The Time Element Of Fermi's Paradox

Interstellar travellers would have to check on Earth thousands of times to have a hope of dropping by in our era -- and if they arrived today, they probably wouldn't want to stick around.

If members of a spacefaring civilization were to happen upon the Earth in its current state and ask the first creature they met to be taken to our planet’s leader, the passing albatross to take the query would be unlikely to offer a useful answer.

If the visitors managed to sort out that the humans are the ones hoping for contact, which leader they were taken to once overcoming our primitive complex languages would depend entirely on where they made landfall.

Eventually, they would probably learn that this small, relatively insigificant planet has organised itself into hundreds of self-governed regions that loosely interact, and within those self-governed regions there are layers of smaller semi-self-governed regions that contain even smaller and less independent regions.

On the off-chance that they were to get into the American sphere of influence once they got their earthly bearings, they would learn that the strongest of these self-governed regions is controlled by a strict code of laws with an inalienable document they refer to as a “constitution” at its core. But they would also learn that the humans being so governed have chosen, from among themselves, someone who defies every aspect and principle of those documents to lead them.

Puzzled by such an undeveloped species, they would fly off and look for a saner planet and humanity would mostly never find out about the interaction. The spacefarers would make a footnote to come back in a million years or so and see if this planet’s occupants have matured enough to participate in the intergalactic football league for which they had intended to visit us to deliver an invitation to participate.

The Fermi paradox, which ponders why the probability of intelligent life in the universe is so high yet nobody has made contact with us, can thus be explained by a twist on a well-known Latin phrase: veni, vidi, fugi: I came, I saw, I fled.

The Earth is estimated to be about 4.5 billion years old. The first signs of life are believed to have started occupying the surface of this little rock about 3.7 billion years ago. If we assume that our theoretical spacefarers became aware of life on Earth 2 billion years ago, we could also expect that they have a solid enough understanding of evolution to know not to hang around waiting for progress.

Let’s say that they made note in their records some time around 2,000,000,000 BC that this planet is worth checking on periodically, and they set the interval to a relatively frequent one million Earth years. By a billion years into the advent of life on Earth, the chemical makeup of our atmosphere had advertised the existence of biology on this planet to research equipment in skyward-looking societies across the entirety of the Milky Way galaxy, which led to that first visit in our story 2 billion years ago.

After visiting Earth nearly 1,500 times at one million year intervals, our interstellar friends finally observed large organisms on Earth and were encouraged to keep watching, continuing the once-per-million-year pace. 300 visits later, large reptiles we call dinosaurs started to appear. Some 200 visits after that, those large but not very communicative giants were suddenly gone and there was a large hole in the Earth’s crust suggesting a major impact had taken place over the previous million years, and evolution had changed course on this curious toddler planet on their circuit.

65 visits later, the planet was teeming with ever-changing life as it had been since they started watching. On the next visit a million years later, in the year we call 2025, but the visitors noted was their 2000th check-up on this rock, they had suddenly found an industrialised planet, encountered the society behind it, rolled their eyes, and decided to come back at the next scheduled appointment in a million years to see if we will finally be ready.

At a relatively frequent, in space terms, one visit per million Earth-years, starting more than half way through life’s evolution here, it still took 2000 visits to find humans. With the friendly visit being awkward and cut short, we missed our chance to engage with interstellar society.

All that to say: it is highly unlikely that we are alone in the universe, we likely wouldn’t understand other (inter)planetary societies’ means of communication on our primitive technology, and the time scale necessary for contact to take place at a moment in history that we contemporary humans could be both aware of the interaction and able to act on it would be so small as to be infinitely improbable.

Fermi’s paradox may simply not account for the sheer scale of time.