What’s Up With the Paradox?

Every so often someone will come up with a new theory to explain the Fermi Paradox, a contradiction between the number of alien civilizations we might expect to see in a universe so vast and the actual number of alien civilizations we have been able to detect with 150 years of science. The latest entry (click here) provides a perfectly cromulent theory based on the probable difficulty of life to sustain itself even on planets that are generally habitable. Life is more than liquid water and temperate climates, but a complex system of feedbacks dependent on stable geological processes and sufficient biomass to perform the critical regulatory role life has in sustaining its own habitat. Perhaps thousands of galactic ecologies were strangled in the cradle by their own fragility, perhaps even the majority of them. That would remove a lot of potential aliens from the equation.

But even for those ecologies able to get past this Gaian Bottleneck and maintain habitability there are plenty of other barriers between life and civilization. Many point out the rapidity with which life arose on Earth as a sure sign that the galaxy must be lousy with civilizations, but as rapid as that may have occurred, the critical jump to multi-cellular complexity took almost three billion years. Any ETs that may have emerged and taken a look at Earth during those three billion years would have noticed next to nothing in the way of life, unless they were able to look very closely. So maybe the Golden Age of Galactic Civilization peaked two billion years ago, and those guys are long gone. Or maybe complexity is so rare that few life forms have ever gotten there at all. Based on the history of life on our own planet (the only case study available), we can expect most alien life is too small to see and probably, as microbes, have nothing much to say.

Still, the odds are fairly good that life evolved more complexity at least somewhere else in the universe. Maybe even within the confines of our own galaxy. But that level of complexity is no guarantee of intelligence either, and again using own world as model, it was only within the last 200,000 years that civilization building intelligence emerged (this out of a 700 million year history of evolving complex organisms). In all that time, from well before the age of dinosaurs to deep into the age of mammals, millions of species adapted to survive on a constantly changing planet, but none of them ever found a high level of what we call intelligence to be a useful adaptation. Self-reflective hubris may have convinced us that our intelligence is the bestest and the brightest old adaptation that nature ever selected, but given how rare it is, and how late in the game it has come along, it would seem that nature has nothing but contempt for the trait.

But even intelligence only gets you so far. Our own, emerging within the last 200,000 years, was stuck in the Stone Age for a long time. The stone hand ax was the pinnacle of human technology for over 150,000 years, much of that time well past our transition into Homo sapiens. Then the agricultural revolution allowed us to settle down and gather into city-states and build empires, but even as our technology and culture grew we were blissfully unaware of, and incapable of making contact with, whatever other life forms may exist in the universe. We excelled in the following millennia in city building and war, but did not reach the technological sophistication necessary to communicate with extraterrestrials until quite recently. There is a common conceit that had Christianity not strangled European thought during the Dark Ages we would be a thousand years ahead in our scientific and technological progress. This notion is not only racist, but assumes progress is inevitable. That may not be any more true for the evolution of civilizations than it is for the evolution of life.

Life – Complexity – Intelligence – Civilization – Technology. Because all of these things have happened on our own world we tend to see them as being inevitable, but it is probably closer to the truth that each one is significantly less likely to occur than the one that proceeds it. Which does not mean that there aren't any aliens out there, only that they are probably so very far away that it would be impossible to have an intelligent conversation with them.

New On Television - January 2014

January always brings a fresh crop of mid-season program premieres to television. Here are my thoughts on three of these new series:  

Intelligence (CBS)

This series stars Lost alum Josh Holloway as superspy Gabriel Vaughn, a man made super by the implantation of a computer chip in his head that gives him access to many computers, electronic door locks and the internet. He is managed by a counterintelligence chief played by Marg Helgenberger, and protected by a Secret Service agent played by Meghan Ory (Ruby/Red from Once Upon a Time). It doesn't seem likely that this series will ever touch any more than superficially on the issues surrounding the integration of technology and biology. The actors are all convincing, but the story nothing more than predictable so far. The back-story for the superspy and the SSA seem contrived to create drama for future episodes, but time will tell if that adds up to good television.

Killer Women (ABC)

Tricia Helfer takes the lead in this series about a female Texas Ranger named Molly Parker, who will apparently specialize in tracking down homicidal women. I’m not sure if being the only woman in the Texas Rangers and focusing on female criminals makes the show sexist or not, but this series breaks no new ground for women in law enforcement. The pilot started ridiculously enough with the 1st of the series’ killer women just walking into a church and killing a bride in front of a few hundred people (some of them well armed). Parker’s investigative techniques were also more than a little laughable, such as asking the suspect if her supposed lover was right or left handed. The guess alone gives you a 50 percent chance to get that right. And the later foray into Mexico to rescue hostages from a drug cartel was wildly unrealistic.

Helix (SYFY)

The SYFY Channel’s latest attempt at original programming takes us to the Antarctic, and a secret research lab that specializes in either viruses or mutations or both. An outbreak results in a call to the CDC, and Dr. Alan Farragut (Billy Campbell) heads way south to investigate and to save his brother, Dr. Peter Farragut (Neil Napier), who has been infected with whatever it is. I didn't realize from the previews that this series was going to be so claustrophobic. Containment of the contagion seems to be the primary focus. Series characters are one step up from SYFY’s weekly schlock fest movies. The one female scientist’s former bad relationship with the male scientist main character has become a SYFY channel cliché. Battlestar Galactica re-creator Ron Moore’s series credit amounts to writing one episode, so I wouldn't count on that to raise the quality of the series. And all of these people are so stupid, that it’s hard care much about their survival. They get these RFID implants placed in their hands to give them access to facility doors. When Peter goes rogue (virus induced behavior change) they take the logical action of deactivating his chip, but never think to use it to track him. When they discover the body of someone he’s attacked has had his hand cut off, they wonder why, instead of assuming that he plans to use that hand to access other parts of the station. So he is able to attack more people and spread the contagion.