Is man really “the measure of all things” in the hunt for extraterrestrial life?

Enrico Fermi’s midday question in the war zone of Los Alamos: “Where is everyone?” has been both a gift and a problem for scientists ever since. Known as “Fermi’s Paradox,” it simply asks: Why aren’t intelligent, highly evolved aliens everywhere, even though life on Earth is ubiquitous and evolved very early in Earth’s history, and the galaxy is very old and not overly large? In particular, why can’t we detect any, and why have no (obvious) aliens visited us?

There are a few dozen proposed explanations for Fermi’s Paradox, all of which, as is human nature, put humanity at the center of the picture. It’s about what we see, how we evolved to this level of technology, what we have or have not heard from space.

Serbian philosopher Vojin Rakić calls these solutions anthropocentric because they put humans at the centre. In an article examining existing solutions to the paradox, he proposes a new, possible explanation: extraterrestrial life could be undetectable with the senses developed by humans, or even live in a part of the universe that we do not know or that we cannot yet discover and observe.

His epistemological approach rejects the role of humans in the nature of the universe and the search for life. Rakić is a scientist at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Belgrade. His work has been published in the International Journal of Astrobiology.

The anthropogenic viewpoint was summed up early on by the pre-Socratic philosopher Protagoras, who wrote in the 5th century BCE: “Man is the measure of all things: 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 been polluting the world, changing the climate, and decimating the rest of the animal kingdom. Is our search for extraterrestrials and aliens based too much on the human perspective?

Rakić begins by classifying the many proposed solutions to the Fermi Paradox into exception solutions, annihilation solutions, and communication barrier solutions. The first assumes that the evolution of life is extremely unlikely, and that we may be the only life in the Milky Way, if not the entire Universe, and that there may be no one out there. The evolution of intelligent life might be even rarer, much rarer, requiring a series of crucial but extremely rare jumps along its path.

Annihilation-based solutions assume that planet-wide disasters occur from time to time, such as the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, or that intelligent species cause their own extinction through war, weapons, or environmental damage, or destroy intelligent life elsewhere, either for self-protection or to obtain resources.

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

The zoo hypothesis assumes that aliens leave the Earth alone and allow it to develop naturally – a kind of prime directive that human space explorers in the “Star Trek” universe have imposed on themselves.

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

They don’t need to take on a new form to avoid human detection; perhaps they have always existed like this. Perhaps they are all around us, even if they are not more intelligent than us, or even have very little intelligence at all.

“A significant number of people believe that they are the most intelligent beings ever encountered (that is, humans have encountered),” Rakić wrote. “This is a highly biased anthropocentric assumption.”

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

“How do dolphins or whales (two animals we consider intelligent) perceive humans? How can humans gain insight into their perceptual apparatus? We still don’t know.” Extraterrestrial beings could be made of dark matter or dark energy, or exist in dimensions of space or time that we have not yet discovered.

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

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

While this is speculation, are they any more speculative than the solutions to the paradox proposed so far? We know there is a lot we don’t know, but we have no idea what we don’t 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 such a vast universe, but the question is much broader: what could exist around humans that humans cannot perceive (where ‘around’ means both terrestrial, extraterrestrial life in our universe and extraterrestrial life in other universes)? That is the key question.

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

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