Where is everyone?
The Fermi Paradox asks, given our present understanding of the universe, why the stars are silent? If you plug in even rather conservative values for the Drake Equation, there is still a question as to why the whole Milky Way was not overrun long ago with the intelligent super-machines the Forerunners must have long ago built.
Who knows the mind of the Omniscient? It may have pleased Him to make all this jeweled emptiness in its vast ethereal splendor that we might be awed by it, as a size of the majesty of its creator.
Or every world might be as crammed with life as even deep caves and the abysses of the sea, organisms that exist on volcanic vents, or subsisting on the decay of radio active rocks … and all manner of intelligent life is crouched behind the constellations waiting for the archangel’s signal to bring up the lights and shout SURPRISE! And welcome earth into some unimaginable galactic celebration.
Or the Eldil may be maintaining radio silence, since Thulcandra, our sphere, is under quarantine.
Or the Federation might forbid First Contact with us, because their Prime Directive wishes not to disturb our quaint native ways, our wars and genocides. Or the Destroyers are maintaining radio-silence as they slide toward us through the endless night so as not to disturb their prey. Or the Dolphins long ago make contact with the space-whales telepathically, and are carrying on a brisk trade in nine-dimensional musical-philosophical spin-values with Tau Ceti, and we are no more aware of it than a plover in a cliffside nest in Greenland is aware of Wall Street.
Myself, I am prone to think (and, boy it really hurts when I am prone to think, especially when I am supine with indifference) that life might be so abundant that the high-tech supercivilizations simply don’t bother to answer when we call. They’re busy. And we don’t know what the electromagnetic signature of their industrial activity is like because we have no notion of who and what they are up to. Whole classes of astronomic actions we take to be natural might not be–wouldn’t it be ironic if every star off the main sequence was odd because they had been engineered for some megascale purpose?
But whatever the truth might be, I note that the idea that man is unique fits in without difficulty to the Christian world-view, whereas the silence of the stars needs some ad hoc explanation to save the appearances in the science-fictional world view. (I call it science-fictional, because I do not consider the Drake Equation to be real science: it is not a disprovable statement, merely an airy speculation phrased as if it were an equation.)
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
