulting in ferocious "monsters from the id" that ultimately wiped out the krell.
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| In Forbidden Planet, Dr. Mobius (Walter Pidgeon) demonstrates the advanced technology of the Krell, which included the ability to create from their own imagination. We later learn that this seemingly amazing technology was exactly what caused their downfall. |
Warhammer 40k has a more bizarre example with the Aeldari, an alien race that once built a thriving empire across the galaxy. That was until they had too much fun and accidentally created a chaos god of murder, Slaanesh (it's complicated), whose birth alone wiped most of them out, leaving what was left struggling to survive in an already unforgiving universe. While creating a literal god through emotional intensity might be a stretch, at least with our current understanding of the cosmos, it is still a good example of a species destroying itself.
Time and Distance
There has definitely been enough time for life forms to evolve, probably more than enough for some of that to grow into an advanced spacefaring civilization, but there's also been more than enough time for that civilization to fall.
Ancient "precursor" civilizations are a pretty old trope in science fiction. The details may vary, but usually it involves the discovery of ancient ruins and artifacts built by a long-forgotten alien species. They may be good, bad, or neutral. They may be completely extinct or still exist in some barely recognizable form. Sometimes, they even go as far as to claim these aliens visited an ancient Earth or had a hand in humanity's evolution. Whatever the details are, the basic ideas remain the same - this once-thriving civilization existed, met a tragic end, and the consequences of their actions can still be felt today.
We can see this all over science fiction - the Elder-Things in At the Mountains of Madness, the species behind the monoliths in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Old Ones of Warhammer 40k, the Forerunners in Halo, the Protheans in Mass Effect, the Isu in Assassin's Creed, the Rakata in Star Wars, the Protoss of Starcraft, the engineers of Prometheus, the Krell in Forbidden Planet, the Lyrans in The Invincible, the list goes on. But maybe the idea isn't so far-fetched.
Perhaps, if we were to find evidence of extra-terrestrial life, this is the most likely way it will happen. Not with first contact, but with us finding what remains. Ruins, artifacts, old technology. Maybe even fossils if they're old enough.
Keep in mind that the universe is currently estimated to be 13 billion years old, and the formation of Earth is actually pretty recent on a cosmic scale. Then there's the issue of distance. Keep in mind that our own galaxy has over 100 billion stars, and it's big enough that light takes 100,000 years to move from side end to the other. And that's not even getting into the even greater distances between galaxies.
Put simply, maybe the reason we can't find alien life is because it's not all that common for multiple spacefaring civilizations to exist in the same time and place. Contrary to what Star Trek and Mass Effect would suggest, a multi-species organization like Starfleet isn't feasible simply because we can't realistically find other spacefaring species to work with. If intelligent life exists, it could well have evolved in another galaxy too far from us to even see the Milky Way, or maybe we're just a billion years too late for first contact.
Perhaps, even if there is something out there, finding it just isn't realistic, at least not with any means we currently have. Maybe finding the remains of past civilizations really is the best we can hope for.
Early Bird
The idea of an alien precursor is certainly an interesting one, but the early bird hypothesis flips the script. What if we are the precursor aliens? The argument here is we can't find any alien civilizations because we're getting into the cosmos early. We are one of, if not in fact the first spacefaring civilization to develop. Other potential species, for whatever reason, simply haven't reached the same technological level as us, and may not until well after humanity is gone.
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| According to the Early Bird Hypothesis, we're the ones leaving the monoliths and it's future alien civilizations who will find them. |
This is an interesting one since it reverses the common trope and offers a scenario not seen in a lot of sci-fi. Imagine in the distant future, some other species figures out space travel, finds Earth, and then explores
our ruins. the remnants of the great human civilization. There could be alien archeologists collecting artifacts and trying to piece together human history.
Rare Earth
Occam's Razor is the principle that, when confronted with multiple possible explanations for something, the simplest is often the most likely. If we apply this reasoning to Fermi's Paradox, it offers a fairly straightforward answer. Maybe the reason we can't find alien life is, in fact, because there's none out there to find. Or at the very least, the formation of living organisms is such a rare occurrence that our odds of actually finding it are almost zero.
Portrayals of Rare Earth have a few variations. They can range from no aliens at all to simply no other intelligent spacefaring species while still allowing alien fauna, to any spacefaring aliens that might have existed being extinct or super uncommon. This can be an interesting approach. Without being able to attribute things to aliens, writers have to get more creative in finding alternative obstacles. A story about humans can focus on human conflicts and human themes. And of course, there's the inevitable existential questions about what it means to be alone in the universe.
Red Dwarf offers a good example of the more extreme view of Rare Earth. Protagonist Dave Lister is accidentally put into stasis for 3 million years, enough time for humanity to go extinct. By the time he emerges, the ship is lost in a cold, empty universe with no signs of alien life. The show deliberately avoids aliens, instead relying on remnants of human creations, spatial anomalies, problems with the ship, conflicts among Dave and his few companions, and his own efforts to avoid going mad from isolation as plot threads.
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| The plot of Red Dwarf centers around its cast being lost in an empty universe. The closest things to aliens are leftover human creations (robots and genetically modified organisms) and occasionally creatures descended from Earth life. |
The Expanse has a somewhat more liberal view, but still takes a similar approach. The show takes place in a future where humans have spread out across the Solar System, but the only trace of any alien life is the mysterious protomolecule. And even when that starts causing problems, it's more about how that fuels human conflict than where it originally came from. We do see alien fauna in later seasons, but that only happens as a result of the ring gate facilitating interstellar travel.
Combinations
It shoud be noted that while the above theories are all very compelling, they are far from mutually exclusive. We have no way of knowing for sure, which, if any, are correct. But there's no reason to assume that the validity of one discredits the others. They can easily overlap with one another, making it entirely possible that some of them fit together as part of the puzzle, rather than being a whole explanation.
For instance, let's say that the Rare Earth hypothesis is true, and life isn't anywhere near as common as we thought. Could that rarity not be compounded by a Great Filter? And if the berserker hypothesis is true, it would be a good incentive for other species to stay hidden.
Dead Space, as shown in this very article, actually combines several different possible solutions to Fermi's Paradox:
- Rare Earth: Life of any kind, letalone intelligent life, is already hard to find
- The Great Filter: Every intelligent species that evolves keeps growing to a point where they struggle to support themselves.
- Berserker: The Brethren Moons deliberately and systematically wipe out each spacefaring civilization that emerges.
- Time and Distance: Humans are unable to make contact because every previous civilization was destroyed before it could last long enough to meet us.
- Zoo: The Brethren Moons intentionally wait until the dominant species reaches the Great Filter before revealing themselves.
Conclusion
We're still no closer to answering the ultimate question at the root of this. Is there alien life out and there and, if so, where is it? The short answer is, we don't know. That's the point of Fermi's Paradox, it challenges us to think about the deeper mysteries of the universe. Maybe all of these hypotheses are correct. Maybe none of them are. Maybe the correct answer, if there is one, hinges on factors we currently have no way of knowing about. Who knows? Maybe someday we'll find some strange piece of evidence that finally points us in the right direction. Maybe we never will.
We've had leads, though so far nothing conclusive. We'd need to find something that definitively, absolutely, beyond the shadow of a doubt proves the existence of a living organism on another planet. Some smoking gun piece of evidence that defies any attempt at natural explanations would be needed. And until such a time as we find that evidence, alien life will have to remain confined to the worlds of science fiction. But through science fiction we can explore these deeper questions about the universe and just what really lies out there.
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