The Vision for Mankind — Chapter III of the Bystander’s Observations on the World series
By: Danny Flowerz
Tags: Future, Morality, Growth, Science, Life

The Vision for Mankind — Chapter III of the Bystander’s Observations on the World series

Chapter III of the bystander’s observations on the world series. This is the last introductory chapter aimed at setting the direction for this series. Though I am aiming to focus each chapter on exploring a specific topic, in order to understand the full narrative, I would highly advise to start reading the series from the first chapter. You can use the free links above to easily navigate through each chapter.

Today I will try to rationalise why I think we should keep growing economically and technologically. In the first two chapters we have discussed that we have made significant progress as a species thanks to innovations such as agriculture, writing, and more recently capitalism. But we have also touched upon a couple of our shortcomings, such as finding answers to some of our most ancient questions regarding happiness and our purpose in life, and the clear damage we are inflicting on our environment with our current growth model (largely fuelled by consumerism). So why not just pull this growth machine to a halt? Why should we strive to find better models to drive our economical and technological growth while also making sure we don’t destroy our planet in the process? Why not just focus on the latter? And how could this give us purpose? A morally very challenging topic I must admit, but I will try anyway.

At the end of the previous chapter I have mentioned that I would like to talk about aliens, but what I actually want to discuss, is the lack thereof: the Fermi paradox. What does this have to do with anything discussed so far? Bare with me.

So the Fermi paradox is an incredibly powerful observation -made by the brilliant physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950 during a lunch conversation with his colleagues- that has scientists scratching their heads to this very day. There are approximately 100–400 billion (possibly even a trillion) stars in our galaxy: the Milky Way. Around each of these stars, orbits at least one planet on average, a so called exoplanet. As telescope technology improves, scientists are discovering exoplanet after exoplanet, some of which are Earth-like rocky planets in the habitable zone of their host stars, meaning they are at the right distance from their star to harbour liquid water. Something essential for all life on Earth.

That is an incredible amount of planets that can potentially host extraterrestrial life, and why not intelligent life? Our galaxy is much older than our own solar system and with such a vast number of potentially life harbouring exoplanets, surely there was enough time for at least one technological civilisation to rise to the level of colonising the entire galaxy, right? Well. If that is the case, why don’t we see any evidence of that? Why isn’t the galaxy bustling with dozens of advanced civilisations like in most of the science-fiction books and films. Or as Fermi himself put it:

Where is everybody?

Where indeed? A lot of technological progress was made in the 70 years since this iconic question was raised, yet the paradox just seems to be becoming more and more prevalent. With every technological advancement we’ve made, we were more confident that we will find signs of life outside Earth. We have searched within our own solar system by digging in Martian soil and analysing its atmosphere, and found liquid water underneath the icy surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa. But so far nothing. We have searched for signs of intelligent life across the galaxy with programs such as the SETI, and still, nothing. Silence. We appear to be painfully alone as living sentient beings on one planet out of millions that could potentially support life.

I cannot emphasise enough how baffling this is. Did I mention that there are around 100–200 billion galaxies in the observable universe? It is called “observable”, because there are physical limitations to how far we can see, but in fact it is just that fragment of the much larger universe, the part that we are capable of observing. It is a little bit like standing on a mountain peak on a clear day. You can see mighty far away, but still, you know that the landscape continues beyond the horizon. If you want to get a better feeling of just how vast this bubble of the whole universe is that we can observe, I highly recommend you to watch the breathtaking animation created by the American Museum of Natural History linked at the end of this article. It really puts things into perspective.

So each of these 200 billion galaxies that we can potentially observe is home to their own hundreds of billions of stars, each of which in turn has a couple of planets. The problem is, these galaxies are extremely far away. Even if some or all of them are teeming with advanced technical civilisations, it would be almost impossible for us to directly observe them, unless they are insanely advanced. Like Type III on the Kardashev Scale level advanced, or in other words: a civilisation capable of harnessing the energy of its entire home galaxy. That is quite a feat for sure, humans are lightyears away from anything close to that (pun intended). It is not inconceivable though, and with countless planets across countless galaxies, one might easily argue that there should be at least some Type III civilisations out there. There is a problem though. You know how nothing in this universe can travel faster than the speed of light? Well that’s not so much about light itself, but rather about information. Light just happens to carry information at the maximum possible speed. Nevertheless, the point is, that due to the insane distance to other galaxies, light (or an electromagnetic ray in general) has to travel for a really long time before it can transmit any information to us. Like millions, but possibly billions of years. This implies that when we observe a distant galaxy, we see it as it was hundreds of millions, if not a few billion years ago. Perhaps at a time when the creatures building such awesome civilisations have not even evolved yet. Assuming there are any such creatures out there of course. Another rather disappointing consequence of these vast distances is that even if we had found irrefutable evidence of such extraterrestrial intelligence, we could do little more than to stand in awe at their existence, but we would never ever be able to communicate with them, no matter how hard we tried. At least not according to our current understanding of physics. But again, so far, all we have seen are countless seemingly lifeless galaxies.

But why this echoing emptiness? How is it possible that in this unfathomably large universe, no matter where we look, we can’t seem to find any trace of intelligent life? Really, where the hell is everybody?!

There are numerous proposed resolutions to the Fermi paradox, but here, I would like to discuss the two most widely accepted ones: the Great Filter and the Rare Earth hypotheses.

What you must know is that there are still plenty of things that we do not understand about the emergence of life or the emergence of intelligence. We have a pretty good understanding about the steps required to get to intelligent life. Steps like the abundance of complex molecules that can bind together to create flexible self-replicating patterns (DNA), the step where a mitochondrion got absorbed by a primitive hunter cell enabling the emergence of much more complex cells, or even the cognitive revolution discussed in the previous chapter which may or may not have been a gradual process. What we do not know, is the likelihood of such events occurring. It also doesn’t help that we have not seen any other examples besides Earth. Could most of the habitable planets out of the 10 billion or so Earth-like planets in the Milky Way have gone through the step of the emergence of life, but never passed the barrier to create more complex organisms? We know from fossils that it took around 2.3 billion years for this to happen on Earth. That is more than half of the entire existence of life on our planet. Or perhaps, could the emergence of extreme intelligence simply not be worth the investment from an evolutionary perspective? There are certainly other intelligent animals besides us on this planet, but nothing comparable to our level. This is something that happened only once, after approximately 3.8 billion years of the existence of life on Earth.

These and similar events are candidates for great filters. Barriers that are almost impossible for life to overcome. You see, life as we know it has the tendency to take up all the habitable space it can find in order to persist. And when I say “habitable”, I am really stretching the meaning of this word to its extremes. Microbes can thrive in the most hostile of environments on our planet. Did you know that there are microorganisms called endoliths, that can live inside rocks? If there are highly advanced civilisations in our galaxy, it would be very natural for them to try to expand beyond their home planets. Again, given the age of the Milky Way and the sheer number of planets it is home to, how come Earth has not been colonised yet? One possible answer to this question is thus the existence of a great filter somewhere along the path to galactic colonisation. We have just seen some possible candidates for such a filter, but there is also a much grimmer possibility. What if this filter is still ahead of us? What if in fact countless alien civilisations got to our level of development before us, but all of them perished shortly afterwards due to some inevitable catastrophe that arises from some aspect of a highly advanced technical civilisation? Should this filter take place not too far beyond our current technological level, it would in fact perfectly match our current observations of the universe. If it is virtually impossible for a civilisation to survive for long after reaching a level of advancement where other civilisations might be able to observe them, then consequently we would also not be able to observe such civilisations. There is an important implication hiding here though: we are practically already dead. Given our current technological level, if the great filter is ahead of us, it is basically guaranteed that humanity will not survive the next few decades or centuries at most. But what if the great filter is behind us? Well that would imply that we got lucky. Like extremely, unbelievably lucky. In fact, purely statistically speaking, if our initial assumption of there being countless planets out there capable of harbouring life is correct, then the great filter is almost certainly still ahead of us. Why? Well because Earth clearly gave birth to an intelligent being such as yourself, and we assumed that our planet is -at least to a certain degree- common in our galaxy. So let us say that there are 100 million planets in the Milky Way with the potential for intelligent life to arise, and Earth is one such planet. And let us also say that the inhabitants of only 1 out of these 100 million planets make it to be a galactic civilisation. Your chances of being part of that 1 civilisation is exactly 1:100.000.000 or 0,000001%. So yeah, chances are that the filter is ahead of us, and is so powerful, that there have not been enough civilisations throughout the existence of the Milky Way to beat these odds. And there might never be — this includes us.

So are we destined for certain doom then? Is there any hope beyond the seeming improbability of us having “won the lottery”? Let us now look at the Rare Earth hypothesis, or rather, an extended version thereof.

This hypothesis offers a slightly different solution to the Fermi paradox. It discards the assumption that Earth is a relatively common planet in the first place, and instead argues that the rarity of complex life in our universe is a direct consequence of the fact that it is extremely rare that a planet can sustain a stable enough environment on a long enough term for complex life and ultimately intelligence to emerge. If Earth in fact does have some unique traits compared to the countless other rocky planets out there, we do not need a great filter to explain the apparent lack of extraterrestrial intelligence. And sure enough, there are plenty of oddities about our home planet and our solar system altogether that we have yet to have observed elsewhere in the galaxy. Though to be fair, we do not yet have that many confirmed planetary systems outside our own solar system to compare to (3047 at the time of writing this article). How would this be different from winning the lottery though? Aren’t we just as lucky to have been born on such a life-friendly planet as if we had passed a great filter? Well, no. You see if we invoke the Anthropic principle, we can formulate a statement such as:

As a conscious observer, we must find ourselves in an environment that allows the existence of such conscious observers.

Pretty straightforward, right? Regardless of how common planets that can sustain complex life in the universe are, we should not be surprised to find ourselves on one such planet. The fact that such planets are extremely rare, just greatly confines the number of possible places where conscious observers such as ourselves could have evolved. There is another even more fundamental principle that this hypothesis seemingly violates though. One that has guided astronomers and other scientists since 1543 (when Nicolaus Copernicus presented his heliocentric model of our solar system): the Copernican principle. In essence what it states is that:

We occupy neither a central, nor a privileged place in the universe.

If we look at the Rare Earth hypothesis, it definitely does not place Earth in a central position in the universe, but it does appear to position it as an incredibly privileged planet. In fact, this problem can be extended to the entire universe: there are several fundamental constants — or basic properties of our universe that seem oddly fine-tuned for the eventual emergence of life. Constants with just the right values to allow a reasonable expansion rate for the universe without ripping itself apart or collapsing back on itself. Constants that allow protons and neutrons to form from quarks. Or even the fact how crucial elements for life such as carbon and oxygen have a nuclear structure that allows them to quickly stabilise after forming in the cores of stars, instead of promptly decaying into lighter elements. There is no apparent reason why these constants should have the exact right values to enable the existence of a universe that can host conscious observers (such as our universe), but it is clear that even a slight variation in some of these properties would result in a universe incapable of producing even the most basic building blocks for life. But why do these constants have the exact right values for us to exist? Are we actually living on an extremely privileged planet within an extremely privileged universe? We could say “that is just the way it is”, but that would not be a very satisfying answer. Luckily, there is an increasingly popular theory out there that allows us to extend the Rare Earth hypothesis to conform with both the Copernican principle and the Anthropic principle, while also providing a reasonable solution to the Fermi paradox.

Enter the multiverse. An increasing number of scientists today believe that our universe is just a bubble in a significantly larger multiverse, that hosts countless such bubble universes. Without going into details, if we were to accept this theory, we could construct the following answer to the Fermi paradox:

We as conscious observers, find ourselves in a (bubble) universe that is characterised by randomly defined fundamental constant values that allow the eventual emergence of such conscious observers. There are significantly more universes in the multiverse where the random values of the same properties do not enable the emergence of the complex structures required to produce life. There are presumably also significantly fewer universes in the multiverse where these same fundamental constant values allow life to be much more abundant. We therefore find ourselves in one of the most common types of universes that still allows our existence. This universe is necessarily large enough to be able to create the extremely low probability circumstances where a planet can eventually give birth to conscious observers. We as conscious observers necessarily find ourselves on one such planet.

Well that was quite a mental exercise. But where does that leave us? Let us quickly recapitulate:

Highly advanced civilisations are clearly not abundant in our galaxy (or even universe)

It is reasonable to assume that despite the mind-bogglingly high number of existing planets, life itself is extremely rare in our galaxy (or even universe)

Until -if ever- proven otherwise, we can safely assume that we are the only highly intelligent, technical civilisation in our galaxy (or even universe)

Right. And where does this leave us? In one word:

Responsibility.

And a great, great deal of it. Remember how we have discussed earlier that life has the tendency to take up all the habitable space it can find? It has another fundamental trait as well. It tries to survive. At all costs. Now there are numerous possible events that could decimate us, or perhaps even wipe us out completely together with most other species on Earth:

an all-out nuclear war

a runaway chain reaction caused by climate change or some other interference with our environment

drastic and long-term increase in volcanic activity

asteroid impact

gamma ray burst by a nearby supernova

Just to name a few. We also know that all life on Earth will at latest seize to exist in a few billion years as the Sun begins to burn brighter and brighter in its later stage of life. Even the above mentioned endoliths, these hardy extremophiles living kilometres deep in rocks would have a hard time surviving that. The thing is, it might not just be all life on Earth, it could well be all life in our universe. But it does not have to be this way! We have the potential to preserve life and to preserve ourselves. We could become the civilisation that colonises the galaxy and spreads life to worlds where it otherwise did not have the chance to appear. At our current rate of technological growth, it really isn’t that far fetched to set such ambitions for ourselves. Especially if we consider that no one else in this universe might be able to do it, but us.

Someone once asked a friend of mine what the purpose of life is. His answer was “the purpose is what you make it to be”. There is a certain appeal to his philosophy. If one were to choose their purpose in life, I could hardly think of a better and more noble purpose than to preserve life:

We should do our absolute best to educate ourselves, to collaborate and keep growing as a unified species in order to preserve life on our home planet, and to spread life across our home galaxy.

This is my vision, this is why I strongly believe that we should keep growing while also saving our environment, and this is what I will be taking small steps towards in the upcoming chapters.