When we think in terms of the human population, we see what at first seems like an enormous
number, the current estimate being over 7 billion, and that currently grows by over
80 million people per year.
By the end of this century, barring any kinds of disasters, we will have almost certainly
surpassed ten billion people living on this world.
Needless to say, we typically see that as a lot, perhaps too many people for one world.
But once you leave this world and head out into the universe, those kinds of numbers
get dwarfed by the sheer numbers of stars present in the universe.
The Hubble Space Telescope alone was estimated to have been able to observe about 100 billion
galaxies.
There are more, those were the only ones it could see, and some estimates place the number
of galaxies within the observable universe in the trillions.
Each of those galaxies contains tens to hundreds of billions of stars, meaning that there are
so many stars in this universe that no matter how much our population grows even over millions
of years, we will likely never outnumber stars in population numbers in the observable universe.
It gets far worse when you wonder about the parts too distant to be observed.
But even in terms of this galaxy, the Milky Way, the current human population numbers
are nothing close to the kinds of numbers you would need to realistically colonize even
a fraction of it.
If you think of the galaxy in terms of real estate, this becomes evident very quickly.
It's difficult to determine and estimates vary, but it's safe to say that there are
at least 100 billion stars within the Milky Way galaxy, though it could be higher.
Assuming that there no other civilizations currently occupying the galaxy's real estate,
that would give each human on earth over ten star systems worth of real estate, and the
empty space in between, entirely to themselves.
Depending on the technology you have at hand, that's such an enormous swath of real estate
that you might not even be able to cross your own property in a current human lifetime,
much less visit the nearest human to you.
While I've known a few people that would be fine with that, isolation on that extreme
is not going to be desirable to most people.
Instead people are generally going to want to live in communities as do now, whether
on planets or space habitats.
That we tend to congregate makes the problem of colonizing the entire galaxy even worse.
Not everyone is going to want to rough it, head to the galactic frontier and colonize
new worlds.
Some will, most won't.
Needless to say, numerically speaking, this also applies to alien civilizations wishing
to colonize the Milky Way.
To do it on the scale of a Kardashev type III civilization, they would need numbers
far in excess of the current population of earth.
And while increasing your population doesn't seem difficult, we currently are doing it
and aliens probably could too, and the prospects of extending life spans factoring in, it may
also be that technological societies eventually go through a population stagnation, or contraction,
that may, just by sheer numbers, prevent them from ever fully colonizing a galaxy.
In Kardashev's day, this seemed unlikely.
Each year the rate at which the human species was growing was increasing.
And, it seemed reasonable at the time that it might never stop.
But in the years following, it peaked and started to drop and we are now seeing indications
of a fundamental change in how we populate here on earth.
And, if drops in fertility rates end up being the case for all countries as global affluence
grows, we're in for a dramatic eventual drop in population.
While it is currently true that our population is still growing, the rate at which it is
increasing has dramatically slowed down and shows no sign of stopping that decline.
Global population growth is now about what it was in 1900.
This may eventually lead to a stagnation of population numbers, or a decline.
If so, it's possible by some estimates that there may not be even a billion people living
on this world in a few centuries.
Life extension technologies are a wild card here.
We're already extending the human lifespan, and the more research that is done the more
we might be able to extend it.
Researchers such as Aubrey deGrey project that it's entirely possible that someone
alive right now, might still be alive in centuries.
Or longer.
We shall see, but if everyone lives to be, say, 10,000 years old, then that's going
to affect the population equation.
But, say it's not enough, and reproduction in a technologically advanced society still
becomes increasingly rare.
If that applies to alien civilizations as well, which there is no guarantee of course
since we can't really even speculate about what their cultures might be like, or how
prolifically they reproduce.
But if they do behave something like we do, they may only see a point to colonizing only
a few star systems and that's that's all they need.
But, that should still be visible to a degree if they did.
With enough looking, you might still eventually spot an alien civilization that possess a
Dyson swarm.
They just have one or two instead of filling a galaxy with them simply because that's
all they need.
But, that assumes again, that they need lots and lots of energy.
What if they don't?
Say you have a planet with a population of 1 billion that's stable, has colonized their
star system, but no further because they don't have sufficient population numbers to justify
doing so.
How much energy do they really need?
Would fusion reactors provide ample energy for such a civilization leaving them without
any compelling need to develop larger scale power generation?
While on an individual star system basis, we haven't looked well enough to know if
anyone's done this yet, but had a Kardashev Type III civilization colonized the entire
Milky Way and encased everything in Dyson swarms or spheres, we would see that very
clearly.
Is there a reason for that?
After all, look at us.
We are energy hungry now, we consume terrawatts of energy as a civilization, and that continues
to grow.
Does this eventually level off?
Does it ever decrease?
What effect does a stabilization or a drop in population have on that?
Does anyone ever really need to harvest the full energy of a star?
Does a civilization with a stable, small population ever need the hundreds of yottawatts of energy
that a Dyson sphere would collect from a star like the sun?
Maybe they, and we don't.
And optimal energy use levels off and can be accomplished with fusion.
If so, such a civilization would be very hard to spot.
Say that optimal energy usage is only just a bit more than we use now.
Anyone looking at this planet further out than a hundred light years or so would see
no evidence of a civilization here.
Anything they could detect that screams civilization, such as radio or improbable chemicals in the
atmosphere have only been emitted by us for about a hundred years.
This is not the case for life, earth's oxygen and methane levels that are suggestive of
life, but not necessarily a dead ringer, have reached out much further.
But life does not mean intelligence or civilization, it just means life is the most likely cause
for those weird levels of methane and oxygen.
But even within that sphere of a hundred light years, it would not be easy to detect our
civilization.
Anyone further than a few tens of light years wouldn't pick up our day-to-day radio transmissions
without a radio telescope the size of a major city.
We do not yet have one of those.
Maybe they could see evidence our city lights on earth's night side.
But they'd need a really big telescope for that.
Perhaps impossibly large.
Maybe they could detect the ozone destroying CFC's in our atmosphere, but only to a certain
distance.
Maybe they might pick up a radar signal, or the Arecibo message.
But they would have to be looking 24/7 to just happen to catch that, and, since those
things don't repeat, they wouldn't be able to confirm the signal, something SETI
scientists here on earth consider a prerequisite.
The point is, we are almost invisible to most of the galaxy.
Almost.
Ancient civilizations might be easier to spot if they've been broadcasting radio for hundreds
of thousands of years, but so far, we haven't seen them if they are there.
Everyone else may be like us, and maybe in the future we simply colonize Mars, or terraform
Venus, and that's enough.
Maybe most people, if our population contracts, choose to stay on earth, and the other planets
of the solar system forever remain outposts for the intrepid.
Maybe we might even colonize a planet in a nearby star system, but who would want to
go there and leave the comforts of earth other than, again, the extreme adventurers.
But how far would they venture before too far was too much, and it becomes a situation
where you have one person willing to colonize a planet but no others?
Perhaps that's as far as it gets?
Granted, all of this has been pretty anthropomorphic.
We don't really know if aliens might be like us, or very different from us, and one
could easily envision the opposite where entire galaxies are infested with some kind of aggressive
version of an interstellar Dyson's sunflower.
His idea was something like a space plant that originates on an ice shell ocean world
like Europa, and then moves out into space.
That sounds more like a weed to me, spreading across a garden.
But say it happened.
Maybe it might eventually somehow achieve intelligence under the conditions of the harshness
of space and evolve very differently from us and not be concerned with energy generation,
since it can already do that on its own so long as it's near a star.
But say it can only exist in space long enough to colonize other suitable environments within
its star system.
We would probably never see that if it's happened in the Milky Way, at least until
we've colonized it and saw first hand.
At any rate, this solution to the Fermi Paradox answers the question with the possibility
of alien civilizations being plentiful, but there just aren't very many members of any
particular alien species.
Or, perhaps they are so different, intelligent Dyson's weeds, that they just don't do
anything easily noticeable to us, especially if they've left our star system alone realizing
life was already here and are leaving us a wide berth.
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently angry at lazy, discrete
aliens that don't reproduce.
How are we supposed to see you if you're like that.
I'm done, I'm just done.
I'm officially no longer on speaking terms with the aliens I'm always talking about
contacting and be sure check out my books at your favorite online book retailer and
subscribe to my channel for regular, in-depth explorations into the interesting, weird and
unknown aspects of this amazing universe in which
we live.
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