• The Fermi Paradox
    2 replies, posted
27/06/2010 “The Fermi paradox is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for, or contact with, such civilizations.” – Wikipedia, the eree encyclopedia I came back to warn you. When I started this voyage I was 29 years old. Now my body is a mere five years older than that, but so much time has passed in the rest of the observable universe. But I’m getting ahead of myself. In 2124 I was working in one of the mining colonies on the asteroids. That was these scientists discovered how to use Neutralinos, the compounding particles of Dark Matter, for power generation. They were their own antiparticles, so when smashed against each other, they turned their rest mass into energy. Dark Matter was all over the place, so a Neutralino Lens would never run out. At least not for a few billion years. We got rid of the nanophotovoltaincs and the fusion reactors, and replaced them with Neutralino Lenses. We mounted a lens on each trans-atmospheric shuttle, interplanetary spacecraft and every robot. We had infinite power, for as long as the universe lasted. So I mounted four of those Lenses on a ship and took off. It took me two weeks to get everything set up, and I had to hear them over the radio telling me to go back to the colony while I flew the ship out of the system. As I wrote the first entries in my journal the ship was accelerating at a nice 0.5 gravities away from Earth and Sol. Then, I got into the Stasis field. After that the ship’s Lenses began catching more Neutralinos. The acceleration grew to one gravity, then ten, then fifty, and at the end the old interplanetary junkyard was accelerating at 2000 gravities. The old hyperdiamond suport beams could barely hold it together. It was risky, since the ship’s impact shields were designed for interplanetary space and could not resist a relativistic impact, but it was a mission that had to be done. My first stop was on Tau Ceti. There I found a planet. Earth-like, at least. Not breathable (At least not for a human without a mask), but definitely a paradise for the little animals that lived there. Yet no sentients. I visited Procyon and Alpha Centauri, and found no-one. On Procyon, just a few mammoth-like creatures on the snow of a frozen planet, whose year lasted 120 years. Summer and winter were decades apart on that world. I then moved on to Delta Pavonis, and found a nice world of blue algae in an ocean that covered the world. But no sentient life. The world was billions of years old, and the fossiles I found there indicated that life had begun a long time before Earth’s. Yet that world was still on a stage of basic aquatic animals. It got interesting when I reached Epsilon Eridani. On the edge of the system there was a gas giant, slightly less massive than Jupiter. There was a moon in orbit around it. The orbit was a thin and long ellipse. As the moon approached and moved away from the microjovian world, the gravity deformed the moon, constantly heating up the core. There was liquid water, there, six Astronomical Units away from the star. I found a few bacteria, but nothing interesting. With the Neutralino Lens on the ship I burnt a tunnel deep through the crust. There I found the Collapse. It was a thin, black layer between two others. It didn’t get my attention, for I lacked knowledge in geology, but it did get the computer’s. It seemed out of place. All the layers underneath corresponded with those of natural geological evolution on a moon with those conditions. But that layer was out of place. The ash of burning forests. My next surprise was on a star that was, to the best of my knowledge, unnamed. Well, it did have a name. Not a fancy one, just a catalogue number. Nothing poetic or anything. It was a red giant star, a dying star whose fusion fuel was running out. The planet had the size of Earth, and was slightly closer to its star than Earth is from the Sun. That is, when the star itself had been smaller. On the dead surface I found ruins. The atmosphere had been blown away, so there was nothing to degrade them but natural decay and the ocassional meteorite, but the system was so old I figured most of the asteroids and comets had already had their time and now there were none. The monuments were visible from orbit. Whomever lived there knew about megastructure engineering, and knew it well. I found hyperdiamond-like and Carbon Nanotube-like compounds much better than the ones on Earth-Moon. They had fused religion with residence with art, had turned their collective homes into temples of prayer and gigantic, towering monuments of what they once were. They looked beautiful from the surface. Contrast made it a world of structures falling apart and shadows, a world where the star was ten times as large as the Sun looked like from Earth and would keep growing until it went nova and took everything away. But whomever lived there had never left. The corpses were still there. And the killer was as visible as the star from the planet’s surface: A Gamma Ray burst. A dying star that had sent out a death cry to the stars, and it just happened that this planet, with a civilization that had grown out of the habits of war and environmental damage, was on the path of the gamma rays. Anyone who had been listening would’ve been fried the second the burst was detected. All the tanks of super-cooled chemicals and photomultipliers and Neutrino telescopes they had built in orbit around their Eden planet proved useless when the threat moved at the speed of light and no information can go faster than the speed of light. Any warning would come at the same time as the gamma rays. I went back into Stasis. Acceleration, continued at several gravities. On the ship time slowed down until the ship reached 9.999999% of c and keep growing. Then, the interstellar midpoint, and deceleration. Arrival at the target star, awakening, orbit around a planet of interest, landing, inspection. World after world. The icy moon of a ringed gas giant: Algae lived on occasional ponds on the ice. I found an old, decayed nuclear reactor, and a city could be seen several miles under the ice by radar. The killer had been climate. A sudden world-wide winter. A planet only a few fractions of an Astronomical Unit away from its star: Life had developed in the caves of the planet’s porous crust, in un-collapsed lave tubes. A civilization had grown there. And they were gone, too. Asteroidal impact. Shook the entire world until the underground cities collapsed. A ring of Dyson Trees, gigantic lifeforms growing on comets, around a star: A natural ring, where life had developed on its own using the materials from the comets and the heat from the star. A civilization of small, elf-like creatures had lived in the thin Oxygen-rich atmosphere between the branches of those trees. Naturally adapted to the cold, adapted to the vacuum of space and long journeys from comet to comet. But there was a time when the sun flared up, and they were gone. The Dyson Trees were ripped off and blown apart by the solar winds, the creatures in transit from one to the other died. Small wooden ‘spacecraft’ that carried tools were burnt. Then I found someone a bit more advanced: I found a completely solid Dyson Ring. A traditional Dyson Ring would’ve been a series of thousands of rotating space habitats with monstrous solar panels and heat radiators. This one was solid. A complete ring, with a flat surface and walls that rose inwards. Needless to say, it was not hyperdiamond or the stuff I found on the planet around the unnamed star. It was something else, something much stronger than any known material. Yet they had mastered it and built it. They created a civilization in a habitat capable of holding trillions of peUntitled 1ople who could walk their entire lives and never would a single man meet another one if the distance separating them originally was even. A world around a star, whose inner surface contained oceans, lakes, rivers, continents, mountains and everything their planet had. Until the Sun flared up. Then the Asteroidal Defense Network, a series of gamma-ray lasers mounted on asteroids, also failed, and the Ring hit an asteroid field. If it had hit the outer surface nothing would’ve happened thanks to the incredible strenght of whatever material they used. But this one hit the inner surface, and those who didn’t die due to radiation poisoning during the initial flare were killed by the impacts. Then, the Defense Network itself failed. Radiation damaged the computers and they aimed their gamma-ray lasers at the world itself. After half the surface had been irradiated, the attitude jets on the asteroids failed and they hit the world too. The amount of knowledge held in the library was incredible. A record of everything that had happened to the structure, and mysteries humanity had wondered since the dawn of time. But radiation there was much higher than background, and my suit, along with the rest of my ship, were already eleven thousand years old at the time. I wondered what had happened to Earth. So I continued exploring. This time I went further, outside the galaxy, to the Magellanic Clouds. There, I found wonders. Eden planets orbited in perfect formation around gas giants of all colours. Rings like the ones I had found on nearly every star, rings much bigger and of ecologies that nobody on Earth could’ve understood. Gigantic Dyson Spheres, series of billions of space habitats capable of holding several trillions of people. Megastructures were everywhere. They had turned the lesser cloud into a garden, where every asteroid, comet, moon, planet and artificial megastructure had an ecology of its own. But then there was a Pulsar event. A flash, and the worlds were gone. By the time I had arrived, the ecology had restored itself to what it once had been. But the sentients were gone. Until I found them. Their ships were carved out of the comets. Using the Helium-3 they fed fusion reactors, and the electrolyzed water ice worked as reaction mass for their ion drives. The Cometships went up to 1% of lightspeed only, but their lifetimes were so long they didn’t even bother. The leader of the Cummunity of the ship, which the small eagle-like creatures called The Net of the Million Worlds (What ever that meant) told me stories of the might of their species, which once ruled the Lesser Cloud, turned it into a society were peace and prosperity were the founding values. When they set their eyes on the other cloud, the Event happened. Their megastructures lost the automatics, and the Artificial Intelligences which had worked alongside them and helped build this all were lost by radiation. All that remained of the empire that would’ve reached Earth if given the time were a few asteroidal mining colonies and Cometships. They went from world to world, trading with local primeval communities for spare parts, old artifacts, and supplies. What once had been… So I came back. I fired up the Neutralino Lens, got into Stasis and set the ship to accelerate as much as possible. Constant acceleration, then, after the intergalactic midpoint, constant acceleration in the opposite vector. That is, deceleration. By the time the ship woke me up, hundreds of thousands of years had gone by. Everybody I knew was dead, either under natural causes or by accident, since the longer you live the greater the chance of you having a life-ending accident. Nobody escapes death, not even with the best of nanotech and genetic engineering. So I got off the chamber, reached out for the nearest handrail in the pitch dark chamber at the front of the ship. I climbed up to the cockpit, slid past the ice-covered fabric of the seat, and looked through the porthole. Earth. Its northern hemisphere completely covered in ice and snow. The dark side showed no city lights or anything. The southern hemisphere was just as dead, with brown patches as large as Africa replacing the once green continents. What those continents were was anyone’s guess. How had they changed so much in so little time? They were unrecognizable. Either humans had grown old of the old shapes and decided to change them or something else had. I checked the radio. Since entering the Solar System it had caught no transmissions. Humanity was gone and it trailed dead silence across all frequencies. All that was left was an impact crater the size of Australia. ------------------ Originally posted on my blag: [url]http://pleasegodno.wordpress.com/2010/06/27/the-fermi-paradox/[/url] So yeah, it's basically my answer to the Fermi Paradox: Alien, intelligent life is amazingly common, but catastrophic events prevent it from reaching any significant point of technological advancement or simply prevent it from expanding into space.
There were some spelling and grammar errors in places, but I like the idea of this story. I like how detailed you got in the descriptions of the mega structures and planets. I don't understand why the character randomly decided to leave the mining colony on a mission that he'd pretty much knew would end when human civilization as he knew it would be gone, but that's just semantics :buddy: If you make a sequel to this, I'd love to see the character interact with some of the civilizations he encounters. Maybe some are peaceful, perhaps some violent, maybe some are intensely apathetic towards everything. I give it a 7/10. Enjoyable but needs some improvement.
[QUOTE=wonkadonk;22916938]There were some spelling and grammar errors in places, but I like the idea of this story. I like how detailed you got in the descriptions of the mega structures and planets. I don't understand why the character randomly decided to leave the mining colony on a mission that he'd pretty much knew would end when human civilization as he knew it would be gone, but that's just semantics :buddy: If you make a sequel to this, I'd love to see the character interact with some of the civilizations he encounters. Maybe some are peaceful, perhaps some violent, maybe some are intensely apathetic towards everything. I give it a 7/10. Enjoyable but needs some improvement.[/QUOTE] Well, the guy didn't leave knowing humanity was going to end. As soon as relativistic spaceflight became possible (Thanks to the Neutralino Lens) the guy simply left Earth to answer the Fermi Paradox. He just wanted to know why there were no transmissions from anyone out there. When he realized it was because they all died out of cosmic chance, he realized he was too far away from Earth (150,000 ly) to warn them, but he went back anyways and realized it was too late to warn humanity. Yeah I should edit it a bit to include a part that says he left to answer the Paradox.
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.