One of my favorite things to contemplate is the Fermi paradox, which goes a little something like this: The universe is so unbelievably vast, and our sun so young, that other intelligent life in older systems should have evolved by now, and we should be able to see signs of their presence—yet we haven’t.
Where is everybody?
Unless we go with the “We’re all in a giant petting zoo and the aliens are watching us while wearing invisibility cloaks” theory, which I guess could be the case (though you think they’d toss some treats into the cages now and then), then logically there’s only one answer for the vast barrenness of a cosmos that should be teeming with life.
On a galactic time scale, all intelligent life self-implodes and kills itself.
Every form of evolution we’ve witnessed involves strife on some level. The fit survive, the slow get eaten; the victors are those with some sort of advantage. When intelligence is added to the mix, weapons develop, because it allows those who develop them to survive against those who don’t.
Take humans, for example. Against a lion, your average human doesn’t stand a chance. He’s basically ambulatory meat loaf. Once that human creates a spear, or a bow, or a gun? Now the ambulatory meat loaf has a pleasantly warm lion-fur cloak and plenty to eat for a couple days.
The problem with weapons, however, is that they are designed to be used, and as societies become more and more technologically advanced, the destructive power of weapons increases. Twenty thousand years ago, we had to club each other to death one at a time using animals’ jawbones. Two thousand years ago, Roman legions used swords and shields to cut their way across most of Europe and crucified those who resisted. Two hundred years ago, muskets and cannons boomed their presence across the entire earth—a deadly cacophony of missing limbs and torn flesh.
Then we got serious. Machine guns, nerve gas, high explosives. Napalm and cluster bombs blazing merrily away, meat popcorn crackling and roasting in the flames. Men and women weeping blood and coughing out spongy lung chunks until nothing remained. Battlefields literally carpeted with bodies, an unseen length of lead scything them down like young wheat until only the crows could feast.
Then we got REALLY serious. We figured out how to split the atom. Entire cities gone in an eyeblink, along with their populations, earth scorched and irradiated for centuries to come. Two countries, each with enough potential energy to permanently change the planet’s entire atmosphere, on the brink of pushing that glowing red button. (Press me, it whispers. Do it.) More countries desperately trying to acquire Shiva’s fire, beautiful in its seductive promise of self-reliant power.
And we’re only getting started. Now we’re playing around with genetic tinkering, molecular nanomachines, biocomputing. What destructive potential resides in a custom virus that can destroy a woman’s ovaries? Kill a country’s future, and you’ve killed that country. Self-assembling and self-deconstructing nanomachines, a tiny invisible swarm capable of melting anything it touches into more fodder for the cloud, the ultimate commune. When your nervous system is synonymous with your operating system, hacking takes on a whole new meaning, and memory wipes can’t be reinstalled (or can they?).
That’s just on the micro scale. Zooming out, we’re making another push toward space, full of needed resources and habitats, much of which is found on rocks. Lots of rocks. Rocks that would store a very appreciable amount of potential energy if they were ever accelerated toward a planet. Perhaps a blue planet? Who knows. If we find a way to create large amounts of antimatter, something we already make in (very) small chunks now? Boom, crack, splat goes the egg. This is your brain on science.
As we are an intelligent society, we can’t not design weapons. Everything we do can be weaponized. Guns are used in a peaceful way to hunt and feed families (peaceful for the humans, at least, not so much for the animals). Biological tinkering has given us vaccines for polio, measles, and smallpox, as well as countless helpful drugs and crops. Nuclear power provides electricity for hundreds of thousands of families—light, heat, and shelter. We’ve invented multiple ways to kill each other, but we’ve also created countless more to help. So far, we’ve managed to walk that fine line between creativity and craziness, advancement and annihilation.
However, the threat is still there, because ideas are weapons too. Without education, without respect, without tolerance, all it takes is one person who doesn’t realize why weapons shouldn’t be used to start that chain reaction that will mark us as just another failed experiment, another brief flash in the night sky on some alien world. As our society, as humanity, unlocks more and more knowledge, we must work just as hard (if not harder!) on stability and empathy and peace, because the risk of total destruction grows larger and larger the more power we amass. One madman with a meteor. One sociopath with smart matter. One ethically challenged despot with access to a doomsday device.
Where is everybody?
Exactly where their intelligence led them.