First Contact: the Quarantine Hypothesis

By James and John Gaines

                Back in the 1950’s, the noted physicist Enrico Fermi developed a line of thinking now called the Fermi Paradox, which stated, roughly, given the mathematically good possibility of intelligent life on other planets in the galaxy or the known universe, why had none of them made contact with humans or left something to demonstrate their existence?   He might well have looked across the lunch table when he developed these thoughts, since he was at Los Alamos, New Mexico, in the middle of a nuclear lab complex, talking with a group of scientists that included Edward Teller, the godfather of the hydrogen bomb.  Let’s keep this context in mind as we develop the discussion.

                For all his off-the-cuff brilliance, Fermi’s paradox does leave considerable room for doubt.  His mathematical calculation of Intelligent Life probability fails to take a few important things into consideration, most notably the factor of universal entropy.  In figuring the tens of billions of years that “early” galactic civilization(s) may have had to spread across space, he did not recognize that life develops on planets and that planets, and the stars that enable them, also have a lifespan.  In fact, many are developing or disappearing right now, within our own, so far short, human window of IL.  Thus, geologically and astrophysically, a civilization does not have forever to get its message across.  

                Moreover, we have to consider that there may be such a thing as a Species Threshold that applies to the situation.  By that, we mean that each species has an evolutionary “window” between the time that it emerges from a determined existence (i. e. homo erectus) and the time when it is capable of ending its existence through overpopulation, conflict, or perhaps other processes of degeneration.  Humans have had only 10,000 years or so of anything we deem civilization.  We still have only a partial idea of how life and intelligence develop, much less of how they may become extinct.  In Fermi fashion, we can consider that we are probably typical in this respect and that other forms of IL would be subject to the same phenomenon of a Species Threshold, possibly absolute, possibly not.  The concept that an interplanetary IL civilization would arise and simply stay the same, continually able to initiate first contact with another IL, therefore seems counter-intuitive. 

                We can conclude that even under a best-conditions scenario, IL first contact chances may be less than Fermi optimistically calculated.  Assume, though, that Fermi is not far off the mark and that there is now at least one IL form in the galaxy that might be capable of contacting us but hasn’t.  This apparently willful neglect in turn suggests that something like the Star Trek version of Prime Directive is at play: interstellar civilizations may have an avoidance policy in effect regarding life forms that have failed to achieve a given level of achievement.  Science fiction has posited this situation many times, beginning perhaps with Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker.  Contemporary variations are too numerous to list.  It is worth mentioning, in addition, that we humans have not proven so far to be a very encouraging study group in some ways.  Other than a few exceptions like the Great Wall and the Pyramids, humans spent long centuries without producing progress observable from space.  Even as late as the nineteenth century, the energy footprint of a great city like London, Beijing, or Baghdad would have been miniscule compared to purely natural phenomena like major volcanic eruptions.  Our first radio broadcasts, arguably the best long-range testimony to our technology, would have been gibberish to a passing IL presence.  They may have been completely ignored, since they were merely analog forms of audio tracks (and who says other ILs even use the same bands and conventions of audio communication that we do?) in a plethora of different languages, not even sensibly digitalized.  The same holds true for television, keeping in mind that the first broadcast capable of reaching even the nearby space of our solar system was of a speech by a fellow named Adolf Hitler.  Of course, the next major observable event would have been the first explosions of the atomic bomb, which accelerated with mind-numbing speed to ever larger, more powerful, and obviously aggressive bombs. 

                We arrive more or less inevitably at the realization that IL life forms in our vicinity may not want to hasten a first contact.  If you heard that a boy from a house way down the street had just murdered part of his family, would you invite him into your yard to play?  Not bloody likely.  Better to make sure that you did not attract his attention in any way.  A Stellar Quarantine might in this case seem to be a scenario that reduces the risk for an IL form in our spatial neighborhood, whether or not the neighbor decided that we were worthy of further observation at all (this will be treated in a late post). 

                At this point, we are tempted to argue, as cock-eyed optimists, that surely the human race had proven that it is capable of better things than World War II or Mutually Assured Destruction.  We have the UN, the Internet, Neil Armstrong on the Moon, the Hubble Telescope.  Doesn’t that prove that we have a worthy side to our existence?  The trouble is that all of our advances, especially in the direction of space, have been driven by a military motive that may not seem like acceptably civil behavior to the neighbors.  Our first satellites were launched on rockets designed originally to destroy London and Moscow, if not New York.  Sputnik caused a virtual panic in military applications that quickly spread into the outer reaches of our atmosphere.  For one Hubble, we have scores, perhaps hundreds, of active spy satellites pointing the wrong way, back down toward Earth, sending drones with explosive payloads to the eradicate the villain-du-jour.  The Space Shuttle was designed primarily not for the inoffensive International Space Station, but to deliver unspecified military machines into orbit.  Now that the Space Shuttle is mothballed, it has been replaced by the secret X-37B vehicle.  No one is supposed to know what it’s doing on its long robotic missions, but we think we can be sure it’s not surveying crops or tracking bird migrations.  All this astro-military activity could not help but send a message to an IL observer that we humans may not be ready to learn how to pop up unannounced in other planetary systems. 

                When immigrants came to the booming USA in the early 20^th century, they had to pass through Ellis Island.  Not because Americans wished to embarrass them or keep better track of them or help them adjust to a new environment, but to quarantine disease carriers before they could set foot on Manhattan Island.  Whether our physical microbes are damaging to extraterrestrial IL forms, we cannot know yet, but we can reasonably surmise that our mental microbes are probably strictly undesirable.  We may be in the Ellis Island Infirmary of interstellar relations at this very moment.  Our future will be judged by one factor, and only one: whether we can cure ourselves of our undesirability.