Paradox: Stories Inspired by the Fermi Paradox
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Paradox
Stories Inspired by the Fermi Paradox
Edited by Ian Whates
NewCon Press
England
In memory of Enrico Fermi (1901 – 1954)
The Fermi Paradox: the apparent contradiction between the high probability of extraterrestrial civilizations’ existence and the lack of contact with such civilizations.
or
Where is everybody?
First edition, published in the UK August 2014
by NewCon Press
NCP 075 (hardback)
NCP 076 (softback)
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Compilation copyright © 2014 by Ian Whates
Introduction copyright © 2014 by National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
“Catching Rays” copyright © 2014 by David L Clements
“The Big Next” copyright © 2014 by Pat Cadigan
“Baedecker’s Fermi” copyright © 2014 by Adam Roberts
“Zeta Reticuli” copyright © 2014 by Paul Cornell
“The Ambulance Chaser” copyright © 2014 by Tricia Sullivan
“Lost to Their Own Devices” copyright © 2014 by Adrian Tchaikovsky
“In the Beginning” copyright © 2014 by Gerry Webb
“The Trail of the Creator, the Trial of Creation” copyright © 2014 by Paul di Filippo
“Stella by Starlight” copyright © 2014 by Mike Resnick & Robert T Jeschoenek
“Fermi’s Doubt” copyright © 2014 by George Zebrowski
“Audio Visionary” copyright © 2014 by Stephanie Saulter
“Aether” copyright © 2014 by Robert Reed
“The End of the World” copyright © 2014 by Keith Brooke & Eric Brown
“The Worldmaker” copyright © 2014 by Rachel Armstrong
“Atonement, Under the Blue-White Sun” copyright © 2014 by Mercurio D Rivera
All rights reserved, including the right to produce this book, or portions
thereof, in any form.
ISBN: 978-1-907069-71-0 (hardback)
978-1-907069-72-7 (softback)
Cover art copyright © 2014 by Sarah Anne Langton
Cover layout by Storm Constantine
Original Text layout by Storm Constantine
ebook converstion by handebooks.co.uk
Contents
Fermi Paradox: An Introduction by Marek Kukula and Rob Edwards
Catching Rays – David L Clements
The Big Next – Pat Cadigan
Baedeker’s Fermi – Adam Roberts
Zeta Reticuli – Paul Cornell
The Ambulance Chaser – Tricia Sullivan
Lost to Their Own Devices – Adrian Tchaikovsky
In The Beginning – Gerry Webb
The Trail of the Creator, The Trial of Creation – Paul di Filippo
Stella by Starlight – Mike Resnick & Robert T Jeschoenek
Fermi’s Doubts – George Zebrowski
Audiovisionary – Stephanie Saulter
Aether – Robert Reed
The End of the World – Keith Brooke & Eric Brown
The Worldmaker – Rachel Armstrong
Atonement, Under the Blue-White Sun – Mercurio D Rivera
About the Contributors
Also Available from NewCon Press
Fermi Paradox:
An Introduction
Marek Kukula and Rob Edwards
Where is everybody? This was the question famously posed by physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950 over lunch with colleagues at Los Alamos National Laboratory. It’s a simple question, but its implications are profound and more than half a century later we still don’t have a satisfactory answer.
The ‘everybody’ in Fermi’s question of course refers to intelligent extraterrestrial life – aliens with a technological civilisation, who leave evidence of their existence and with whom we might even hope to have some kind of conversation. Inspired by sensational media reports of UFO sightings, Fermi and his colleagues had been discussing the likelihood of discovering real signs of intelligence elsewhere in the cosmos. By 1950 the scale of the problem was well understood: the Universe is vast, it contains at the very least millions of galaxies, each of which consists of billions upon billions of stars. If just a small fraction of those stars have Earth-like planets circling around them then the sheer weight of numbers implies that there should be many places in the cosmos where life could begin. Given that this state of affairs has existed for billions of years, surely intelligent life must already have arisen many times over?
Being a scientist, Fermi attempted to add a degree of numerical rigour to the discussion with some back-of-the-envelope calculations. By combining educated guesses about the frequency of Earth-like planets and the possibility of life arising, he came to the conclusion that alien civilisations should be numerous – and yet we see no credible signs of their existence. This is the heart of what has become known as the Fermi Paradox; a conflict between an overwhelming probability and a total lack of evidence.
Fermi’s ideas have since been expanded and refined by a host of scientists and philosophers. Perhaps the most famous of these is the radio astronomer Frank Drake, who in 1961 codified the method of estimating how many civilisations might exist in our galaxy into an equation, combining numbers and probabilities whose values – in principle at least – we might hope to pin down with some degree of plausibility.
The first four terms in the Drake Equation are the rate at which new stars are formed in our galaxy, the fraction of stars that have planets, the number of these which are potential habitats for life and the fraction of planets on which life actually develops. Astrophysicists already have a good grasp of our galaxy’s star formation rate and in the two decades since extrasolar planets were first detected it has become clear that the vast majority of stars have planetary systems orbiting around them. The vibrant new field of astrobiology is actively engaged in characterising what a habitable world might look like and it’s exciting to think that in the next few decades we may even know how common planets with biospheres really are.
Astronomers have therefore made good progress in constraining the first half of the equation, but from here on things get much more difficult to quantify. The remaining terms consist of the fraction of life-bearing planets on which intelligence evolves, the fraction of these where a detectable technological civilisation emerges, and the length of time over which a typical civilisation remains visible before being destroyed or otherwise removing itself from view. These factors are the province of biologists, anthropologists, historians and sociologists and to date their values remain wide open to interpretation.
Even without the equation we know that right now there is definitely one civilisation in the Milky Way capable of signalling its presence across interstellar space. But, depending on the degree of optimism of the person performing the calculation, the Drake Equation gives wildly differing answers to the question of how many other civilisations there might be, ranging from ‘a few’ to ‘millions’. And, whatever the final number, the fact remains that we have yet to see any sign of them. Drake himself has commented that his equation is really just a way of defining our ignorance: more of a prompt for discussion than a practical way of resolving Fermi’s question.
The ‘argument from probability’ which lies at the root of the paradox is really just a mathematical way of framing the instinctive feeling that we all have when we look up at a night sky crowded with stars. There are so many planets out there, we tell ourselves, that surely some
where in the Universe there must be other beings like us. This conviction is nothing new, and in fact for centuries the default assumption of everyone from astronomers to theologians has been that the cosmos is indeed teeming with aliens, some of them perhaps technically, intellectually and morally more advanced than us.
In 1543, when the Polish astronomer Nikolaus Copernicus published his revolutionary idea that the Earth, rather than being the fixed centre of the cosmos, was in fact a planet in orbit around the Sun, he inadvertently set in motion another intellectual revolution. For if the Earth is a planet then surely the other planets must also be Earths, each with their own landscapes, climates and even people? This concept was profoundly different from earlier ideas of supernatural gods and angels inhabiting the sky – instead these would be natural beings like us, living in environments similar to ours and subject to the same physical laws that govern human lives.
Later in the sixteenth century the Dominican friar, philosopher and mathematician Giordano Bruno took the argument further: if the Sun is a star, then the stars should also be suns, each with their own planets orbiting around them. With characteristic boldness he wrote in 1584 “This space we declare to be infinite, since neither reason, convenience, possibility, sense-perception nor nature assign to it a limit. In it are an infinity of worlds of the same kind as our own”. Bruno was tried by the Roman Inquisition and in 1600 was burnt at the stake for a variety of heretical opinions beside which his assertions about the habitability of the cosmos were really rather tame.
A decade later, Galileo’s telescopic observations of lunar mountains and the satellites of Jupiter lent empirical weight to the idea that celestial bodies were indeed worlds like the Earth, complete with their own landscapes and moons, and by 1692 Edmond Halley was able to state without controversy that “It is now taken for granted that the Earth is one of the Planets, and they all are with reason supposed Habitable”. Halley’s colleague Sir Isaac Newton was more cautious in public but his unpublished notes make plain where he stood on the issue: “For if all places to which we have access are filled with living creatures, why should all these immense spaces of the heavens above the clouds be incapable of inhabitants?” Newton’s position was probably based as much on theology as science: would a rational God really create such a vast cosmos only to leave the majority of it entirely empty of minds able to appreciate it?
Meanwhile, in his “Cosmotheoros” of 1694, Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens made the shocking suggestion that the inhabitants of other worlds need not look exactly like us. Anticipating the bug-eyed monsters that would become a staple of twentieth century science fiction, Huygens gave voice to a very human disquiet about the possibility of life which is not as we know it: “For when I do but represent to my Imagination a Creature like a Man in every thing else, but that has a Neck four times as long, and great round sawcer Eyes five or six times as big I cannot look upon’t without the utmost aversion, altho at the same time I can give no account of my Dislike”. The politically correct crew of the USS Enterprise would not have approved.
As improvements in telescope technology revealed the worlds of the Solar System in ever-increasing detail, the advance of science did little to dent the conviction that they must be the abode of intelligent beings. In 1780, in a letter to Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne, the great Sir William Herschel, discoverer of Uranus and mapper of the Milky Way, wrote “Who can say that it is not extremely probable, nay beyond doubt, that there must be inhabitants on the Moon of some kind or another?” Four years later Herschel’s groundbreaking paper on the icecaps, atmosphere and polar axis of Mars concluded with the throwaway remark that “its inhabitants probably enjoy a situation in many respects similar to ours”. Somewhat bizarrely, at least for modern readers, he also speculated about the likelihood of life on the Sun.
The early nineteenth century saw no let-up in the feverish speculation about extraterrestrial life. In what became known as the Great Moon Hoax of 1835, the New York Sun published a series of sensational articles allegedly describing the flora and fauna of the Moon as observed by John Herschel, the son of William and himself one of the most famous astronomers of the day. The pieces were lavishly illustrated with lithographs of exotic landscapes and creatures, including winged, bare-breasted Moon maidens, and readers flocked to the newspaper. Clearly the public were just as eager as the scientists to believe in life elsewhere in the Solar System, especially if it was scantily clad. Needless to say, John Herschel had nothing to do with the whole affair but although the newspaper never issued a retraction he responded with (mostly) good humour, quipping that his actual research could never hope to be as exciting.
The polymath William Whewell in his 1853 essay “On the Plurality of Worlds” sounded a more cautionary note. Like Newton, Whewell had a religious as well as a scientific interest in the subject of extraterrestrial intelligence, although in this case it led him to the opposite conviction. The existence of myriad inhabited planets, he argued, would make a mockery of the idea that God could take a special interest in the people of this particular one, thereby contradicting Christian scripture. But Whewell was no religious fanatic and his reasoning was based on solid contemporary science. Foreshadowing the modern concept of the Habitable Zone – the ‘Goldilocks’ region around a star in which temperatures are just right for water to exist in a liquid state – he wrote “The earth is really the domestic hearth of the Solar System; adjusted between the hot and fiery haze on one side and the cold and watery vapour on the other.” Moreover, by this stage it had become clear that the other stars exhibited a wide range of properties – not all of them particularly sun-like – so conceivably any planets they possessed might not be hospitable to life after all.
But the expectation of a Solar System rife with intelligent beings refused to die away. Later in the nineteenth century the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli reported seeing strange linear features on the face of Mars and when the Italian word ‘canali’ was translated into English as “canals” rather than the more neutral ‘channels’ it provoked feverish speculation that these were indeed artificial structures, the product of sophisticated Martian engineering. One very prominent champion of this idea was Percival Lowell, a wealthy American businessman who founded his own observatory in the Arizona desert and published popular books setting out his vision of a civilisation that constructed vast irrigation canals to bring water from the polar ice caps to the equatorial deserts of a dying world.
Lowell’s ideas were widely circulated and proved particularly popular with writers of science fiction stories. Classic tales by H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Ray Bradbury can all trace their roots back to Lowell’s exotic vision of ancient Martian civilisations and these romantic views of the Red Planet still colour our imaginations today. When Wells wrote of “intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic” regarding our world “with envious eyes” he was also referencing the Nebular Hypothesis of Pierre-Simon Laplace (translated into English by Astronomer Royal John Pond), which proposed that the planets further from the Sun were increasingly older and more evolved – setting a template in science fiction for crumbling Martian ruins and Venusian swamps teeming with prehistoric reptiles.
But by the early twentieth century scientific support for an inhabited Mars was already fading. An ingenious experiment carried out in 1903 by E. Walter Maunder of the Royal Greenwich Observatory demonstrated that the linear ‘canals’ were most likely an optical illusion, conjured up as the human brain joined the dots between natural, irregular features on the Martian surface. Meanwhile, as more powerful observing techniques became available, a very different picture of Mars began to emerge. Even at the equator, ambient temperatures were well below freezing, and the atmosphere was little more than a wispy halo of carbon dioxide. Apart from the polar icecaps, there was little sign of water on the surface or in the atmosphere and without a magnetic field the planet’s surface was exposed to cosmic rays and harsh radiation from the Sun. Lowell was billions
of years too late: Mars was not a slowly dying world. As far as the possibility of complex life was concerned, the planet was already long dead.
By 1950, when Fermi and his colleagues were wondering where the aliens might be, it was quite clear that they would not be found on any of the other worlds of our Solar System. The advent of the Space Age a decade later confirmed what scientists already suspected. As a succession of robotic probes revealed the planets in intimate detail it became clear that each world was complex and highly individual, but also very different from the Earth: Mercury was an airless cinder, Venus a searing, toxic hell, and the four giant outer planets were churning maelstroms of gas and cloud, lacking solid surfaces.
Although today there is renewed hope of finding simple microbial life in sheltered corners of the Solar System – in aquifers beneath the Martian sands, under the icy crust of moons such as Europa or Enceladus, or even in the methane lakes of Titan - the search for Earth-like conditions where intelligence might have a chance to evolve has long since shifted its focus to the stars.
Out beyond the Solar System the prospects are undoubtedly exciting. We are living in a golden age of planetary discovery, one that is redefining the way we think about planets and the possibility of life in the Universe. For most of human history the number of stars that were known to have planets orbiting around them remained stubbornly at one – the Sun – but in the last decade of the twentieth century that changed forever with the discovery of the first extrasolar planets, around the Sun-like star 51-Pegasi and the pulsar PSR 1257+12. Now the tally of confirmed planets is in the hundreds, with thousands more candidates currently under investigation and new discoveries being made almost every week. By extrapolating these results beyond the tiny fraction of the sky so far surveyed we can be confident that planets easily outnumber the billions of stars in our galaxy.