Where is Everybody?

Imagine living in a neighborhood, a really cramped neighborhood. You don’t have any friends and are bored of the people you are living with. But hey, your neighborhood is cramped, so maybe there’s someone out there. So, you look outside your window, but all you see are windows of houses taller than yours and roofs of houses shorter than yours. You want to meet new people, but haven’t seen even a shadow in any of the windows.
As time passes by, you grow more and more desperate and begin to write notes that read like the spam popups on certain websites, “Hi! How are you? I live here. Wanna come over?” But you get no response. You pick up small objects from your house and begin to throw them randomly at windows and walls, hoping to see a face, any face, even an angry one. But, nope, nothing. Zilch. “Where is everybody?”
And one day, as you stand under the shower, watching the water run down the grilled mouth of the drain, it hits you. “Maybe there is nobody out there! Maybe I am all alone.” It’s a scary thought. In all the expanse of this cramped neighborhood, you are alone. Absolutely alone. There’s no one else. Nobody to reply with a “Hello” if you mutter, or even yell a “Hi”. You stop the shower. But you’re still sweating.
You open that window of yours and put your towel out to dry. As your sweat cools, you begin to think. “How could there be no one out there? What happened to all the people who lived in these houses? Or did no one live here ever since they were built? Are those houses so bad? My house is good. In fact, it’s perfect. I get just the right amount of sunlight. It’s never too hot or too cold here, and everything is close by. In fact, this neighborhood is a realtor’s dream. I have lived here for such a long time, but I’ve not seen a single soul in any of the other houses. What is the problem?”
Your logical mind lets you arrive at a series of theories, all of which sound convincing. First of which, of course is the most obvious. There’s nobody out there. You. Just you. All alone. In the entire neighborhood.
That sounds too heady and too scary at the same time. But we know that there are all these houses in the neighborhood. How can they ALL be empty? Something else must have happened or must be happening. What is it?
The next theory is that the other houses have people. Of course. But the people are too young or too short to rise to the level of the windows and communicate with you. So, even if they have seen your messages, and are trying to respond, they are not able to respond to it in a manner that you can see and understand.
The biggest roadblock to this theory is that the other houses are as old as and in some cases, much older than your house. So, the people there must be at least as advanced in growth as you, if not more.
So, we come to the next theory. There were people in the other houses, they did grow, but they died before they grew tall enough. Something must be wrong in their houses that shortened their lifetimes. Some strange disease that spreads within the walls of the houses and kills all the residents. Some strange malaise that is triggered with time by the houses themselves, and therefore is contained to the houses. But this has happened individually in all the houses. A kind of a great cloak that smothers clans in their houses, separating the ephemeral ones from the relatively eternal ones. Is that a…great… filter?
At this stage, you’re scared again. Because, the thought of the great filter has sweated out all curiosity of the others from your mind. You are now extremely worried. If it is a great filter, and if it has ended lives in all the houses in the neighborhood, and if you are the only one left, how long do you have left?
Here we end the extended analogy I drew in order to simplify the Fermi paradox. The paradox is that we have high estimates of the probability of the existence of extra-terrestrial civilization, but we do not have any contact with, or evidence of such civilizations. Like living in a crowded neighborhood and yet, not actually seeing any neighbors.
So, let’s continue with the assumption that we are special, hell, not special, we’re unique in the true sense of the word. There’s only one tiny planet in an unremarkable solar system that has got complex life, ours. So, how did this happen? What happened to the Great Filter? Well, there are a few possibilities.
We already crossed the Great Filter
1. This possibility is based on the premise that the Great Filter is mostly in the beginning. Life on earth is an outcome of a complex set of factors that had to be present and function at just the right level for life to start. The click, that lightning strike, the second at which the primordial carbon chose to “breathe”, we have tried to recreate it in labs and failed. This implies that the probability of life on a planet is so close to zero that we are the only ones out there.
2. The Great Filter is in the beginning, but not so early. Life started in a lot of planets, as it did on earth, as simple prokaryotes. But these simple prokaryotes either never found the right conditions or the need to transition into complex eukaryote structures. If this is the case, then the universe is full of life, but most of it is similar to the bacteria we have on earth. There’s no way the bacteria-like lifeforms are going to reply to the signals we have sent from the earth.
While we’re on the Great Filter, some of the other theories are that the evolution of man was the Great Filter. But, no. The Great Filter, by definition, has to be “Great”. You remember the dinosaurs? The earth may have, according to the most accepted theory, been hit by an asteroid 65 million years ago wiping out the largest creatures ever to walk on land. But life survived and continued. So, that’s not necessarily a Great Filter and neither is human evolution.
So, according to this possibility, we have already crossed the Great Filter when life started on Earth, or when it became Eukaryotic. The only way now is up, to become as great as we can be.
The Great Filter is not Happening:
This possibility is based on the premise that, like humans, the universe itself has gotten “civilized” and does not go about ending civilizations with gamma ray bursts on planets. We have observed these things happening on distant galaxies (but because of the distance, we know that some of these events happened even before humans evolved, or even before life started on earth). If this were the case, then the universe has decided to keep the current civilizations intact, and among them, we’re perhaps the most advanced. And once again, until the universe decides otherwise, we’re destined to become as great as we can be.
The Great Filter…is coming… or we’re heading towards it
Well, in matters of the universe, not all is…err… sunshine. This possibility suggests that all civilizations evolve to a certain level of advancement, perhaps to where we are, and then something happens, like the cataclysms suggested before. Or (and this seems more possible, looking at where we are now) civilizations reach such a degree of advancement where their rationale gives them the power to capture and destroy planets, but their inherent craziness uses the same power to destroy their own planet. The End.
There’s another side to the Fermi paradox that goes along the lines of “There’s somebody out there. But they don’t want to talk to you”. But, that’s perhaps for another day.
Getting back to why I feel that the Pluto flyby is important for the Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter, as long as we remain a one-planet civilization, we’re vulnerable to the cataclysms such as Gamma ray bursts, or perhaps the transition of the sun into a Red Giant towards the end of its life. Honestly, there is a long time for that to happen, but no harm thinking about it now.
Based on the Kardashev scale and a complex calculation devised by Carl Sagan (again, perhaps for another day), we’re a Type 0.72 civilization. To be truly invulnerable to planet and even solar system-level cataclysms, we need to become a Type 3 civilization and have complete mastery over the resources of our entire galaxy. Closer to reality, we believe we need another 100-200 years to have mastery over the resources of our own planet and we haven’t been able to even imagine how to harness the energy of our host star, the sun.
But fear not, friends.
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
Or before the Great Filter kills you and me.