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Get us off this Earth: Glenn Reynolds

If humans are going to survive for the long term, we have to leave the nest.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds
On the Hungarian-Slovakian border in June 2016.

In 1950, physicist Enrico Fermi looked at the billions of stars in our galaxy, the likelihood that many of them might have planets, some of which, statistically, would be capable of supporting life, some of which would, statistically, evolve intelligence. Then he realized that intelligent life at a 20th century level would be detectable across huge distances, and that even slower-than-light travel would allow a species to colonize the galaxy in a few million years.

Which led to his famous question: ”Where is everybody?

This question has sharpened in recent years, as improved telescopes have shown that planets, and even earth-like planets are more common than we had previously expected. So: Where is everybody?

There are a number of answers to this question: We might just be the first intelligent species to evolve in our galaxy, at least to the point that we would be detectable by our radio emissions. Sure, that seems unlikely, but somebody has to be first. Or maybe most advanced civilizations move quickly beyond radio to methods of communication, perhaps based on quantum mechanics, that we can’t detect. Then there’s the so-called "zoo hypothesis,” that aliens are keeping us isolated, possibly for our own good.

The most troubling hypothesis, though, is that when civilizations become sufficiently advanced to be detectable, they’re also sufficiently advanced to destroy themselves in some fashion in short order. Once you get radio powerful enough to be detected across light years, you’re close to developing technologies like nuclear weapons, advanced biological weapons, killer nanotechnology, strong artificial Intelligence, etc., and one of those technologies wipes your civilization out in what, in cosmic terms, is the blink of an eye, making it unlikely that anyone else will notice your existence.

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People who think about this refer to a "Great Filter,” something that tends to wipe out civilizations between the time they split the atom and the time they are able to colonize other planets, thus presumably avoiding the risk of being wiped out entirely. But can we know what that Great Filter is in advance, and maybe avoid it?

That’s the subject of an interesting paper by Smith College economist James Miller and the University of Massachusetts’ D. Felton, The Fermi Paradox, Bayes’ Rule, and Existential Risk Management. In essence, they argue that if there are “Doomsday Traps” in the form of weapons, or maybe physics experiments that could go wrong with catastrophic results (there have been such fears regarding experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, but so far we’re still here), they’re probably not obvious, or some civilization somewhere would have avoided them. Thus, we should look for signs of planets destroyed by physics experiments gone wrong, and other signs of planetary destruction, as a cue toward developing avoidance strategies of our own.

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It’s a very interesting paper, but to me the best way to protect ourselves from the Great Filter is to shorten the time between splitting the atom, which was done in my grandparents’ time, and colonizing other planets, which I’d hoped would be underway by now. Once humanity is spread across the solar system, and even moreso once it has colonized other stars, the likelihood of anything, even a nuclear war or deadly physics experiment, wiping us all out is much, much smaller.

We aren’t sure that there’s a Great Filter at all, of course. We might just be the first of our kind. (Or in a zoo). But since we can’t know until it’s too late, doesn’t it make sense to get to the point where it doesn’t matter anymore? As Robert Heinlein once said, “Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for mankind to keep all its eggs in.” Time to get moving.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

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