Fermi Paradox: Uninterested Aliens

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:01]One not often considered aspect of the Fermi  Paradox and contemplating why we don’t see anyone else out there, at least not so far, we’ve only  just begun in that regard, is the simple fact of directionality in your communications. The reality  is, when sending a communications signal, you want to make it as narrow as you possibly can, a beam  as best you can make it. You only need to hit the target receiver, and anything else ultimately  is unintended leakage, which wastes energy. In a lot of ways, some leakage is unavoidable,  but you can try to do the best you can.

[00:00:39]That would very likely be true for an  alien civilization as well. If you’re going to go through the trouble  of collecting or producing energy, you probably don’t want to frivolously waste  some of it if you don’t have to, unless you have a specific reason to do that. There simply  usually isn’t a reason to just waste energy, even if you have a lot of it available. It’s just  good sense to mitigate a rule of the universe.

[00:01:05]Now, there is a conditional case here where  conserving energy isn’t what you want to do.

[00:01:09]When SETI first began with the seminal  Cocconi and Morrison paper of the 1950’s, the first place to look was the low hanging  fruit, an omni directional powerful beacon intended to get anyone in the galaxy that was  looking in the radio spectrum’s attention.

[00:01:26]Especially if it was at a specific frequency,  or set of frequencies instead of even more costly broadband. And it would get attention,  if you were tossing out yottawatts of energy, as a star like the sun does in visible light, but  you were radioing that across the entire plane of the milky way narrowband, you would be seen by a  huge swath of stars in this galaxy. Indeed, you might even be visible to nearby galaxies. And by  doing it narrowband, it would be unmistakable as a technological signal, especially if you broadcast  it continuously for very long periods of time.

[00:02:04]The problem is that to do that, you need to  harness the full power of a moderately sized star like the sun with its 384 yottawatts per second  output, really close to a giant star rather than a tiny low output dwarf star, with an enormous dyson  swarm of energy collectors to power your beacon.

[00:02:24]If contacting other alien species was your main  aim in existence, you could do it. But at the same time, as the early days of SETI showed, no one  in this galaxy seems to have done that. Beacons like this are not totally ruled out for various  reasons yet, but it’s certainly not as obvious as it could be if such a thing is out there. In  short, there are ways to scream your existence, and no mistake will be made, but we aren’t doing  that and we don’t see anyone else doing it either.

[00:02:53]With more nuanced, and weaker  signals, with distance, the fact is, scattering is going to happen, so the  modern hope in SETI is to catch either leakage of an alien civilization’s internal  communications, or a laser driven light sail, or something like radar where the signal can  be wider and stronger, but also signals in optical that might make use of things like laser  communications targeted at us on purpose. These are all less expensive energy wise than a beacon.  After all, we have no idea what aliens would or would not do, and sending a signal directly to  a promising planet with a detectable biosphere might be something they do. Maybe with such a  mature exoplanet, you might get a signal from someone if they are there. But that’s only if  they want to talk to us, which is a big if.

[00:03:42]Or not. Equally as probable are alien  civilizations that might see the Earth’s biosphere, not want us to know they are there, and  thus they avoid beaming any signal towards this planet, or perhaps even any other exoplanets that  appear habitable. It might be a security protocol, even if you have no idea if there is anyone  there that could receive your signals, you may still designate star systems with  worlds that could have a civilization you haven’t detected yet because of the  speed of light limit, as off limits for sending anything in their direction.  A dead zone where you do not broadcast.

[00:04:22]And security is only one reason  aliens might avoid sending anything.

[00:04:26]They might also have a prime directive  sort of idea where you do not beam any indication of your existence towards aliens  of lesser technology in order to not affect their growth and development. Let them be  them until they figure out that aliens must be out there and try to contact you. You  contacted us, we were merely listening, to paraphrase Contact. This would be a really  tall order for us right now though, since we’ve only ever sent out a handful of signals to message  alien civilizations that might be out there, and the really viable signals we did were generally  not broadcasted widely, but directionally.

[00:05:05]Someone might see it, or they may not, but  the only way they would see it is if they were monitoring our direction on a constant basis. One  short signal of a short duration is easily missed.

[00:05:16]As far as monitoring constantly, this  is something we ourselves do not do, we do not yet do permanent all sky 24/7 SETI.  We’ve dabbled with it, but nothing permanently yet which is what you need. You may even need  to do it for centuries or longer for any hope of picking up the type of signal we’ve sent to  contact aliens, which were few and far between, never repeated, and overall weak other than the  Arecibo signal. But as with something like the Arecibo signal, anyone that could pick it up,  would need to know exactly when to look and there isn’t a way for them to do that without  constant monitoring for millions of years.

[00:05:56]As an aside, there is a strange aspect  to this. Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and has had life for billions of years of that.  All life that has ever existed on this world, so far as we know, has never had radio capability  except us, and only then recently. Earth has been listening to radio for less than a drop in the  ocean of the age of the earth. But say for a moment it was earth itself that could pick up  signals. While there obviously is hope in SETI, and even artifact SETI, the most  likely object associated with us to have ever nominally “seen” in quotes  evidence of aliens is Earth itself.

[00:06:35]Countless radio transmissions beamed intentionally  or unintentionally towards earth asking if anyone is home perhaps, may have waved over this planet  hundreds, thousands or even more times in this history of the planet. There was simply no one  here listening and we missed them. Obviously Earth can’t pick up a technological radio signal and  interpret it, but it’s a fun thought to ask what stories it might tell if it could. That’s if Earth  would even talk to us, it might just as easily have been uninterested, aloof, at best might say  Meh, there are aliens, and not tell us anything more, or just call us a surface infection it  needs to see an exoplanet doctor about. I digress.

[00:07:16]There is a signal aliens would see  regarding this world or any others, the biosignatures. One reason to consider  this is our own biosphere. While we’ve only been sending out nominal technosignatures  aliens could detect through things like radio transmissions for just over a century, Earth  has already sold us out and betrayed us by broadcasting the existence of our biosphere for  many millions of years. There has been enough, well enough, time for the weird oxygen levels  of our world, among other signatures of life, for anyone in the milky way that was looking  at this world to have seen the biosignatures.

[00:07:51]But it may also be that they don’t care  situationally. Sometimes you might see them if you know what to look for, but  sometimes you might not. This is like the arecibo signal. Think of it like this. You  can certainly directionally broadcast on earth, things like certain satellite downlinks, you also  can broadcast radio stations in all directions if you don’t care if anyone else in a foreign  nation hears them. Indeed, this is sometimes done intentionally for a number of reasons, to reach  as wide of an audience as possible. Or to deliver messages to peoples in closed nations, or to  deliver coded messages by shortwave to operatives, and even misinformation and so on. But what also  is done are broadcasts intended to not be picked up by anyone else, or otherwise so buried  in code, no one will ever figure them out.

[00:08:41]What we really don’t do is care about  uncontacted tribes of people on earth as far as radio. They don’t have radios, so  no effort is put into filtering what radio signals they receive. They can’t receive them  anyway. This obviously could be us overall, the aliens may communicate in ways  that we simply have no idea are there, or we cannot currently utilize them, such as  gravitational wave communication or neutrinos, or even speculative science things like dark  photons. All we know is that those kinds of speculative communications technologies seem  really hard to send and receive, and do not give very many advantages over radio, since they  are also speed of light limited communication.

[00:09:24]What advantage there is however with such  communications is that for neutrinos and gravity, they go through anything, nothing meaningfully  blocks them, which is not the case for photons.

[00:09:35]And if the isolated group of humans did develop  radio on their own, it’s a lot harder to go from cold trying to understand a language you don’t  understand over a radio without direct interaction from another human to teach you that language, and  vice versa. You need a basic framework in person to come up with a way to figure it out mutually.  That’s not going to happen with distant aliens.

[00:09:58]Aliens may well see it that way, that it  doesn’t matter to them if anyone catches their leakage because the other civilization  is too unlikely to be able to decode it. But, we haven’t seen that, or at least not  recognized it if that is the case so far.

[00:10:13]Also worth noting here that we don’t know what  the social whims and evolution of alien societies might be. That could be really situational on  its own. An example would be a civilization that broadcasts and listens for alien signals for a few  hundred years, never finds anything, and simply stops searching. They end their version of funding  for it because it hasn’t produced fruit, or they stop at the first one they detect, or their  society moves in a direction to no longer look.

[00:10:42]But, again, we’ve barely looked. And there is  an issue. Past a certain distance of perhaps 100 light years, it becomes less and less  likely we’d pick up an alien civilization’s signals due to power loss over distance, the  inverse square law. And there is a kind of bias in radio SETI against very weak signals.  Indeed, some seemingly promising candidates in SETI have been disregarded predominantly over  weakness. But our own radio stations for the most part are not visible at Alpha Centauri,  they are far too weak. We may well be that discarded weak signal somewhere out there,  our global culture, with our art, music, thinking, literature, everything that makes  humanity interesting, would simply be lost to someone out there who said, you know, this  signal probably isn’t anything, it’s too weak.

[00:11:31]Only certain things we do are powerful and  the aliens could see if they are close enough, like radar, unless of course they have a  radio telescope the size of New Jersey.

[00:11:42]Weakness is relative when you have a very  large dish, which we do not. We have big ones, but not on that level. That may be  the case for the aliens as well, outside of a certain distance, they may  not broadcast anything strong enough for us to see above the noise. Again, broadcasting  strongly costs more energy. And receiving weak signals requires you to build enormous  radio telescopes, probably in space, and there are physical limits to that outside  of interferometry, which has limits of its own.

[00:12:12]Indeed, that is a solution to the Fermi Paradox  that isn’t often talked about in discussions on that subject. The fact that alien signals might  just be really weak, or if you will, call them hard to see aliens. Our own tend to be, so why  not theirs. We are a hard to see civilization, if not the earth’s biosphere itself. Maybe aliens  don’t build beacons, too costly, but they also don’t build 24/7 medium power signals either, if  they don’t need them internally. That’s actually on the more likely end of the solutions, but  often doesn’t get discussed as much as it should.

[00:12:49]But ultimately one must ask a more philosophical  question here. Why would aliens care at all about communicating with us, or even watching  us? It’s certainly possible that aliens simply do not care. You can put this in human  terms. The first alien civilization we find, and can prove is in fact aliens, will constitute  one of the greatest discoveries humanity has ever made. The second discovery of another civilization  will be a headline, but will not have the impact of the first. The third, less. Well what happens  if you are catalog entry 217? Would anyone but specialist scientists care? On earth, unless there  was something extremely interesting about you, the reality is few would care about the  217th alien civilization ever discovered, a primitive one that only has had radio  communication for a very short time.

[00:13:41]It may be the case, going by humanity, that by  that time, only some specialists care and they probably do not get much in the way of resources  to study species 217 very closely. A few may care deeply for scientific reasons, or cultural  reasons, or another reason. Often it’s termed that we would be like ants to a highly advanced  civilization, who would care about us? Well, on earth, there are scientists who dedicate their  entire careers to studying ants, I’ve done some interesting interviews on Event Horizon on the  scientific study of ants, one because I find ants interesting, but two, by studying species on  earth radically different from us, studying ants might just give us clues on how to study an alien  species, should we ever find one. That may go for aliens as well. One thing to remember, generally,  the ants don’t care about us. Food for thought.

[00:14:37]Thanks for listening! I am futurist and science  fiction author John Michael Godier currently eyeing earth more than suspiciously. It gave  up our location, atmospheric conditions, the whole magilla with its biosphere long before we  got here to anyone out there that may be drawing their plans against us. Well, I guess telling  Earth to get off my lawn might be too harsh, it was actually LIFE itself altering earth’s  atmosphere that did it in which case I am now eyeing the lawn suspiciously because not only is  it life, it’s photosynthesizing and adding to the biosignature. Can’t win in this universe  and be sure to check out my books at your favorite online book retailer and subscribe to my  channels for regular in-depth explorations into the interesting, weird and unknown aspects  of this amazing universe in which we live.