Despot Aggression Could Be an Ominous Foretelling of the Answer to the Fermi Paradox

By Dr. Gary L Deel, Ph.D., J.D.

I’ve written previously about the Fermi Paradox. For those who are not familiar with this concept, below is a brief explanation.

Enrico Fermi was a twentieth century physicist who made an interesting observation about the universe around us, and specifically the apparent absence of other life beyond Earth. Fermi considered the age of the universe (roughly 14 billion years) and the size of our Milky Way Galaxy (roughly 100,000 lightyears across). He also considered the famous Drake Equation from astrophysicist Frank Drake, which suggests that, even under the most conservative estimates, there ought to be many thousands or even millions of worlds with life in the Milky Way.

Fermi then surmised that life which emerged much earlier in the timeline of the universe than Earth’s life did — many millions or even billions of years earlier perhaps — should be far advanced beyond our current capabilities. In fact, it should have had plenty of time to evolve, develop advanced spacefaring technology, and explore the galaxy. Fermi postulated that, even with spacecraft that could travel only a small fraction of the speed of light, a civilization which began exploring the galaxy millions or billions of years ago should have had plenty of time to visit and populate all of the most distant corners of our galactic home by now.

And from this postulate comes the Fermi Paradox: If this is true, then where are they? Why haven’t we seen any evidence of any other life in the galaxy?

Of course, many theories have been proposed to explain the Fermi Paradox. One simple explanation is that perhaps Drake was wrong, and intelligent life is much rarer than we might otherwise assume. If so, then perhaps this is why we haven’t seen or heard anything from ET yet.

There are also hypotheses which revolve around the basic premise that extraterrestrial life might have in fact visited our solar system, observed life on Earth, and decided not to make contact or interact for one reason or another. For example, Dr. Neil Degrasse Tyson has famously posited that perhaps for such interstellar beings, Earth life is so simple and unintelligent (relatively speaking) that…