The First Rule is: Do Not Talk About the Fermi Paradox

On its face, the Fermi Paradox seems simple. It states the following discrepancy: we don’t see ET life anywhere, despite the apparent high probability of it being abundant enough for us to have done so. Some prefer to merely ask the question, “Where is everybody?”

The chain of reasoning underpinning the Fermi Paradox is also relatively simple (it’s for this reason that I prefer not to think of it as a paradox at all but, rather, a very difficult problem, or discrepancy). It runs something like the following:

1) There are billions of sun-like stars in our own galaxy, the Milky Way

2) Many of these stars will very likely have Earth-like planets within their ‘Goldilocks Zone’ of habitability.

3) Many such stars (and their Earth-like planets) are far older than our sun and therefore may have developed intelligent life a long time ago.

4) Given (3) some of these intelligences may have developed interstellar travel.

5) Even with the potentially limited interstellar technology we can imagine, our galaxy could in principle be traversed in millions of years (or, at least, their probes could).

6) We have no evidence this has occurred.

How does this apply to what’s recently happened at the United States Congress with regards to the UAP (Unidentified Ariel Phenomena) issue? Let’s take a look at the stakes here.

When talking about this issue in public, the most common error I’ve encountered is that the whistle-blowers are testifying to Congress in order to establish the existence of ET civilisations/interstellar non-human intelligence. This is inaccurate.

The specific project of these hearings is not to determine the origin of unidentified sightings. It’s to sort out where to go next if we're going to take the sworn testimonies of these three credentialed whistle-blowers seriously.

Those testimonies include evidence which has been submitted to the Inspector General regarding the existence of so-called black budget/stove-piped programs dealing with sequestered materials in their possession which have already been allegedly determined by those covert programs to not have originated a) terrestrially nor b) by any prosaic explanation.

The appeal from these whistle-blowers is that Congress evaluate these dossiers and set up oversight systems in response.

Well, some respondents to the sworn testimonies of Commander David Fravor, Ryan Graves and particularly of former intelligence official David Grusch, have made two complaints.

First that, whilst the three whistleblowing officials have testified extraordinary claims, they have scuttled behind the barriers of their security clearances to opt-out of publicly substantiating these. Secondly, even if we accept their claims as true, the explanation for them is very likely more prosaic than their sensational hints given the Fermi Paradox.

Indeed, Founder of Skeptic Magazine, Michael Shermer, tweeted a fairly standard response to the Fermi Paradox in the direction of Brian Cox. That is, the odds an Earth-like exoplanet yielding interstellar-capable intelligences is astronomically low.

Perhaps, in order to legitimise himself in front of a theoretical physicist, he mentioned that he’d plugged a few approximations of variables into the Drake Equation to calculate these odds – a needless ornament to the tweet, but the thrust of the response remains the same: he feels the solution to FP is just to say the odds of a civilisation achieving technological capability to travel interstellar is too low for the problem to get moving. It’s a respectable, orthodox position, and a good response to most attempts to explain UAP sightings in terms of ETs.

Though, in this specific case, in my view, the orthodox response does not meet the heterodoxy of the Congressional case. In order to meet that case, please indulge me in a heterodox response for a moment.

It seems to me that the Fermi Paradox’s possible solutions are delimited by its background assumptions. That’s to say, the Fermi Paradox assumes that we live in a universe which can be wholly captured by some unification of Einsteinian and Quantum-Mechanical models. On this view, at the macro level (the level at which antigravitic ET craft produced by interstellar civilisations would presumably operate) the laws of General Relativity govern. I.e. light is the speed barrier constraining the plausibility of ET traversing the relative distance from ‘there-to-here’.

The challenge for the respondent to the FP on this view is to build an account for the absence of ET from these background Einsteinian assumptions.

However, if it turns out that we already have data confirming beyond-reasonable-doubt – as the sworn whistle-blower testimony to Congress claims that we do – then we have two broad options to choose from:

i) We do live in a completely Einsteinian-Quantum Mechanical universe and those ETs really did take a very long time to get here.

ii) A successor theory to the Einsteinian-Quantum Mechanical universe explains more of the story.

Invoking the need to respond to the Fermi Paradox as an objection to the testimony recently tabled to Congress seems inappropriate on at least two levels and both are downstream of answers to the question, “Is their testimony veracious?”.

Either Grusch et al are mistaken or they aren’t. If they aren’t mistaken and ETs are here, then those calling on the need to answer the Fermi Paradox to respond to Congressional proceedings aren’t exploring the theoretical turf around the issues they’re presenting with their priors amended to the specific data we (hypothetically) possess. If the whistle-blowers are mistaken and ETs are not here, then the whistle-blower data are not ET, and we're left with the standard Fermi Paradox.

Given that the second possibility is not really any of our concern here, let’s momentarily assume two things. A) The Congressional whistle-blowers are not mistaken and B) the data whistle-blowers are pointing to leads to the smoking gun.

In this case, the challenge of our response to the Fermi Paradox is not to account for the absence of data from the bottom-up; it’s to account for the presence of ET given how unlikely we currently assume it must have been for them to get here given our Einsteinian-QM view.

One way to do this is to amend our priors to accommodate the data we know we have, allowing us down the following chain of reasoning:

- We don’t live in a universe entirely captured by Einsteinian-QM modelling but in the universe of a successor theory which retains Einsteinian-Quantum Mechanics as nested within it.

- At least one ET/Interstellar Non-Human Intelligence knows about that and can engineer on that basis.

- We (as in humanity, though currently not all of us) have been seeing ET and they explain some fraction of UAP sightings: particularly the ones that seem to defy prosaic explanation recently rolled out by military and governmental sources.

- The technologies these ET/Interstellar NHIs have engineered explain at least some of the data being tabled in the current hearings which, according to the whistle-blowers under oath have, until very recently, been sequestered in the ways they have outlined to Congress.

Following the branch of the decision-tree down which we should take the whistle-blower testimony seriously, I would argue that something like the above offers a parsimonious account explaining the claims they are making. It's certainly more parsimonious to suppose they've made these claims to Congress because they believe them to be true rather than to postulate nested conspiracies: i.e the Government have nefarious motives and have created this meta-situation with fake white-hat whistle-blowers stage fake disclosures about shadowy departments within their own halls to really shake up the general populous.

Given that something like the above way of approaching Fermi-like problems looks like a reasonable way to accommodate the data we’d need to respect if we take the whistle-blower claims seriously, skeptics might conclude that the only way to avoid preposterous conclusions is simply to deny the veracity of the evidence they are providing. This appears to be the strategy of much of the public-facing scientific community currently. I.e. Grusch et al must be deceived, mistaken or lying.

Though, even taking that route circumvents the orthodox response to the Fermi problem as it either has to sit in the heterodox background assumptions, or else deny them along with the veracity of the evidence. In either case, invoking responses to the Fermi Problem does no theoretical work for you in relation to this very specific case. To do so is to, at best, utterly divorce oneself from its context. At worst, it's to completely swerve around the target of what's at stake here.