Where is Everybody? Lao Tzu’s Response to Fermi’s Paradox

When you take a tropical child to visit the northern latitudes where the tilt of the Earth is such that night inexplicably comes at 4 p.m., finding a bit of snow is an obligatory part of the trip agenda. For my youngest child, our aspirations of bundling her up like Ralphie’s little brother in A Christmas Story and laughing at her first interactions with that fluffy white stuff that burns in a funny, cold sort of way had been unsuccessful during her first two winter visits to the United States. On our third midwinter visit, we figured elevation was the key to outsmarting climate change or bad luck, and we found a cheap Airbnb trailer in the hills of West Virginia at the base of a popular ski resort. Lo and behold, we got our snow. Our Central American wardrobe, however, was ill-suited to the occasion, and after the initial elation, the obligatory snowman, and some failed attempts at sledding with a cardboard box, we were trying to figure out how to spend the rest of the day without freezing our children to death.

So we took a drive through the hills of West Virginia. The barracks of an old coal mining town had been turned into a summer tourist trap. The ski resort looked like what we imagined it would look like. It was just as expensive as we imagined as well. And then, fitting the uncanny solitude of the West Virginia wilderness, a massive radio telescope the size of a 40-story skyscraper emerged on the horizon. The Green Bank Observatory, in search of the increasingly rare spaces devoid of cellphone and Wi-Fi signal interruption, was built in the 1990s and is still the world´s largest steerable radio telescope.

I was a bit wary of turning into the driveway as I had once been escorted by armed military personnel off of Andrews Air Force base while trying to follow GPS directions to the nearest Panda Express. The sheer size of the towering telescope made one wonder what other surprises might be lurking around the grounds. But one of the pleasures of travel is coming across unexpected little museums, especially when they pop up in the middle of nowhere.

The Green Bank Science Center not only offered a good way to spend the afternoon in a warmed space (the novelty of snow had long since soured on child number 3), but it was also a fascinating opportunity to learn about the very earnest search for extraterrestrial life. Here, in the hidden hollers of the West Virginian mountains, the U.S. government and the National Science Foundation have spent twenty-five years observing the universe at radio wavelengths, mapping interstellar gas, star formations, pulsars, black holes, and also listening carefully for any potential whispers of extraterrestrial intelligence seeping through the empty void of space. For the time being, the universe has only responded with silence.

The little museum, sitting in the shadow of that massive ear pointed towards the heavens, had an entire exhibit explaining this hushed response emerging from the vacuum of space.

The Fermi Paradox

The story goes that Enrico Fermi, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist, was visiting Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. During a conversation with some fellow scientists and physicists about the likelihood of extraterrestrial life, the feasibility of faster-than-light travel, and the best possible designs of flying saucers (they were in New Mexico, after all), Fermi blurted out his famous question:

Well, where is everybody then?

Because there are billions of stars in the Milky Way that are similar to the sun, many of them most likely have planets circulating in the known habitable zone of planetary orbits. Many of these stars are significantly older than the sun, in some cases by billions of years. Given the statistical probability of so many possible life-sustaining planets in our galaxy, it seems probable (and some would argue even statistically likely) that intelligent life would have developed on many of these planets.

Homo sapiens have only been around for approximately 300,000 years, and even in this relatively short time span, we have already set foot on the moon and sent out probes that have traveled 15 billion miles into interstellar space. Given the longer timeframes available to extraterrestrial intelligence to progress along the path of civilizational and technological development, Fermi and others assumed that interstellar travel should have been developed. Even without faster-than-light travel, the entire Milky Way galaxy could have been traversed in just a few million years. Thus, the argument goes, Earth should have been visited at the very least by the probes of other extraterrestrial civilizations that have had a much longer time to develop technologies that allowed for interstellar exploration.

Yet all is quiet on the cosmic front. Thus, where is everybody?

Responses to the Fermi Paradox

I am generally not one given to conspiracy theory rabbit holes, but since that visit to the Green Bank Observatory, every news article mentioning UFOs or UAPs gets a morning click and a pretty earnest read. And there has been plenty of fodder for thought in recent years. From Congressional hearings with supposed whistleblowers saying the US government is hiding extraterrestrial “biologics,” to armed forces’ footage of shiny little ovals that seemingly defy the laws of physics, perhaps the visitors that Fermi was expecting are just a little bit shy about making their grand entrance. After taking a couple million years to traverse the Milky Way, they probably figure they have the time.

But alas, most good conspiracy theory fodder ends up being clarified by rather mundane explanations. Drones, tricks of light on the eye, a whistleblower who wants to build his reputation as a good podcast guest by disclosing secrets that are great clickbait: we usually end up back at Fermi’s question.

Why exactly haven’t we been visited by extraterrestrial life? Speculation on this question has been taken up by philosophers, astrophysicists, and amateur UFO conspiracy theorists. By some counts, there are over fifty proposed answers or responses to Fermi’s question regarding the silence of extraterrestrial life. From my reading, most of these answers seem to be not only a clarification on why the aliens haven’t made it to us, but also subtle and perhaps subconscious predictions of why we will not ever make it to them.

Several of the responses to Fermi’s paradox focus on the alleged inability for intelligent civilizations to pass through the bottleneck of technological development that would allow for interstellar travel to be possible. In some theories, intelligent extraterrestrial life succumbs to collapse scenarios as their civilizations push against planetary boundaries in their pursuit of technological advancement. Similar theories along this line of thought propose that there simply might not be enough available energy and resources on any given home planet to construct the necessary infrastructure to allow for interstellar travel. In short, the dreams of extraterrestrial Elon Musks and Jeff Bezoses are thwarted by either too little stuff or too much destruction of what stuff there is. For these alien civilizations, the promise of an unlimited, non-polluting energy source (nuclear fusion, for example) never quite made it in time.

Other scenarios imagine the role of artificial intelligence in foiling interstellar fantasies. In some cases, the AI which came to dominate the decision-making apparatus of a given extraterrestrial society (if not supplanting the biological aliens altogether) simply had no interest in traversing the universe. In other imagined scenarios, the rapid advancement of digital hyper-worlds, virtual realities, and simulated metaverses became so addictive and engrossing that the extraterrestrial society became less interested in the world around them, let alone the stars above them. Perhaps this theory motivated our human Musk and Bezos to collude in the destruction of Zuckerberg’s Metaverse dreams.

My personal favorite response to Fermi’s paradox is known as the “oxygen bottleneck.” For the past 300 million years, the Earth’s atmosphere has stabilized at around 21% oxygen. This allowed for the emergence of complex life and ecosystems. It is also conveniently ideal for fire making and combustion. If the percentage of oxygen were just a bit lower (say, below 17%), fire and combustion would not be possible, or would only allow for very low-intensity fires. The oxygen bottleneck hypothesis believes that if extraterrestrial civilizations had just a bit less oxygen in their atmosphere (as did Earth’s through most of its history), metal smelting and most forms of electricity generation would not have been physically possible. The fantasy of launching a rocket into space would have been confined forever to ET science fiction.

This hypothesis would make for some intriguing extraterrestrial mythology. After alien Prometheus stole fire from the heavens, the gods saw no reason to create liver-eating eagles or to send mysterious boxes of evils into the world. Rather, they just dialed down the degree of oxygen in the world beneath their feet to temper the pretensions of power and the possible heights of alien hubris. I can imagine the laughter of the gods as the aliens rejoiced in their pitiful, smoldering fires while the gods continued to throw thunderbolts in the oxygen-rich heavens above.

The Desire to Stay Put?

Of all the possible answers to Fermi’s big question, it seems to me that there is one conspicuous omission; one that again perhaps reflects back on the state of our own habitation of this blue-green planet circling the habitable zone of a medium-sized yellow dwarf star in the Orion-Cygnus Arm, about 27,000 light-years from the galactic center of the Milky Way.

What if our galactic neighbors have never come for a visit because they simply feel quite at home in their little corner of the universe? What if they chose to stay where they were, not because of inherent limitations in energy, ingenuity, or resource availability, but because they understood the preciousness of their place?

In the penultimate verse of the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu offers a prospective response to Fermi’s Paradox. Long before space travel could be considered a tangible possibility, Lao Tzu dared to imagine a people who find meaning and fullness in the world given to them and not in the constant search for the next frontier to conquer, the next country to colonize, the next galaxy to inhabit. Though Lao Tzu was offering this remedial vision for rooted, placed communities as a response to the earthly predicaments we face, a few tweaks to some of the nouns (in parentheses below) offer a distinctive reply to Fermi’s Paradox, one so evidently disregarded by our myopic gaze into the heavens:

Though there are highly efficient mechanical contrivances (unlimited nuclear fusion energy and faster-than-light travel), the people have no use for them. Let them mind death and refrain from migrating to distant places (distant planets). Boats and carriages, weapons and armor (interstellar spaceships and anti-matter engines) there may still be, but there are no occasions for using or displaying them. . . . Though there may be another country (habitable planet in the galaxy) so close that they are within sight of each other and the crowing of cocks and the barking of dogs in one place can be heard in the other, yet there is no (interstellar) traffic between them, and throughout their lives the two peoples have nothing to do with each other (but stare in awe at each other’s light as it traverses the space between them).

This ethos of “staying put” is not a resignation or a begrudging acknowledgement of insurmountable barriers to conquering the Universe. It is not the result of heavy-handed authoritarian governance enforcing a submission to place. Rather, as Lao Tzu says, it arises because the people are “contented with their food, pleased with their clothing, satisfied with their houses, and inured to their simple ways of living.” In this galactic revision of the verse, we might say that the people are gratified with the ground given to their care. Though the tools and technologies are available—though they could be put to use in escaping their given place—there is a greater pleasure in the world as it exists and as we exist in it.

Conclusion

On the last stop of that West Virginia winter road trip, we came across a small horse farm tucked into an open valley between the rolling hilltops of gray, leafless trees. Through the dusting of snow that remained, green blades of spring grass glowed in the warm afternoon sunlight. The horses were stocky and properly covered with a warm rug. They smelled of fresh hay and slowly decomposing manure. Their approachable demeanor disclosed the trust between man and beast born of mutual respect.

This wasn’t a hobby farm of a wealthy family that wanted a few large pets to show off to friends who came for a weekend getaway at the nearby ski resort. My farmer eyes noticed the taut lines of rusted barbed wire that had been restrung instead of replaced. Many of the decades-old black locust fence posts had rotted through at ground level, but were suspended in the air by the new posts of an emerging hedge of mulberry, elderberry, and locust saplings.

The paddocks were carefully portioned off with an eye to detail and to beauty. The barn sat in the high corner of the valley meadow where the knowing eyes of a good farmer might see which grass was ready to be grazed on any given day. Though the worst of winter was past, covered hay bales lined one side of the barn in testament to careful provision. This place was cared for in such a way that its care was its own reward. The beauty it radiated, the peace it imparted, the good, daily work it asked for: all of these were the reason for its present state.

The maintenance and preservation of a good thing might seem more pedestrian than the exhilarating velocity of interstellar voyages. Yet because of the stillness of that well-loved and cared-for horse farm, I could see the first light of a star emerging from the purple haze of dusk and desire only to appreciate its glimmering light with my feet firmly planted in the snow-dusted soil. Beyond the silence of the Universe, perhaps there are billions of other alien eyes looking at the twinkling light of our star with that same sense of contented belonging.

Image Credit: NASA