Could humanity be the first intelligent civilization to emerge in our galaxy? Could that be why, when we look up at the night sky, we are confronted with a "Great Silence"?
Host | Matthew S Williams
On ITSPmagazine 👉 https://itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/matthew-s-williams
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Episode Notes
Could humanity be the first intelligent civilization to emerge in our galaxy? Could that be why, when we look up at the night sky, we are confronted with a "Great Silence"? This is the essence of the "Firstborn Hypothesis," a proposed resolution to Enrico Fermi's time-honored question ("Where is Everybody?")
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Resources
Beyond "Fermi's Paradox" X: The Firstborn Hypothesis: https://www.universetoday.com/147591/beyond-fermis-paradox-x-the-firstborn-hypothesis/
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For more podcast Stories from Space with Matthew S Williams, visit: https://itspmagazine.com/stories-from-space-podcast
The authors acknowledged that this podcast was recorded on the traditional unseeded lands of the Lekwungen Peoples.
Call them the Firstborn. Though they were not remotely human, they were flesh and blood. And when they looked out across the deep space, they felt all and wonder and loneliness. As soon as they possess the power, they began to seek for fellowship among the stars. In their explorations, they encountered life in many forms, and watched the workings of evolution on a thousand worlds. They saw how often the first faint sparks of intelligence flickered and died in the cosmic night. And because in all the galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind. They encouraged it, starting everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars, they sewed, and sometimes they reaped. And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.
The preceding excerpt comes from Arthur C. Clarke's 3001 final Odyssey. It was the last novel in the Space Odyssey series that Clarke wrote before he passed away in 2008. The book opens with this description, which explains the origin of the Monoliths, which play a central role throughout the series. In short, Clark was describing the Monoliths as a series of technological objects created by an ancient species that was the first in our galaxy to achieve sentience. As established throughout the series, the same species went on to influence evolution on planet Earth.
Those who've seen the film adaptation in 2001, A Space Odyssey will remember the opening portion of the film titled The Dawn of Man, where we see the early ancestors of humanity struggling to survive. In an arid climate where water and edible plants are limited, and competition between different groups of hominids is high, then the arrival of the Monolith leads to a sudden change in the dynamics of one particular group. One, in particular, has a sudden breakthrough where he realizes that bones can be converted into clubbing weapons.
This gives this group of early hominids the advantage over others, it allows them to hunt herbivores for a source of meat, and it gives them the ability to defend themselves against predators. In short, the intervention of the monoliths was key to the survival and evolution of early hominids giving rise to humanity as the film and the novel progress, humanity now a spacefaring civilization go on to find the remnants of monoliths throughout the solar system, which have remained behind to keep watch over their creation.
The idea of Ancient Aliens having come to earth and tampered with human evolution, the cultural or biological, has been explored extensively, not only in science fiction, but as a real scientific possibility. It has also after a fashion been explored as a potential resolution to the Fermi Paradox. What if rather than being visited by a firstborn species in the past, humanity were the Firstborn?
That is to say, what if we are the first species in our galaxy, that has achieved sentience created a civilization, and one that relies on technology that would allow us to explore other planets, seed them with life, and even intervene in their evolution?
What if the reason we perceive no evidence of advanced technological civilizations when we look out into the cosmic night is because none have arisen yet? Perhaps the universe is seated with countless forms of life, simple and complex, that is working its way towards the development of sentience. Perhaps there are plenty of sentient creatures out there, and all that they really need is a slight push from someone more advanced and more developed.
Like many proposed resolutions to the Fermi Paradox, the firstborn hypothesis is basically an attempt to eliminate the simplest answers to Fermi's time-honored question, “Where is everybody?” Whereas the Hart-Tipler conjectures suggested that extraterrestrial intelligence doesn't exist. The Firstborn Hypothesis takes a page from Carl Sagan and the seminal paper he co-wrote with his colleague William I. Newman, titled “The solipsist approach to extraterrestrial intelligence.”
This paper, released in 1983, was in response to the many papers by Frank Tipler, for whom the Hart-Tipler Conjecture is partially named. In his papers, Sagan and Newman argued that there were innumerable reasons why humanity has not found evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence yet, not the least of which was the immaturity of the field of study. However, another interesting possibility is we arrived to the cosmic party early and let's wait for other species.
To arrive as well. A key aspect of this theory is known as the anthropic principle, which is essentially the opposite of the Copernican principle, which states that neither earth nor humanity are outliers or in a privileged position to observe the universe. In other words, the Copernican principle assumes that life is typical within the cosmos. The Firstborn Hypothesis, on the other hand, comes down to the anthropic principle, which essentially states the exact opposite, whereas the Copernican principle states that life is typical within the cosmos.
The Anthropic Principle states that observations made of the Universe are entirely dependent on its laws being conducive to life, or as Brandon Carter described it, the theoretical physicist who first proposed the Anthropic Principle, although our situation is not necessarily Central, it is inevitably privileged to some extent. Taking this a step further, one could make the case that humanity is privileged because, to the best of our knowledge, we are the only technological civilization that is capable of viewing the Universe deducing its physical laws, and appreciating the fact that if those laws were just slightly different, life would never have emerged in our galaxy or in our universe.
This includes the balance between matter and antimatter had had been slightly different. atoms of hydrogen and antihydrogen would have annihilated each other, which would have prevented the formation of the first stars were one of the most difficult to pinpoint exactly who said at first, a good example is the 1982 study by Lawrence Bracewell, a professor with the space
telecommunications and radio science laboratory or star Lab at Stanford University. His study was titled “Preemption of the galaxy by the first advanced civilization.”
Using human history as a template Bracewell considered how the first civilizations to emerge and environment can invariably suppress or disrupt others that hope to follow. Applied to our galaxy, he theorized that this could be the reason why humanity hasn't heard from any other intelligent species. As he wrote, “[T]errestrial history demonstrates that the advent of one tool capable and traveling population results in that species expansions to all viable territories. The spread of the population occurs in a much shorter time than does the evolution of the species, indicating that perhaps humans are the first intelligent species in the galaxy, and may be the future population of the galaxy.”
And it certainly is an interesting point. If history has taught us anything, it is that technological evolution vastly outpaces biological or terrestrial evolution. As Futurists such as Ray Kurzweil has argued in the past, technology is an iterative process subject to what is known as the Law of Accelerating Returns. With every development, the time that it takes for the next development to come along becomes that much shorter. The progress is not incremental, but exponential.
Whereas it took 4.5 billion years for life to emerge on earth and to reach a state of complexity where tool using technologically dependent hominids were now populating every corner of the earth. Humanity's evolutionary development, or EVO Devo, which is largely driven by technology and the social impacts that it has has led to a situation where the human population has doubled in a matter of decades, rather than centuries or millennia. Multiple technological revolutions are now expected within an individual's own lifetime, and people born in an earlier generation suffer from future shock, as the pace of change is far too rapid for them to adapt to.
This scenario would place humanity in a position of great responsibility. If we are in fact the most advanced life forms in this galaxy. At the moment, all future contact with less advanced species would need to be dictated by a sort of Prime Directive - a la Star Trek.
From a cosmological standpoint, there are many reasons why this could be the case. These include energetic phenomenon, most notably gamma ray bursts. These bursts are the most energetic phenomenon in universe and occur when massive stars go supernova. While these bursts are usually brief, they can be lethal to any planets along the path of the burst. In fact, recent research has linked a GRP event to the Ordovician extinction here on Earth, which occurred roughly 440 million years ago.
This event is considered by geologists to be one of the big five major mass extinctions, which resulted in the elimination of 49 to 60% of marine life forms and 85% of marine species. James Annis, of the Fermi National Accelerator lab produced the paper in 1999, which argue that periodic GRBs could be responsible for limiting the emergence of intelligent life. According to Annis’ paper, the interval between GRPs and our galaxy is on the order of 1 billion years.
This is consistent with the interval between the emergence of multicellular life on Earth, and higher-order primates, which includes modern humans. GRBs were more common in the past. This could explain why humanity sees no evidence of intelligent life today, perhaps extinction-level events were happening too often for advanced civilizations to emerge. That being a relative newcomer to our galaxy, our solar system has been spared this speak, at least so far.
These findings were supported by another study released in 2008, by Milan and Cirkovic and Branislav Vukotik of the Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade. In their study, “Astrobiological phase transition towards the resolution of the Fermi Paradox” Cirkovic and Branislav created a model to test whether or not GRBs and other energetic phenomena can periodically reset the cosmological clock.
According to their findings, these events occur with exponentially decreasing frequency over time, creating longer and longer windows in which biogenesis or the emergence of life and new Genesis the emergence of intelligence can occur. This is, in fact, a distinct possibility considering that massive stars were more common during the early Universe.
Population III stars, as they are known, are significantly more massive than more recent generations and had much shorter lifespans. As the general rule, massive stars even those that were born more recently, have a shorter lifespan than smaller G-type stars like our Sun, K-type stars, otherwise known as orange dwarfs, and red dwarf stars, the most common class of star in our Universe.
This brings us to another seminal study conducted by Professor Abraham Loeb of the Harvard Smithsonian Center of Astrophysics and his then-postdoctoral researchers Raphael Batista and David Sloan. This study, released in 2016, was titled “Relative likelihood for life as a function of cosmic time.” Based on recent exoplanet research, which indicated that red dwarf suns, which account for roughly 75% of stars in our galaxy alone, are one of the most likely places to find Earth-like planets orbiting within their habitable zones.
Examples include Proxima b the closest exoplanet to our Solar System, and the seventh planet system of TRAPPIST one. Not only did these suns appear to favor the formation of rocky planets, but they are also much longer lived than any other class of star, whereas stars like our sun burn for about nine or 10 billion years before leaving their main sequence and expanding to become a red giant red dwarf stars can remain in their main sequence phase for up to 12 trillion years.
By calculating the relative formation probability as a function over time, they've determined that planets orbiting red dwarf stars are much more likely to support life over longer timescales. That is, assuming the absence of any factors that would suppress their potential habitability. This might just be the case, as more recent findings have indicated that red dwarf stars are prone to flare activity.
This has brought their potential to support habitable planets over long periods of time into question. Naturally, this theory has its share of flaws as well. Critics of the hypothesis site that is not only anthropic in its outlook, but awfully anthropocentric. At present, there's no evidence to suggest that energetic phenomenon in our universe have become less common with time, certainly not since Earth formed roughly 4.5 billion years ago.
In addition, resources linked to mass extinctions on Earth to possible GRBs would indicate that life has a way of abiding in spite of these phenomenon, according to some estimates, roughly 1000 GRBs have taken place close enough to Earth to affect life since it began to emerge. The fact that life exists on earth here today, and that intelligent life did emerge would indicate the GRPs are not the death sentence that some assume they might be. What's more, the theory is criticized because it's extremely difficult to test.
At present, we cannot gauge how common intelligent life is within our galaxy, or whether or not it's become more common over time because of a lack of evidence. Like all theories related to the Fermi Paradox, there's simply no definitive evidence either way. Nevertheless, from a theoretical standpoint, the firstborn hypothesis is interesting. And ultimately, it's one that we have to ask. Could it be that the reason we have found no evidence of intelligent life out there is because we're early to the party?
Only time will tell only by finding evidence of life in our universe and intelligent life to vote, can any constraints be established on the likelihood of intelligent life, and whether or not that's changed over time. Nevertheless, if humanity is, in fact, “early to the party,” that means that our future in space will be a very interesting one. If we do become an interplanetary and Interstellar species, we may very well encounter life that is in the early stages of development, and even the first sparks of intelligence emerging on distant planets.
What will our species do then? Will we respect and preserve life that we find on other planets? Or will we attempt to tamper with its evolution, promoting the development of intelligence so it gets here sooner? Or, as is often the case? Will we disrupt it and suppress it by our mere presence alone? Worst of all, will we destroy it because we fear competition emerging down the road?
All good questions. And of course, all of these are an inversion of the usual questions we ask when considering the possibility of more advanced species in the universe. If they find us, well, they attempt to guide us, shepherd us, suppress us, destroy us, or just leave us alone. In the meantime, as we continue to search for extraterrestrial intelligence, these are all very good questions to ponder.
They constitute ethical considerations that any advanced species will need to consider before it finds evidence of other life in our universe, and certainly before it attempts to make first contact with other intelligent species. And if we are, in fact, not “early to the party,” we can certainly hope that more advanced life forms have considered the same ethical conundrums, and have developed something along the lines of a Prime Directive of their own.
And that concludes this latest installment on the Fermi paradox and its proposed resolutions. Tune in next time, where we'll explore more interesting theories, including the possibility that extraterrestrial intelligence actually has visited Earth in the past and left some indications of their presence. Thank you for listening. I’m Matt Williams and this has been Stories from Space