“We are either alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” -Arthur C. Clarke
For this reason, and to return to the original hypothetical, the discovery of simple, multicellular life on Mars or a nearby planet would show that life isn’t some universal jackpot, but rather something as common and mundane as water—common enough to happen independently on not just one, but two planets in our solar system. We would immediately know the great filter was something beyond multicellular life, something we have yet to encounter. It would foretell our collective fate. But it is not so easy to imagine how exactly our society could come crashing down. Hundreds of years of social development and “enlightenment” fool us into thinking history is a strictly linear advancement from nature to civilization, barbarism to sophistication. And yet the Romans, the Soviets, Germans, Byzantines have all seen their once established and advanced nations fall into ruin. Human civilization has highs and lows, rise and falls - could we face a fall that prevents us from continuing our trajectory towards the stars? What event could halt the seemingly unstoppable march of history, not just for a decade or century, but forever? The lessons of the 20th century might cause one to immediately think of nuclear weapons. At the height of the Cold War, mankind possessed over 64,000 nuclear warheads12, each enough to vaporize a city. Many were on permanent standby, ready to launch nuclear fire at predetermined cities with a single phone call. Government research into potential casualties estimates that even a relatively miniscule launch of 100 warheads at major U.S. cities would cause 50 million casualties.13 Studies by the Internal Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War determined that even a minor nuclear exchange between powers like India and Pakistan would cause global climate disturbances that could threaten food supply for two billion people14, over a quarter of humanity. Maybe an understanding of the power of the atom is inherently too dangerous for life to possess, maybe scientific advancement inevitably leads every species to its own destruction. But the range of possible extinction events spans far beyond simple nuclear exchange. Nick Bostrom, a philosopher who studies these existential risks, identifies a multitude of outcomes: everything from drastic climate change, asteroid impacts, wars fought with future weapons beyond our comprehension,
or rogue artificial intelligence.15 Other theories suggest the competitive nature of evolution drives any species to become inherently predatory and violent, and thus unable to peacefully coexist in the cosmos. The corollary of this is that planet-bound civilizations like ourselves realize the possibility that space is filled with aggressive, hyper-advanced creatures, and then isolate themselves from what they perceive as a possibly dangerous universe, leaving no obvious evidence of their existence. Ultimately, this is all a game of speculation. There could be unaccounted variables that explain Fermi’s infamous question in full, perhaps something we have yet to discover about biology, chemistry, or physics. But as long as our sample size only consists of one species, we have nothing to rely on but our educated guesses. ! Footnotes 1 http://www.economist.com/node/10918055 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poker_probability 3 Grewell, Greg (2001). “Colonizing the Universe: Science Fictions Then, Now, and in the (Imagined) Future”. Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature. 55 (2): 25–47. 4 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics, Fermions 5 http://www.pnas.org/content/110/48/19273 6 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/water-lust-whyall-the-ex/ 7 https://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/earlyearth/ questions/formation_oceans.html 8 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature21377 9 https://www.livescience.com/3996-humans-chimps-split. html 10 http://www.sharksavers.org/en/education/biology/450million-years-of-sharks1/ 11 https://www.webcitation.org/5n7VYJBUd?url=http:// hanson.gmu.edu/greatfilter.html 12 https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-weapons 13 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK219165/ 14 http://www.ippnw.org/pdf/nuclear-famine-two-billion-atrisk-2013.pdf 15 https://www.technologyreview.com/s/409936/where-arethey/
Spring 2018
15