All Alone in the Dark Forest

By Bobby Neal Winters

If there is intelligent life in the universe, where is it?

I’ll make the easy joke and then get on to business: It sure isn’t here.

That out of the way, the question is known as the Fermi Paradox.  It is attributed to the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi who believed that if there was other intelligent life in the universe, then it would have had enough time to begin spreading and would have arrived at Earth by now.

This makes the assumption that we aren’t one of the first intelligent species to arise, and that is fair. In science they try not to assume that there is anything special about us.  This strikes me as unnecessarily limiting, but let’s proceed.

My YouTube feed is filled with videos regarding the Fermi Paradox.  It looms large in my life.  It’s everywhere.  There seems to be a cottage industry among YouTube creators who make content about the Fermi Paradox.  Hairs are split and then sliced thinner and thinner. Content is recirculated.

And I eat it up.

There are a number of solutions to the Fermi Paradox. The one I am going to name now is called the Dark Forest solution.

This comes to mind because I’ve just finished a novel by Cixin Liu called “The Dark Forest.”  It is the second book in his trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past.  The first was “The Three-Body Problem.”  I liked the first book enough to read the second, but I waited because it exhausted me.  The second is even better, but I will need to rest again before I tackle the third, “Death’s End.”

Returning to the Fermi Paradox, what the Dark Forest Solution says is that an intelligent race in the universe needs to act like an unarmed person who is alone in a dark forest which might have predators hunting within it.  You don’t want to make any noise; you don’t want to light your flashlight; you don’t want to do anything to attract attention.

For an intelligent race in the universe, this means that you don’t want to do anything that shows the universe that you are intelligent.

Well.  I can’t say what we look like from stellar distances, but up close we are hiding our intelligence just fine.

All kidding aside, on one hand this looks like a pretty good argument.  It was good enough to carry the novel by that name.  On the other hand, I’ve heard convincing scientific arguments that you can’t really hide an intelligent civilization for very long.  It has to do with the products of industry and so forth.  But that gets technical really quick.  If you are interested, I suggest you go to YouTube and search “Isaac Arthur Fermi Paradox” and be prepared to spend some time.

I’ve settled down to the opinion that intelligent life is very rare.  Scientists say that life arose on earth at the very first moment it was possible for it to do so. Taking that at face value, this means that either (1) it is very easy for life to arise or (2) it arose somewhere else and arrived here beginning to grow when it was possible to.

Given either of these alternatives, it took billions of years to get from life arising to the so-called homo sapiens, man the wise.  That means that however easy life is, intelligence is hard.

We are looking out on the universe with ever more sophisticated equipment--the latest being the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)--and we are seeing no signs of intelligence. There is one indication of possible life, which they will argue about for years and years and years, but we’ve not seen the markers of intelligent life.

This argues that it’s rare.  Maybe so rare that we are it.

Given the pictures of the universe that the JWST is sending us, where untold billions of galaxies are in an area of the sky that can be hidden behind a grain of sand. Within that picture, our galaxy--not our sun, our galaxy--looks like a mote of dust in a sunbeam. 

That is absolutely terrifying.  

The Dark Forest Solution to the Fermi Hypothesis aside, there are those who’ve been looking for extraterrestrial intelligence to be the “adult in the room.” There are those who use extraterrestrial intelligence as a replacement for God.  They keep saying, “There must be life elsewhere, and some of it must be intelligent.”

Or we could be all alone in a dark forest.

It strikes me that the human race was once all alone in the dark forest.  We learned to build fires and soon taught any predators who came near to be afraid themselves.

Just a thought.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.