# Fermi Paradox: The Firstborn and the Reset Hypotheses

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** John Michael Godier
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKD_cHal1Bo

## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKD_cHal1Bo) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00)

As someone that has spent their life wondering about alien life, ever since I was kid looking up at the stars blazing overhead in the days before city light skyglow grew so much and so badly it’s hard to find dark skies these days, I have wondered if there was anyone else out there. The world of science fiction saw untold numbers of stories of interactions between humans and aliens, but that was just that, fiction. The reality of pondering the Fermi paradox, SETI, even abiogenesis itself is far more sobering. The simple fact is that in all our searching so far, we have never seen any reliable or repeatable evidence of anyone being in the universe other than ourselves. Perhaps there have been hints, Wow signals, of which I have covered many of here on this channel, but nothing solid to this very day that would tell us that unequivocally aliens exist. This leads into a class of potential Fermi Paradox solutions that I would term early in the game scenarios where we are effectively the ancient ones of this galaxy, the very first civilization to arise, but not the last, more are coming. Rather we are simply the first born civilization. As an aside, one aspect of this is interesting. There have been papers and work done that suggest that this galaxy will actually become more habitable as time goes on in the sense that there could be a future explosion of alien civilizations as the galaxy ages, especially if red dwarf star systems truly are habitable, because the longevity of red dwarfs leaves vast amounts of time for something to have happened, and maybe the reason that we are here now is more a matter of luck in that life on earth evolved on a much faster timeline than it might happen in other places. We just got through various hurdles faster than the other inhabited exoplanets, which might be stuck at a microbial level billions of years longer than earth was. Incidentally however the first born hypothesis does not actually preclude other alien civilizations as it is sometimes presented, rather they would simply be very distant, populating other galaxies, perhaps being the first born in those galaxies. But there is a caveat to this thinking. Nothing in physics says that there could not have been earlier civilizations, this galaxy had been hosting ostensibly habitable worlds for billions of years when we got here, or for that matter, when earth life got here. The first born hypothesis is the most famous of this class. Now classically presented, it actually extends it to humanity being the first intelligent life anywhere in the universe. I don’t particularly like scenarios like that because you cannot ever prove it to be true, because it requires proving a negative. There are galaxies beyond the observable universe horizon that we have zero way of measuring, and we see galaxies as they once were, not what they are now so there would be no way to ever know if there was anyone out there that distant, the universe simply does not allow us to do it. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So for our purposes here, I will alter the idea simply to us being the first civilization in the Milky Way. That we might someday prove, especially if our great terran empire someday grows to encompass the entirety of the galaxy and we never find anyone, or archeological evidence of past dead civilizations. Indeed, it could happen tomorrow. If we find anything at all, and say a radio signal comes in that does finally meet the criteria and we find good evidence of aliens, then this solution to the paradox evaporates instantly. One aspect of this is what is known as the Hart-Tippler conjecture, and in a nutshell it’s the notion that we see no evidence of interstellar probes, therefore there must not be anyone out there. The obvious flaw there, is that maybe we don’t know how to find alien von Neumann probes, or no one sent one here. But broadly this is interesting because it’s one of the reasons that Fermi blurted out the paradox in the first place, he said at a lunch at Los Alamos during a discussion of alien life potentials, where are they? The reality is that it should be obvious in some way, from a certain point of view, that aliens are out there, and indeed it should in that point of view be expected that we would see alien probes in the solar system. Such a thing is not as far of a stretch as some have made it out to be in the discussion regarding 3i/ATLAS, rather that object wasn’t the “You know it when you see it” moment

### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKD_cHal1Bo&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00)

such a scenario won’t go the way the 3i/ATLAS affair did. Everyone will know. Another aspect of this is the rare earth hypothesis which states that somehow the conditions of earth are simply rare and do not happen enough for intelligent life to be common, and even the notion that life on earth may be unique. Again, I have problems with this thinking, and they are two fold. So Earth might be rare, but with the sheer numbers of exoplanets that exist in this galaxy alone, at some point earth would have a twin just in the Milky Way alone, there are conceivably hundreds of billions of chances for that to happen here. It’s also important to remember that at various points in the history of the solar system, this star system didn’t just host one surface habitable planet. It has hosted three. The other two being Mars and Venus. Mars clearly had liquid water and for a time in its history it was actually the superior, safer planet for life than Earth was at the time. And then Venus may have had a liquid water ocean before everything went south. Mars, had it simply been a bit larger, conceivably might still have oceans persisting today. The point is, this star system has seen three for all intents and purposes, Earths. It’s just that the other two weren’t the right distance from the sun, and Mars was too small. That does not bode well for rare earth. The second is statistical essentially. This universe really hates general uniqueness. If you see one asteroid, just that you happen to have seen it means that there are probably asteroids all over the place, and that has been proven to be the case since the discovery of asteroids. It’s the same with almost everything else, you see one red giant star, you will see others, to the point that a standard procedure in science is if you see one instance of something, go look for other instances and see how common it is, and almost always other examples are found. Well that works for intelligent alien civilizations. We self-prove the concept, we’re here, we’re someone else’s alien civilization and it’s very clear that the universe allows intelligent life and technology. Chances are, there are other examples, but that does not mean they have to be close enough for us to detect. It could be that intelligent life is very, rare and there are reasons to suspect that from the history of Earth. We are, so far as we know, in this planet’s 4. 5 billion year history, the only technological civilization to have ever existed here. And while it can’t be proven that is the case, earth is very dynamic and destroys evidence, this being known as the Silurian hypothesis, but that civilization could not have been doing too much because we simply do not see certain perhaps telltale things, such as we still have all the oil being a big one. No one ever depleted those reserves, nor do we see certain long lived isotopes of artificial nature like we produce and put into the environment, and so on. But those are just my thoughts, and the rare earth hypothesis does factor into the first born hypothesis by giving it some kind of plausible mechanism, but once again, rare earth requires proving a negative thus it cannot ever be tested beyond looking at our own galaxy to see if earth’s are rare, which is a process that has only barely just begun, that will need centuries more study to establish if it is the case, and even then it will only ever speak for the Milky Way, not other galaxies. Maybe this galaxy was deficient in ways that most other galaxies are not when forming earths, but I do not know what that would be. But what I do have is a spooky alternative to the first born hypothesis. You could call it the first survivor hypothesis as a general term, but many of you will recognize this concept. In short, we are here because we just so happened to come along at a time when the galaxy had been relatively recently cleansed of all intelligent technological civilizations. Perhaps the most famous factor here is Fred Saberhagen’s berserkers, probes that destroy all life and everything and clear a galaxy of civilizations. In which case, if the berserkers are still out there dormant or whatever, we haven’t gotten their attention yet. This is spooky because we could in principle be living in a galaxy that resets itself, and presents the illusion that intelligent life is rare, but across time, it wasn’t. This means that a large swath of Fermi Paradox solutions are false, from rare earth, to first born, to all the hard steps to intelligent life, and many more. The battlefield will be quiet indeed, when all the combatants are dead.

### [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKD_cHal1Bo&t=600s) Segment 3 (10:00 - 13:00)

Incidentally, those civilizations need not be dead, they may still be out there either in a state of exhaustion where they used all their resources for the galactic war, or they are in a state of reset and the war sent them back to their stone age. All an attack probe needs to do to reduce earth to that is simply EMP the planet from orbit over and we’re living in the post technology apocalypse, at least for a while and the probe can go move on, or go dormant until we rise again and it has to knock us back down. We’ve only been doing this technology thing for a short time, and we do not know the galactic rules on it. Now invariably, many of you will be saying “Hey JMG, We’ve heard the galactic reset scenario before” and yes, this is the premise of Mass Effect. Here as a fun aside, the Mass Effect Trilogy remains my favorite game of all time, and that’s saying a lot since I started gaming playing Pong on an Atari and going to arcades in the early 1980’s, graduating to gaming on a Commodore 64. The realism, and general eye towards plausible science and speculative science, while imperfect, made Mass Effect a really good series and also the fact that their worldbuilding was top notch. That said, the galactic reset has appeared in other contexts in science fiction for decades, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy; which that world building he did started in the 1940’s. But these ideas when applied to the real world Milky Way are interesting. It can be imagined that before humanity ever existed, the galaxy may have once teemed with alien civilizations and technosignatures spanning the entirety of the Milky Way all to go entirely quiet. Perhaps someone relatively nearby watched the spreading silence, say a species in the Andromeda galaxy, perhaps in horror as this unfolded before their very instruments and their Fermi Paradox was solved by looking at the terror Galaxy next door. Perhaps they are watching it now from their vantage point 2. 5 million light years away, helpless to do anything to help their neighbors. And now, we live in the subsequent perplexing great silence. Maybe some day, the Andromedans will tell us about it, but at the same time, we’ve never seen any signs of life in Andromeda either. Thanks for listening! I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently teasing the new book, yes, 2026 is slated to see the release of my latest science fiction book, more details on that around summer, but I will give you a hint, spooky science fiction this time and it remedies the fact that neither of my previous novels dealt directly with a true alien civilization on another planet, and in the meantime be sure to check out my other books at your favorite online book retailer and subscribe to my channels for regular, in-depth explorations into the interesting, weird and unknown aspects of this amazing universe in which we live.

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/42263*