The Fermi Paradox, first proposed by Italian physicist Enrico Fermi (1901–1954) in 1950, is a simple question: In a vast and ancient universe, where are all the extraterrestrials?

Many possible explanations have been offered, including that they are hiding, extinct, or just not interested.

And now, theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder tells us that “The Fermi Paradox Just Got Much Worse.”

She points to a new paper at ArXiv by economist Sergey Ivliev:

His contention is that any advanced civilization would long since have solved the space travel issues and “successful expansion would be machine-mediated, distributed, low-noise, and partly biological rather than Kardashev-like or imperial.” So we should, in his view, be looking for well-disguised probes rather than little green men.

From the transcript:

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Hossenfelder: [3:57 min] He considers a 10 kilogram seed probe traveling at 0.01 times the speed of light. At that speed, it crosses 100 light years in about 10,000 years and the galactic disc in about 10 million years. That’s less than 1/10 of 1% of the age of the galaxy.

This means that any civilization which has developed such technology should have spread their probes throughout the galaxy by now. Okay. But wait, this means there is another plausible explanation now for why we haven’t heard of those extraterrestrials. We’ve simply looked for the wrong thing. So far, almost all searches for technosignatures have been to look for electromagnetic signals in one way or another, because the aliens would directly send signals or because they built structures around their star to extract energy and thereby dim it or similar.

Maybe we should instead make more effort to look for alien probes in the solar system. Maybe some of those supposed asteroids are not asteroids. Maybe some of those supposed meteorites are not meteorites. Maybe some unidentified anomalous phenomena are not camera glitches.

I think these are possibilities that we should take more seriously.

That said, I give this paper a 10 out of 10 on the [ __ ] meter. Not because it’s bad or wrong, but because I think this isn’t actually a scientific paper. It’s more of a cultural speculation. But it’s still interesting and I think it’s another sign for how much the conversation about extraterrestrials has changed in the past decade.

Enjoy!