Fermi Paradox - Self-Annihiliation?

Where's all the aliens?

I used to think the vast distances between stars to be sufficient to answer that question. The closest star to the sun is Proxima Centauri, which is a little over four lightyears away. According to NASA:

The Voyager 1 spacecraft is on an interstellar mission. It is traveling away from the Sun at a rate of 17.3 km/s. If Voyager were to travel to Proxima Centauri, at this rate, it would take over 73,000 years to arrive. If we could travel at the speed of light, an impossibility due to Special Relativity, it would still take 4.22 years to arrive.

Proxima is a red dwarf to boot, and those types of stars throw out loads of life-frying radiation, so who knows how many stars one would have to visit before he or she found a planet with a good environment for supporting life. I think there’s some wiggle room around the edges. Life can probably get going in a range of conditions within a pretty narrow spectrum, and beyond that it is impossible. Probably water is necessary. Probably shielding from radiation is necessary. Probably temperatures ought to be moderate within a range. Planets within those parameters are probably quite rare, and certainly Earths, planets with strong magnetic fields and robust atmospheres and oceans of liquid water, are rare, but in a universe as big as this one rare only means there’s billions and billions of them. They are too far apart to be able to communicate. They are just little specks floating all willy nilly in the cosmic ocean.

Big Bang Up For Grabs?

Probably.

The James Webb telescope found huge galaxies in the early universe, something that’s not supposed to be there. The oldest galaxies that go back to just a few million years after the currently understood big bang are much larger than they were predicted to be. Assuming those results hold up to scrutiny, we are off in our calculations about the age of the universe by a fuck-ton. Bouncing cosmology seems to be back in style, that the universe goes through cycles of retraction and expansion.

If the James Webb can gaze that deep into the universe, does it also have the ability to zoom in on some exoplanets? Turns out, it can probably give us the ability to do spectroscopy and detect atmospheres. (Note: NASA has a good website about it.) That’s where we are in this. Previous, all we’ve done is look for radio signals. It’s still early in the search. What that means is we are going to get stories about planets and their atmopheric composition, and I definitely think we will get news that a nitrogen atmosphere has been detected, and that will be interesting, yet that is still a far cry from answering our intial question: Where’s the aliens?

If there were some really beast-mode aliens out there, one would think they’d leave evidence all around. Think about it like this: How beast-mode would humans have to be to be able to fly around other earths? They’d have to have some kind of propulsion or other means of transportation that was faster than light. Wouldn’t they? The distances between all of these places is measured in lightyears. Essentially, we’d have to be Star Fleet, and when I put it like that, it strikes me that there’s probably no Star Fleets. Why not?

Propulsion. Just good old-fashioned propulsion. Humans are never going to do anything approaching the speeds required to travel to distant star systems. It is what it is. Now, it may be the case that I’m just thinking three-dimensionally, though, that there are probably giga-Chad insights to be had about space and time. I think that is probably the case, too, but I guess I’m saying that us talking apes aren’t going to have those kinds of insights, that we’re sort of hog-tied.

So I don’t even think one needs self-annihiliation as a potential answer to the Fermi paradox even though I think it is a good one. It makes total sense to me that a species, once it reaches a certain level of intelligence, annihilates itself, intelligence probably bringing along with it an expanding psychosis. I’m not sure one even needs it as an explanation.