In the hunt for extraterrestrial life, is man really “the measure of all things”?

The lunchtime question posed by Enrico Fermi at wartime Los Alamos, “Where are the people?” has been both a gift and a problem for scientists ever since. Known as the “Fermi Paradox,” it simply asks: Why, given that life on Earth is ubiquitous and developed very early in Earth’s history, and that the galaxy is very old and not too big, are there not intelligent, advanced aliens everywhere? In particular, why can’t we detect any, and why haven’t any (obvious) aliens visited us?

There are dozens of proposed explanations for the Fermi paradox, in which, as is often the case, man is placed at the center of the picture. It is about what we see, how we evolved to this technological state, what we have heard or not heard from space.

Vojin Rakić, a Serbian philosopher, calls these solutions anthropocentric, because they place humans at the center of the picture. In a paper that reviews existing proposals to resolve this paradox, he puts forward a new possible explanation: extraterrestrial life could be unobservable by human senses, or even live in a part of the larger universe that we do not know about or cannot yet detect and observe.

His epistemological approach rejects the role of man in the nature of the universe and the search for life. A researcher at the Center for Bioethics Studies at the University of Belgrade, Rakić’s work has been published in the journal International Journal of Astrobiology.

The anthropogenic view was summed up early by the pre-Socratic philosopher Protagoras, who in the 5th century BC wrote: “The measure of all things is Man; of things that are, that they are; and of things that are not, that they are not.”

Plato later reduced this idea to “man is the measure of all things.” Since then, humans have continued to pollute the world, alter the climate, and decimate the rest of the animal kingdom. Is our quest for the alien and extraterrestrials too much based on the human perspective?

Rakić begins by classifying the many proposed solutions to the Fermi paradox into exceptionality solutions, annihilation solutions, and communication barrier solutions. The first posits that life is very unlikely to develop and that we might be the only life in the Milky Way galaxy, or even in the universe, and that there might be no one out there. The development of intelligent life might be even rarer, much rarer, requiring a series of crucial but extremely rare leaps along the way.

Annihilation solutions hold that planetary catastrophes occur from time to time, such as the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, or that intelligent species cause their own extinction through war, weapons, or environmental damage, or destroy intelligent life elsewhere, either as a means of protection or to gain resources.

Solutions to communication barriers raise the question of whether alien civilizations are too far away, incomprehensible to humans, or whether they (or we) only exist for a relatively short period of time, or whether intelligent aliens have chosen to go into hiding, a scenario hinted at in Liu Cixin’s science fiction trilogy “Remembrance of Earth’s Past.”

The zoo hypothesis proposes that aliens are leaving Earth alone to develop naturally, a sort of prime directive, like the one imposed on themselves by human space explorers in the “Star Trek” universe.

Rakić’s proposal goes further, proposing an alternative solution to the Fermi paradox that goes beyond the solution that aliens are so intelligent and advanced that humanity cannot perceive them. But “this is only a fragment of the solution proposed in this paper,” he writes.

They do not need to take on a new form to escape human detection; they may have always existed in that form. They may exist all around us, even if they do not surpass us in intelligence or are very unintelligent.

“A significant number of human beings believe that they are the most intelligent beings ever encountered (i.e. encountered by humans),” Rakić writes. “This is a very biased anthropocentric assumption.”

Do insects and worms perceive humans as highly advanced life forms, and if so, how? They suffer the consequences of our actions but may not understand why. Do artificial intelligences observe humans in ways we cannot discern?

“How do dolphins or whales (two animals we consider intelligent) perceive humans? How can humans gain insight into their perceptive apparatus? They still don’t know.” Extraterrestrial entities could be composed of dark matter or dark energy, or exist in spatial or temporal dimensions that we have not yet discovered.

“Humans cannot even imagine what the two (or more) additional dimensions of time would look like,” Rakić continues. “In this respect, humans are like the insect that perceives space in only one dimension.”

Or maybe life forms exist through a wormhole to another part of the universe, in parallel worlds, another part of the multiverse, or at a length and energy scale that we can’t handle even with our largest particle accelerators.

These are speculations, to be sure, but are they any more speculative than the solutions proposed so far to the paradox? We know that we do not know much, but we have no idea what we do not know: the “unknown unknowns.”

Rakić concludes: “The formulation of the Fermi paradox is actually too narrow. The paradox is indeed why humans have not perceived extraterrestrial life in a universe that is enormous, but the question is much broader: what can exist around humans that humans cannot perceive (the term “around” meaning both terrestrial, extraterrestrial in our universe, as well as extraterrestrial in other universes)? This is the key question.”

“The Fermi paradox is just an anthropocentric formulation of one aspect of this question.”

© 2024 Science X Network