"Where are they?" This is the question, according to apocryphal tales, that physicist Enrico Fermi asked of his colleagues at Los Alamos as they discussed the likelihood of extraterrestrial life.
If the universe is so large, and if even an infinitesimally low percentage of planets bore the potential for the development of intelligent life, there should be plenty of it in the universe, and thus some form of evidence for it all. So where are the aliens?
Fermi never articulated his question more formally, but it has nonetheless become known as the Fermi Paradox, and many scientists have proposed their own solutions to the problem. Perhaps life really is more rare than we might imagine. Or perhaps the expenditure of energy needed to establish civilization on an interplanetary scale is too great. Or perhaps such civilizations take pains not to advertise their presence lest they attract unwanted attention from would-be conquerors.
In his 1973 book "The Cosmic Connection," Carl Sagan offered as his potential solution to the Fermi Paradox the notion that "very advanced civilizations may not be in the least apparent to a society as backward as we, any more than an ant performing his anty labors by the side of a suburban swimming pool has a profound sense of the presence of a superior technical civilization all around him."
The problem with all of these solutions is that they are focused more upon the nature of the universe than they are the nature of life. The astrobiologist Peter Ward, in his 2009 book "The Medea Hypothesis," argued that life is inherently self-destructive: Living things will exploit the resources before them until those resources run dry or until the waste products of life poison the environment enough to hinder life's further development.
For example, although we are now suffering a surfeit of greenhouse gasses heating our planet, 2.3 billion years ago early photosynthetic microbes had removed so much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as to produce what scientists call "Snowball Earth," in which the ice caps extended all the way to the equator.
The Medea Hypothesis is compelling, but I don't believe we have to go that far to explain the absence of evidence for life in the cosmos. Instead, let us consider this proposition: Life, by its very nature, produces too great an abundance of jackasses to allow for the establishment of interplanetary societies.
As Charles Darwin argued, evolution produces changes in species over time due to the competition for resources. This competition is not just between species, but between the individuals of a particular species.
Take, for example, the punchline of the old joke about the two guys running from the grizzly bear: "I don't need to run faster than the bear, Jack. I just have to run faster than you!"
Or think of all those animal groups in which males compete for the right to mate with a female. Baby chicks compete for attention each time the mother comes back to the nest. In some shark species that give birth live rather than lay eggs, competition between siblings occurs even within the womb, with the victor cannibalizing all the would-be brothers and sisters.
However, although we tend to think of evolution as driven by strength and speed and other such attributes, the phrase "survival of the fittest" really means the survival of survivors, and there are many ways to be a survivor. As the movie "Titanic" shows us, sometimes the way to survive that sinking boat is to be a real jackass. Our sympathies might lie with Leonardo DiCaprio, but Billy Zane's character survived, and almost certainly got to pass on his genes to the next generation of jackasses.
Nature is replete with examples of underhanded behavior. Some male cephalopods will change their coloration to appear female so that they sneakily impregnate the female another male is guarding. If his children survive, then that behavior survives as well.
Nature isn't just red in tooth and claw. Sometimes nature is sneaking down the fire escape on the run from a suspicious husband.
Homo sapiens includes not only classic hunters and gatherers, but also lazy freeloaders and downright psychopaths. When such strategies as begging or stealing or murdering one's fellows can yield sufficient returns to permit survival, then such strategies will proliferate. And, unfortunately, our currently resource-rich society is ripe for the proliferation of jackasses.
Back in the 1990s, I used to receive occasional letters from an outfit called St. Matthew's Church. These would include a "financial prayer form" that I was supposed to fill out and mail back to the church, as well as testimonials by people who had reportedly followed this church's instructions on prayer and been rewarded with blessings of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Arkansas' attorney general Dustin McDaniel warned the public about the operations of this church back in 2012 after his own grandmother received such a solicitation, writing, "Consumers who provided Saint Matthew's with their contact information have complained that after doing so, they were bombarded with solicitations and harassed constantly for donations."
Those requests came through the mail. But with email at their disposal, scammers can harass millions with the low-cost click of a button.
Some jackasses aim even higher.
The front page of the March 2 issue of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette featured the headline, "Hackers jam prescription drug copays." As the article reported, a ransomware gang had struck United Healthcare Group, snarling the prescription process for millions of Americans, "forcing some to choose between paying prices hundreds or thousands of dollars above their usual insurance-adjusted rates or going without lifesaving medicine."
In October 2023, the British Library was hacked by a ransomware gang that demanded 600,000 pounds in bitcoin for the data it had stolen, and the institution still has not recovered. And who can forget the May 2021 cyberattack on Colonial Pipeline? It was the largest (yet) such attack on the country's oil infrastructure, and impaired fuel supplies across multiple states for about a week.
On Oct. 13, 2023, one of the podcasts to which I listen to keep up my Swedish language skills, "P3 Dystopia," released an episode on hackers and the fundamental threat they pose to our global society. Hackers have already "bricked," or rendered completely useless, a number of satellites in orbit, sometimes by ordering the satellite to aim its solar panels right at the sun and thus frying all its instruments, or messing with the thrusters.
But even personal medical devices such as pacemakers are now connected to the Internet so that doctors can more accurately monitor the efficacy of the instrument. Not long after I listened to this episode, a relative received a pacemaker complete with a downloadable app for her telephone. Pacemaker hacking has already become the new arsenic in the coffee trope for many modern mysteries.
Especially with the widespread availability of Artificial Intelligence, the burden of dealing with all the jackasses in human society will grow exponentially, perhaps beyond our ability to handle. No longer will we be able to open our email account without being inundated with a near-infinite amount of spam. No longer will we be able to swipe our debit cards without the persistent worry that hackers will breach the company's security and empty our bank accounts. No longer will we be able to enjoy the connectivity our modern society makes available, because we'll also be connected to all the jackasses out there.
That day is already here, and we can see what some people are doing. In 2018, John Paul Phelan, the Minister of State for Local Government and Electoral Reform for the Republic of Ireland, announced that the nation's brief and limited experiment with electronic voting would not be repeated, as it would be impossible to secure such machines from interference.
Previously, leaks by Edward Snowden about the extent of the NSA's intrusion into the electronic communications of other countries led to typewriters being dusted off in the halls of many a foreign intelligence service, because you cannot hack a typewriter.
The only way to preserve our societies, the only way to survive as a species on this planet, might be to shed our connectivity willingly. As social media shows us each moment of its miserable continued existence, the more connected we are, the more the jackasses among us have the opportunity to wreak havoc and destroy lives. We may eventually conclude that the Internet itself was a mistake, given that the more systems there are connected to each other, the further the reach of bad actors across the world. If we want to survive, we simply must limit the amount of damage jackasses can do.
As long as life persists, life will produce a variety of strategies for survival, and as long as there are resources to cheat and swindle, we will have to deal with cheaters and swindlers. "The jackasses you will always have with you," Jesus might have said had he been an evolutionary biologist.
But we can structure our society in such a manner as to provide the greatest impediments to the jackasses among us. It's no accident that Nigerian prince scams did not take place when the chief means of written communication were quill and vellum. We just need to find the right balance between connectivity and jackassery.
"Where are they?" That's the question that gave rise to the Fermi Paradox. If there's so much potential intelligent life out there in the universe, why can't we see evidence of it? But the most intelligent life will leave no such evidence, because intelligent life was either destroyed by its own population of jackasses or was forced to reduce its connectivity to avoid that fate.
The silence of the universe is its own beautiful answer to the paradox. We can be either intelligent or dead. Which will we choose?
Guy Lancaster is the editor of the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas, a project of the Central Arkansas Library System.