What if aliens are everywhere, but we are cognitively unable to perceive them? A Serbian philosopher has proposed a disturbing solution to the Fermi Paradox: the answer lies not in the universe, but in the limits of our own brain.
Where is everyone? The Fermi Paradox is one of the most famous questions in modern science. The universe is immense and very ancient. The lights we see in the sky are billions of galaxies and trillions of planets. By mere statistics, intelligent life should be common.
If this is so, why haven’t we found the slightest evidence of it? Why haven’t we seen its megastructures, caught its signals or received visitors? “Where is everyone?” physicist Enrico Fermi asked in 1950.
The Great Filter. There are many brilliant minds who have dared to use the Fermi Paradox. Many of the responses fall under what has come to be known as “The Great Filter”: something that prevents the development of a higher-level civilization on the Kardashev scale.
Perhaps advanced civilizations tend to annihilate themselves in nuclear wars, or perish in the face of lethal climate change before they can colonize the galaxy. Perhaps the conditions that allowed life here are an unrepeatable cosmic coincidence. We are alone because we are a rare bird.
The ego can get us. All of these solutions have a root problem: they are deeply anthropocentric. They assume that other intelligent life forms are like us, that they use technology that we can detect.
What if the great silence of the cosmos was nothing more than the result of searching for radio signals when the intelligent life we seek communicates across dimensions we cannot even imagine?
We are dumb as worms. This is where the proposal of the Serbian philosopher Vojin Rakić, published in the International Journal of Astrobiology, comes into play. Rakić calls it the “solution to enduring human epistemological limitations.”
The key is in the term “epistemological”, which in the theory of knowledge is how we know what we know and what the limits of our perception are. Extraterrestrial life could be so radically different from us that our brains simply aren’t equipped to recognize it. We are to aliens what worms are to us.
So? Well, if Rakić is right, there isn’t much to do. We look for little green men in flying saucers, but intelligent life could exist as a form of non-physical consciousness, an interdimensional energy network, or an intelligence based on dark matter.
Rakić uses very powerful terrestrial analogies. We know that octopuses are incredibly intelligent, but their nervous system is completely foreign to ours. Fungal networks demonstrate a complexity that goes unnoticed by us. And few would have imagined that a handful of silicon chips would give rise to AI. How can we explain to someone from a couple of centuries ago that we have taught stones to speak?
SETI is already at it. This idea, which might seem like pure philosophy, is catching on in the scientific community. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI) itself has called for “abandoning the anthropocentric perspective” in its exploratory work.
It is not about stopping searching, but about expanding our definition of life and intelligence, thinking that “other minds” might have nothing to do with terrestrial biology. For now, our best weapon to stop being dumb as worms is to advance our own science and improve our own cognition.
Imagen | NSF/NSF NRAO/AUI/B.Foott
