Maybe we Missed the Call

The Fermi Paradox essentially deals with the strange and somewhat alarming contradiction between the high chance of the existence of extraterrestrial life and the lack of evidence of extraterrestrial life being present. The Italian-American scientist, Enrico Fermi proposed this idea and then asked the famous question: “then where are they?” in reference to the absent aliens. If we have been on earth for thousands of years, when will we get that dreaded ring from otherworldly beings? This paradox has been the ongoing debate among scientists, however evidence suggests that a missed call or unreadable message could be the cause of this radio silence we have been experiencing over our entire existence.

To begin, the article dives into the idea that we have either missed the window of opportunity to receive the message or vice versa. According to Seth Shostak from a 2006 Sky & Telescope article, ‘“radio leakage from a planet is only likely to get weaker as a civilization advances and its communications technology gets better. Earth itself is increasingly switching from broadcasts to leakage-free cables and fiber optics, and from primitive but obvious carrier-wave broadcasts to subtler, hard-to-recognize spread-spectrum transmissions.”’ In more simplistic terms: as Earth develops more high-tech forms of communication that are harder to detect, outside life has a lower chance of picking up on our signals and finding us leading to the possibility of the window of communication passing by. This problem can also be turned around to the Aliens. Maybe the extraterrestrial beings were trying to reach out but missed the change because we were unable to hear their message. In both cases, the possibility of that missed opportunity still exists.

In addition to a missed call (or in this case a missed radio-wave), there is the possibility that “Alien life may be too alien” in the sense that us humans would never be able to decode or understand what the extraterrestrial life was saying to us in the first place. The article brings up the point that ‘“Physiology might also cause a communication barrier. Carl Sagan speculated that an alien species might have a thought process orders of magnitude slower (or faster) than ours. A message broadcast by that species might well seem like random background noise to us, and therefore go undetected.”’ This bit of information essentially shows that we have a very slim chance of making contact with Aliens if our brains were unable to comprehend the messages we receive.

In conclusion, evidence pointing to a missed or an unreadable message could explain why humans have received no contact from life outside earth. While this lack of contact is very puzzling and even concerning, the idea of receiving a call from an alien is exponentially more concerning. What would we do then? That is an entire can of worms that could be opened at any second. Another interesting question to ponder about all this alien talk, is whether or not we should be waiting around for this call in the first place. Are we simply waiting around for something that doesn't exist to call us?

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox