Science Forums 2

[CraigD]

While I agree with Moontanman, Michaelangelica and HydrogenBond that science can be used for good and ill, and personally believe that we humans will manage to use it for great good and much lesser ill (signing and breaking many peace pacts along the way), a thread on “will science destroy us?” wouldn’t be complete without mention of Fermi’s paradox.

The gist of the paradox, posed around the time of the development by the nuclear weapon physicist for whom it’s named, is “why aren’t there lots of ETs more advanced than us around?”

One line of reasoning, “the doomsday argument”, presupposes that intelligent beings such as ourselves are fairly common, and travel or communication between stars not a great challenge for many of them, and dismisses claims from UFO-ists that ETs are here. It then takes the position that answers to the question along the lines of “we don’t hear from them because they’re intentionally hiding from us” don’t make sense, because if there are many civilizations and/or individuals with the capability, there’s little chance that all of them would agree not to interact with us. The answer that’s left is that they don’t communicate because they’re none around, and that the reason is that about the same time that any beings attain the capability of spaceflight and communication, they also, a little bit sooner, attain the ability for such terrible destruction that they quickly destroy their capability for both. The galaxy, then, should be full of civilizations about like ours, almost capable of travel and communication with other star systems, but slightly more capable of nuking ourselves back into something between the stone and the early industrial age.

This isn’t my personal answer to Fermi’s paradox, but it’s a compelling one, and a powerful cautionary tale.