Belmont Club: Where Are They?

News from Cambridge that they may have detected biochemical signatures on a relatively nearby exoplanet has altered the solution probabilities to the Fermi paradox. The New York Times writes that “a team of researchers is offering what it contends is the strongest indication yet of extraterrestrial life, not in our solar system but on a massive planet, known as K2-18b, that orbits a star 120 light-years from Earth. A repeated analysis of the exoplanet’s atmosphere suggests an abundance of a molecule that on Earth has only one known source: living organisms such as marine algae.”

Of course, it may be a false alarm. Did we actually find signs of alien life on K2-18b, asks one publication: “We should expect some false alarms and this may be one.”

The excitement sparked by the announcement was quickly tempered by a wave of caution, with scientists emphasizing that the results are still preliminary and come with several caveats. Chief among them is the fact that Madhusudhan and his team reported their DMS detection with a three-sigma statistical significance, indicating a 0.3% chance of it being due to random chance. Experts point out that this falls short of the typical five-sigma standard required for a scientific discovery to minimize false positives, which translates to a 0.00003% chance that the findings are due to a statistical fluke.

But let’s assume for the sake of argument that a real biosignature has been detected on an exoplanet. What does it imply about solutions to the Fermi paradox? For those who haven’t heard it, the Fermi paradox, formulated by the famous physicist Enrico Fermi, asks: If the universe is vast and old, and if conditions are right for life to emerge, why haven’t we detected or been visited by other civilizations?

“Where are they?”

One of the formerly given reasons for why we have not observed extraterrestrials is the possibility that life may be very rare. How often does dead matter come to life, as apparently happened? But if K2-18b shows potential signs of water vapor and biosignature gases like dimethyl sulfide, it suggests life can arise on exoplanets with similar characteristics. Since K2-18b is of a relatively common type, it thus weakens the “low probability of life” explanation. That leaves three remaining candidate solutions to the famous paradox.

1. Simple life may be common, but intelligent life is still rare in the universe.
2. Life is common and evolves, but civilizations destroy themselves, a thesis known as the Great Filter.
3. Advanced intelligence is undetectable to significantly less capable observers without a key.

If we can detect the chemical signals of algae with JWST from K2-18b from 120 light years away, but have not picked up radio signals from SETI, then there may be a lot of life out in the universe, but nearly all of it is dumb. This is where the Great Filter idea comes in. 

The concept originates in Robin Hanson’s argument that the failure to find any extraterrestrial civilizations in the observable universe [is due to] … a “Great Filter” which acts to reduce the great number of sites where intelligent life might arise to the tiny number of intelligent species with advanced civilizations actually observed (currently just one: human) [and] might work as a barrier to the evolution of intelligent life, or as a high probability of self-destruction.

Oxford academic Nick Bostrom argued that finding lots of primitive life would be a very bad augury. “It would be good news if we find Mars to be completely sterile. Dead rocks and lifeless sands would lift my spirit… How do I arrive at this conclusion? I begin by reflecting on a well‐known fact… humans have, to date, seen no sign of any extraterrestrial intelligent civilization… You start with billions and billions of potential germination points for life, and you end up with a sum total of zero extraterrestrial civilizations that we can observe.”

Now, an important question for us is, just where might this Great Filter be located? There are two basic possibilities: It might be behind us, somewhere in our distant past. Or it might be ahead of us, somewhere in the millennia or decades to come … 

[Finding only primitive life everywhere implies] that the Great Filter is after us, in our future. This would mean that there is some great improbability that prevents almost all technological civilizations at our current human stage of development from progressing to the point where they engage in large‐scale space‐colonization and make their presence known to other technological civilizations.

If you reject the Great Filter hypothesis, that leaves explanation number three: “Advanced intelligence is undetectable to significantly less capable observers without a key.” Higher levels of intelligence may have too many bits for beings with low cognitive capacities to recognize. It’s easier to detect weaker intelligences than superior ones. Take Einstein’s blackboard: “The equations on the blackboard are related to the cosmological model known as the Friedmann–Einstein universe.”

An ant would crawl over the blackboard without noticing anything unusual about it. Even humans of low cognitive ability may see the writing as nothing more than graffiti. Higher intelligence often involves more complex thought processes. For someone with lower intelligence, their cognitive “hardware” may not have the necessary capacity to recognize these intricate ideas. The output produced by a higher intelligence can simply overwhelm the processing abilities of a less capable mind, leading to a failure by the lower intelligence to comprehend – or detect the higher.

Thus, we can detect algae and intelligence up to our order of power, but advanced extraterrestrials may appear to us as noise because we lack the pattern recognition power to see them. We might detect mildly exotic biological entities in hollow metal saucers of the sort depicted by Hollywood, but there are limits to what we can comprehend. Just as a dog can’t understand a smartphone, we couldn’t understand an AI networked by some technology we haven’t discovered yet.

There are even cosmologies that argue that the universe itself is intelligent.

In physics and cosmology, the mathematical universe hypothesis (MUH), also known as the ultimate ensemble theory, is a speculative “theory of everything” (TOE) proposed by cosmologist Max Tegmark. According to the hypothesis, the universe is a mathematical object in and of itself.” 

The more popular version of MUH is the simulation hypothesis. “The simulation hypothesis proposes that what one experiences as the world is actually a simulated reality, such as a computer simulation in which humans are constructs.

The master computer, as it were, responsible for running the simulated universe, is not something we could detect by looking for flying saucers or listening for SETI radio signals. In fact, we would be hard pressed to detect a simulation – if it existed – by any means at all. Whether we could find evidence of a simulated universe depends on its quality and the simulators’ goals. If it’s a flawless simulation meant to stay hidden, we’d be none the wiser. But if it has detectable flaws (glitches, limits, or design signatures), we might spot something. Even then, interpreting those clues as proof of a simulation rather than natural quirks would be challenging. Ultimately, it’s a possibility we can explore but may never definitively confirm.

Fermi’s original question—“where are they?”—turns out not to be so trivial at all.

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