Serengeti: a Solution to Fermi’s Paradox

by Peter Cawdron

part 2 of 3

“I remember things,” Diana began. “I remember places on Earth. It’s as though I were there just yesterday. I feel as though I’ve walked barefoot on the soft sands of a beach, hiked up a mountain in the fresh snow, or strolled through a redwood forest after the summer rains have cleared. And yet I’ve never been off this ship. They’re not my memories, they’re hers.”

“She gave them to you. They’re a gift.”

“A gift or a curse?” Diana asked. “She’s shown me all that I will never enjoy, all I can never have. I realise she had her reasons for signing up for the mission. But I’m not her. I’m not the same woman. I may look the same, sound the same, but I’m me, I’m not her. Why did she do that? Why did she give up her life? Why did she abandon the Earth on a quest she knew she would never personally fulfil? A mission she knew could take thousands of years? Why would she undertake something like this, that cut off her contact with the living Earth, all the while knowing she’d never live to see the results? She knew she’d personally never see either success or failure, so why do it? All I can think is, it’s because she...”

Diana paused, struggling to find the words.

Anderson filled in the words for her, saying, “Because she believed. She believed in the mission and its importance.”

“Because she was mad,” Diana added, half laughing. “She had to be.”

“Or extraordinarily brave.”

Anderson hadn’t noticed up until this point, but Diana was now holding his hand, her warm fingers interlocked over his. As she spoke, her passion flowed and her fingers flexed with excitement.

“I wouldn’t have chosen this. I know, it sounds contradictory, crazy. Perhaps that’s what bugs me most. Because, if she hadn’t chosen this, I wouldn’t be here, I would have never existed, but here I am. And yet, this is not my choice. I have no control over my own life and that scares me. To even be in existence scares me. My mind is alive with possibilities, excited by life and yet afraid of death, excited to feel the warmth of the light, but afraid of the darkness and the cold. I guess that’s what draws me here to the bridge at night. The darkness teases and torments me and I can’t fight back. All I can do is to try to understand.”

“You’re here by choice,” said Anderson in reply. “You’re here by design. Natural humans are, for the most part, conceived haphazardly, almost by accident, but you, you’re special, you’re a part of the greatest quest in the history of mankind, the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life. To be afraid is human, it means you think, you feel, you value life.

“Fear is simply the recognition of just how precious life actually is. It means you value what you have and you want to preserve it. That’s natural. And you’re doing the right thing. You’re not ignoring it or pretending it isn’t real, you’re facing that fear with courage.”

In the soft light, she looked beautiful. Her face radiated with a smile.

“I have no doubt we’ll detect intelligent life, the only question I have is whether there’ll be anyone back there on Earth to receive our signal.”

“Why?” asked Diana. “Where would they go?”

“It’s not so much where they would go, but whether mankind still exists.”

“Really?” replied Diana, surprised by the concept.

“Sure. It took well over four billion years for intelligent life to develop on Earth, and yet it has only been in the last six thousand years that self-aware conscious intelligence has emerged in its own right.

“The numbers are deceiving: six thousand as a proportion of four billion is something ridiculously low, something like one ten-thousandth of a percent. It’s so low that under normal conditions you’d round it down to zero, and yet that’s civilisation, that’s everything that is modern man wrapped up in a fraction of time that barely registers at all on a galactic scale.”

“And you think they’re dead?” asked Diana, still somewhat taken back by the possibility.

“It’s quite likely. We’ve been hurtling through the interstellar vacuum for well over seven hundred years. We’re five hundred and eighty light years from Earth, almost a hundred light years beyond the galactic plane, right on the cusp of the galactic magnetosphere. We’re riding the bow shock thrown up as the Milky Way ploughs through the heavens, but the time dilation effect means almost fifteen thousand years have passed back on Earth.”

Diana’s eyes widened visibly; for her, a month seemed like an eternity, let alone a year. Fifteen thousand years was inconceivable.

“Yeah,” said Anderson, seeing the expression on her face. “A lot can change in fifteen thousand years. Civilisations rise and fall. Societies ebb and surge. Entire cultures are transformed beyond recognition. I’d be surprised if they even speak English any more. We’re talking about such a vast amount of time that there are probably significant physical, biological, evolutionary differences between us and them.

“If they haven’t wiped each other out in a planetary war, there would be tectonic technological differences. The era in which the Serengeti was launched would seem to them to like ancient antiquity.”

“Really?” Diana exclaimed. Her curiosity was peaked, the concept seemed so wild and yet rang true to her ears.

“Hearing from us is going to be like hearing a voice from prehistory. And yet, like us, they have not been able to breach the speed of light.”

“How do you know that?”

“Well,” Anderson continued. “They haven’t overtaken us. If they’d developed a faster-than-light drive they would have beaten us to the halo point and stepped out beyond the bounds of the Milky Way and into the intergalactic plasma. That is, of course, if they’re still concerned about finding other forms of intelligent life.

“For all we know, they could have devolved and receded into a more privative state following some kind of apocalyptic war or global famine. Honestly, we have no idea. Except we know that they’re not in the same state we left. For better or worse, they’ve moved on over the horizon.”

Diana shone. It was invigorating to talk so openly, so freely with the commander. She felt close to him. He had a warmth that made her feel like a long-lost friend. She felt accepted, trusted.

“Do you really think there’s life in outer space?” she asked, moving closer, her leg brushing gently up against his. She felt comfortable, natural around him. Anderson leaned back on the bench, with one arm stretched out behind her, the other pushing a holo-monitor to one side as she lay gently up against him. The warmth of her body felt good.

“It’s a question that’s already been answered,” he replied softly, his voice almost as faint as the ambient light. “We already know with certainty that there is life in outer space.”

“Really?” she replied, her head turned curiously to one side in surprise.

“Sure. Where do you think the Earth is?” he said with a warm smile.

Diana laughed. Her teeth glistened in the soft light. She pushed him playfully, punching him tenderly on the shoulder, saying, “Oh, of course, but, you know what I mean. Is there any other life in outer space?”

“Well, if it happened once, why can’t it happen again? Why can’t it happen anywhere, everywhere?”

“But it doesn’t,” she replied. “It would be nice if it were that simple, but it’s not, is it?”

“Maybe it is. Maybe life is everywhere, it’s just that we can’t see it.”

“I don’t understand,” she said, enjoying the cat and mouse game of intellects, desperately wanting to comprehend. Anderson’s coffee was cold, but he sipped it anyway before continuing.

“Mankind tends to oversimplify things. We think only in terms of black and white, right and wrong, life or death. And we tend to see things from only one vantage point, our own. So we’ve looked at the Earth as though it were something special, something unique, a single point for the origin of life. We don’t see the Earth for what it actually is. We don’t see it as the third minor-sized planet in orbit around an average star roughly three-quarters of the way from the centre of a modest-sized galaxy, and yet that’s all it is.

“We see the Earth as this vast, all-encompassing, all-consuming remarkable reality. And we call it Nature. Yet everything about the Earth physically cries out as being normal or ordinary rather than exceptional or extraordinary.”

“So why haven’t we been able to find life elsewhere?” asked Diana, clearly enjoying the discussion.

“The theory goes that it’s not the Earth or even the Sun that is unique. They’re both quite average in a rather dull and boring way. It’s the very space in which the Earth and Sun are set that forms a unique environment capable of sustaining life.”

Diana was silent.

“In the early 21st century, scientists discovered that the sun is surrounded by a massive bubble of superheated interstellar hydrogen several hundred light years across. The sun is set in a bubble of low-density ionised gas glowing at over a million degrees. Now the gas is so thin and hot that it’s a poor conductor of radiation, effectively protecting the Earth from being ravaged by harsh interstellar cosmic rays that carve up the rest of the galaxy.”

“So it’s like big balloon around us?” said Diana. “Like a big air-bag.”

“Effectively, yes. The rest of our galaxy is cool and dense and flooded with crippling radiation that bounces around it like a billiard ball on a pool table hitting everything in its path. But the hot, thin gas in our Local Bubble insulates and protects us from harm. And that’s it. That’s the only significant point of distinction between our sun and literally millions of other similar sized stars spread throughout our galaxy. That’s why we have life and they don’t.”

“But I thought space was cold?” Diana asked. “Isn’t it like absolute zero, a frozen vacuum? How can it be heated to a million degrees around the Earth? Wouldn’t the Earth melt or something?”

“With only one atom for each cubic centimetre of space,” Anderson replied, rubbing the stubble that had formed on his chin, “it is a frozen vacuum. From our perspective, it’s an almost perfect vacuum that’s cooled to just a fraction over absolute zero, but that one atom is glowing like the surface of the sun. It’s incredibly hot, but it’s just so minute and minuscule it’s ineffective at heating anything else. The rest of the galaxy, out beyond our bubble, contains roughly a thousand atoms per cubic centimetre. From your perspective or mine, it’s still pretty much a complete vacuum, but relative to what’s around the Sun and the Earth, it is a thousand times more thick and dense.”

“And that’s it?” asked Diana, genuinely surprised that the critical element for sustaining life could be something so simple, something so seemingly mundane.

“That’s it. Or, at least, that’s the theory.”

“And that’s what we’re looking for out there?”

“Yes. We’re looking for bubbles, similar-size superheated gas bubbles in other galaxies. That’s where we’ll find life.”

Diana laughed at the thought, although she was sure these bubbles looked entirely different from anything she’d ever seen before, or, more precisely, anything Diana-1 had ever seen as a child and remembered for her.

“Why Serengeti?” she asked. “Why the name? Isn’t that like somewhere in Africa?”

“The theory is,” Anderson began, “that we don’t see any other forms of life around us because our galaxy is like the Arctic circle on Earth. Life can exist there, but not in great abundance. It’s just too harsh, too inhospitable. The idea is that, rather than being the norm, we’re the exception. We’re the Eskimos of the universe.”

Diana-9 laughed at the thought. Anderson smiled. He looked her in the eye as he spoke. Her attention lay wrapped around every word.

“Imagine if you took an Eskimo, someone who’s only ever known polar bears and seals, someone who’s lived their whole life thinking the Canadian or the Siberian wilderness is the norm, someone who looks at glaciers, permafrost and the frozen tundra and thinks that’s all there is, and you took them to Africa. What would they think when they stood on the Serengeti and looked out at the tens of thousands of creatures swarming around them? Ants, spiders, beetles, flamingos, eagles, butterflies, vultures, ostrich, crocodiles, wildebeest, hippos, elephants, monkeys, lions, cheetahs, gazelle, zebra, meerkats, orangutans, gorillas, snakes and lizards. They would simply be overwhelmed with the sheer diversity of life around them. But it’s life that’s always been there. But for them, it had been inaccessible.”

“And that’s why we’re here,” said Diana, realising for the first time the reality of the opportunity before them. “We’re here to explore the Serengeti.”

“Exactly. But to detect gas bubbles in other galaxies we need to get beyond the interference of our own galaxy.”

“So what’s out there?”

Her child-like excitement fascinated him. It was so simple for her. She sat there, swinging her legs back and forth. It was as though she were listening to some fast-paced music in the background, keeping time to some unheard tune. Anderson reached over and rolled a chair a little closer, putting his feet up on the seat as he leaned forward, thinking.

“What can you see?” asked Diana again.

“Nothing yet. It’s all just theory. We’re on the verge of intergalactic space. So far, we haven’t seen anything, but it’s probably because of the all the background noise and the radio interference. The probe is so sensitive that, were it stationed in an Earth orbit, it could detect the heat signature of a cup of coffee on Pluto. The problem isn’t the probe; it’s where it’s located. It needs the quiet of the intergalactic medium to focus at the sort of distances involved when it comes to other galaxies.”

“Show me.”

Proceed to part 3...