Space: the Fermi Paradox or Why Aren't We Getting More Christmas Cards?

     Surely most science fiction devotees have been stumped at some time by Enrico Fermi's famous skeptical question about the possibility of intelligent life outside our atmospheric cocoon.  In a conversation about the topic with Edwin Teller and two other physicists, Fermi is said to have brought speculation to a halt by speculation by interjecting, "But where is everybody?"  

     Indeed, it is clear that efforts to detect signs of extraterrestrial intelligence by such means as radio telescopes and scans by space probes have revealed no contacts.  Numerous people have already remarked that this silence may be due to our own patterns of communication.  After all, some of the earliest electromagnetic transmissions from Earth to include video centered on speeches by one Adolf Hitler -- not a very encouraging beginning for anyone out there monitoring us.  In addition to this stumbling opening, I was drawn recently to another factor during a discussion with family members.

     "Why aren't we getting Christmas cards any more?" moaned one relative.  "There are hardly any in the mailbox these days."  Christmas cards, after all, are relatively simple phatic communications for the most part, despite the recent tendency to turn them into yearly reports.  They are a rough equivalent of "Here we are, we come in peace."  Pessimists (including those espousing Robin Hanson's Great Filter scenario) would say that our kinsmen may be a lot more numerous than extraterrestrial civilizations and therefore we should not expect greetings in our electronic mailboxes.  Optimists might counter that research in exoplanets has boosted the predictions by people such as Carl Sagan and his colleagues who hypothesize the possible existence of millions of civilizations spread across the universe.  

     We suggest perhaps a tighter focus on the nature of communication itself, a closer look at these cosmic Christmas cards.  To answer my relatives, I would point out that they are getting fewer cards because that is an eclipsed form of communication.  Fewer an fewer of those missives can really be called Christmas cards, since only a small minority contain any reference to the religious significance of the holiday.  A card with a cute cardinal or polar bear may not spark an interest in the receiver.  There is even a fear on the part of some people to send Christmas cards because they might be considered offensive by any number of social groups.  Economics weighs in, as postal prices have steadily increased.  However, perhaps the biggest factor is that print (and even more so handwritten script) is essentially a "hot medium," to use Marshall McLuhan's terminology, one that requires deeper mental work than many are willing to give.  It is no accident that an increasing fraction of Christmas cards are not really cards at all, but a photograph that is designed to elicit an immediate emotional reaction rather than any processes of thought.  Unfortunately, the days of the Christmas card may be numbered.

    Could the same be true of our current forms of electromagnetic communication?   If interplanetary civilizations necessarily develop faster-than-light transportation, would they not also need a faster-than-light form of communication.  Long-range railroads quickly needed the telegraph.  They couldn't have operated practically with only visual semaphore as a way to stay in touch.  This necessity would be even more crucial in space.  

      How could spacefarers deal with this problem?  We know as little about this question as we know how to get to our sibling planets in a rapid way.  Science fiction has not neglected the issue.  The 1956 movie It Conquered the World features Lee Van Cleef as a scientist who manages to communicate instantaneously with Venus without even changing the use of radio very much.  Many sci fi stories revolve around the employ of some kind of "sub-space" transmissions that conveniently cross the limits of the speed of light.  Perhaps advanced civilizations have long ago left behind our relatively slow forms of communication, just as we have abandoned semaphore signals and, more recently, telegraph wires.  

     Not only that, but what if there are civilizations out there that expect us to do so?  In the StarTrek universe, the Vulcans do not bother to try to communicate with humans until Ephraim Cochran develops a warp drive.  Wouldn't it be even more practical to make the criterion of contact translight communication?  It would be more sensible to avoid a physical presence in first contact, which could lead to all sorts of problems avoided by a more rapid and perhaps more precise form of messaging.  

     Let's push the prospects one step further.  For a truly advanced civilization, why not do away with instramentality and go straight to thought?  Could aliens already be sending out messages directly to our thought systems?  Of course, we would have to be able to recognize these emissions in order to respond, but that would presume sufficient cerebral development to deal with the finer points of interplanetary messaging.  As early as 1951, John D. McDonald's novel Wine of the Dreamers posits a situation where an alien race unwittingly begins to communicate with humans telepathically while dreaming.  Unfortunately, this circumstance leads to terrible results, since neither the senders nor the receivers realize what is going on.  

      Physical science, science fiction and language sciences require more interplay with each other before these sorts of problems can be more completely understood.  It will mean a much deeper dialogue than currently used by the government as they exploit military sci fi writers to suggest future terror weapons.  Human culture delights, on the contrary, in pitting the thinkers in different nations and situations against each other, rather than coordinating their work.  The solution to this fragmentation lies in courageous action by the thinkers themselves, as Professor Barnhardt undertakes in The Day the Earth Stood Still.  It may not prove easy, but we cannot hope to achieve communication with extraterrestrials until we do a better job of communicating among ourselves.

John D. MacDonald's novel Wine of the Dreamers