The Fermi Paradox has always felt strange to me in a way that I can’t fully articulate.
People love coming up with theories about it, and equations for those theories, and plugging lots of arbitrary assumptions into those equations, and then imagining what the output might mean about the likelihood of aliens existing in the universe. But we have no way of testing these theories and we have no idea whether these assumptions are reasonable.
I propose that the Fermi Paradox is nerdslop, by which I mean that nerdy people tend to be interested in it because it is fun to think about, rather than some other reason, like its explanatory power, its relevance to the real world, or its truth. Nerdslop is to nerds what reality TV is to normal people. Using the example of the Fermi Paradox, perhaps we can come up with a grand theory of nerdslop.
The Fermi Paradox asks: given the immense size of the universe, and the billions of years that the universe has existed, if there were even a small chance of civilization evolving on any given planet, you would expect that some civilization would have had time to spread across the galaxy or at least emit some kind of signal that we can detect. So why haven’t we detected any yet?
By using the name “Fermi Paradox” we are already making a confusing word choice; this is not classically a “paradox,” in the sense that we have no strong reason to believe the lack of evidence of alien life is surprising or contradictory, beyong a simple extrapolation from “there are lots of planets” (if you read anything about the Fermi Paradox, you will repeatedly see examples of people making strange assumptions about large and small numbers, as people are known to do).
Fittingly, this idea originated from an offhand comment that Enrico Fermi made at lunch, and was not something he devoted a lot of study to, likely due to the fact that we have essentially zero useful information about the likelihood of life evolving on other planets.
Despite this, scientists have come up with countless theories about the Fermi Paradox and what it means about the nature of potential aliens. These theories even have math in them!
You will hear your nerdy friends talk about the Drake Equation, where you can plug in any number of fun arbitrary assumptions and out pops a p(aliens). One of these assumptions is “how likely is life to evolve on a given habitable planet,” which many people give crazy high numbers for, like 50%, when it may well be 0.0000001%. Or the “grabby aliens” theory, in which many questionable assumptions and reasoning steps are strung together to form a very fun theory in which alien civilizations are destined to take over the galaxy at a rapid rate in the future.
Or you can indulge in the horror genre by thinking about the “great filter” theory, in which we don’t observe alien life because all past alien civilizations eventually ran into a near-impossible challenge, such as not killing each other with nukes, or ASI, or perhaps some milestone we’ve already passed like developing multicellular life, or the “dark forest” theory, in which we don’t hear anything from aliens because the civilizations that do make noise are quickly killed by the others.
I am not describing these theories perfectly, but you get the point.
Now I will list some traits of nerdslop, derived from the things that seem weird to me about the obsession with the Fermi Paradox:
It is very fun to think about. Space! Aliens! Simple math!
People set up lots of up toy statistical models where you can plug in assumptions, the result being that theories seem mathematical/rigorous even when they are not.
People choose “reasonable” assumptions for these statistical models, where there is no rigorous basis for what is reasonable, and they often just mean “number doesn’t seem too large or too small.”
There is extremely little real-world information from which to draw conclusions (or to restrain fun speculation).
People tend to create highly-abstracted theories with lots of assumptions and reasoning steps.
A disproportionate amount of pop science content focuses on it. For example, large YouTube channels like Kurzgesagt and Rational Animations have many videos on the Fermi Paradox and its offshoots, despite its relative lack of evidence/relevance.1
Other examples of possible nerdslop:
The simulation hypothesis
Quantum immortality
The p(doom) subset of AI safety
This post was published as part of the Inkhaven residency, for which I have to publish a blog post every day for a month or else I get kicked out.