Where Is Everybody? The universe has a public-relations problem!

If you watch a lot of cosmos videos on YouTube like I do, you undoubtedly know that the universe has a public-relations problem. It advertises itself as unimaginably large and unfathomably old, but when it comes to intelligent life, it appears to have produced only one confirmed customer: the earthly human being.

This is the essence of the Fermi paradox, named after physicist Enrico Fermi. During a lunchtime conversation in 1950 about extraterrestrial life, Fermi famously asked the simple question: “Where is everybody?”

The logic behind his question is difficult to dismiss. The Milky Way contains hundreds of billions of stars, many of them billions of years older than our sun. We now know that planets are common outside of our solar system, and that the law of averages justifies the assumption that some of these exoplanets have conditions favorable to life.

Further, if intelligent civilizations arise with even modest frequency, at least a few of them should have developed advanced technology millions, or perhaps billions, of years before human beings appeared on earth. Also, given enough time, it would seem that such civilizations would have spread across the galaxy.

Even traveling at speeds far less than the speed of light, they could colonize or explore the Milky Way in a relatively short period of time by cosmic standards. But, if so, why don’t we see any manifestations of their existence? Where are they hiding?

Perhaps the answer is simply that intelligent life is extraordinarily rare. Or maybe simple organisms are common, but the jump from microbes to conscious beings capable of asking questions is so improbable that it has happened only once in the entire history of our galaxy.

Another possibility is that civilizations routinely destroy themselves soon after acquiring advanced technology. Nuclear weapons, engineered diseases, artificial intelligence, environmental collapse, and good old-fashioned human stupidity offer numerous ways for intelligent beings to commit suicide.

Or perhaps advanced civilizations deliberately remain silent. They may consider immature civilizations like ours dangerous, uninteresting, or both. Human beings like to imagine that extraterrestrials would be eager to meet us, but this assumes they would find a species that specializes in politics, war, and reality television irresistible.

Then there is the possibility that we are being observed without knowing it—the so-called zoo hypothesis. Under this scenario, earth is a kind of cosmic wildlife preserve: advanced beings watch us but avoid interference, much as researchers observe animals in their natural habitat but don’t interact with them.

Or perhaps the simplest possibility of all: No one else is out there! And if that’s true, the implications are staggering. It would mean that in a universe containing perhaps trillions of galaxies, consciousness may exist only on an ordinary planet circling an ordinary star. Earth would be the only place where matter awakened, became sentient, then looked around and asked, “Why am I here?”

On the other hand, if life is everywhere, one might argue that the universe is naturally fertile and requires no divine explanation. But that still raises the question: Why does the universe possess laws that allow matter to organize itself into stars, planets, living cells, consciousness, and self-reflection?

Of course, if human beings are alone, a religionist might view our uniqueness as evidence of purpose, i.e., that consciousness is not a cosmic accident but the reason the universe exists in the first place.

Regardless, caution is recommended, because people have a habit of using gaps in their knowledge as hiding places for God. Whenever science fills one gap, God is pushed into another. That, however, is a weak foundation for belief, because it makes God dependent upon human ignorance, and if God is omnipotent, he doesn’t need such help.

The stronger argument is that science, by its very nature, describes how reality behaves after reality already exists. It can explain how galaxies form, how atoms interact, and how species evolve, but it cannot answer why the universe exists in the first place.

Which leads to the most fundamental question of all: Why is there something rather than nothing? Nothing would seem to be the easier arrangement. Nothing requires no matter, no energy, no space, no time, no laws of physics, no explanation. Yet, here we are.

Some physicists propose that the universe emerged from a quantum vacuum, but a quantum vacuum is not nothing. It is a physical state governed by physical laws. The question then becomes: Why does the quantum vacuum exist in the first place? Why does the universe even have physical laws?

Many astrophysicists, as well as amateur stargazers like myself, believe that our universe is one of countless universes in a “multiverse.” However, even an infinite number of universes does not answer the question of why anything at all exists. Rather, it simply multiplies the number of things requiring an explanation.

To the religionist, God may be defined as the necessary, eternal foundation of existence itself. Whether one finds that explanation convincing depends upon whether the idea of an eternal mind seems more reasonable than an eternal universe.

The truth be known, both the militant atheist and the staunch religionist have a tendency to claim more knowledge than either of them possesses. We do not know whether the universe is crowded with intelligence, whether consciousness has a cosmic purpose, or why existence exists, but our lack of knowledge is not meaningless, because our ability to even ponder these mysteries may be the most remarkable fact of all.

What we know for sure is that somewhere in this seemingly infinite universe, matter became conscious enough to contemplate infinity, search for its creator, and wonder why there is anything at all to contemplate. But the question we cannot presently answer is: What caused all of this to happen?

Whatever the answer, the Fermi paradox is alive and well, because the question remains: “Where is everybody?” And, trust me, the answer is not to be found in Area 51.