Theories, ideas and discussions relating to The Great Silence (‘Fermi Paradox’) and ultimate nature of reality

An exceptional, random and irreproducible sequence of events spanning 4.5 billion years eventually led to the arrival on Earth of the homo sapiens species with its capacity to develop technology and fathom the deep mysteries of the universe. From abiogenesis in ponds, tidepools and deep-sea hydrothermal vents to RNA, DNA and multicellular life evolving over billions of years shaped by cosmic and terrestrial events. To the Cambrian explosion to quantum computers, artificial intelligence and experiments probing the origins of the universe. The word ‘miraculous’ to describe this remarkable pathway seems almost inadequate.

A beacon of consciousness

The tenancy of homo sapiens constitutes only around 0.007% of the age of the Earth, during which the population of our species has been reduced on a number of occasions to near extinction. Use of technology starting with written language in Mesopotamia has existed only for one millionth of Earth’s history. Earth has around 0.5 billion years of habitability remaining – had civilisation evolved 10% later we wouldn’t be here. Our ephemeral and precarious beacon of consciousness in the vast emptiness of space emphasises both the uniqueness of humanity and the need to protect our precious planet.

No signals

Continued improvements and investment in alien search technology, ongoing discoveries of potentially habitable exoplanets, organic molecules inherent in interstellar molecular clouds and so forth have fostered the widespread belief that the discovery of alien signals is an inevitability at some point in the near future. I argue in contrast, using my own research and that of others, that the probability of humans receiving an intelligible alien signal is vanishingly small.

An interdisciplinary approach

My name is Gary Robertshaw and this website is a collection of theories, ideas and discussions relating to The Great Silence (‘Fermi Paradox’). A necessarily broad interdisciplinary approach is adopted throughout to include a consideration of more esoteric subjects such as the nature of consciousness, perception and the meaning of reality, evolution, philosophy and economics.

The material covered on this website is scientific, academically rigorous and evidence-based. The website is work-in-progress with open questions. Comments and feedback are invited as the site is developed.

“The biggest joy was on the way home. In my cockpit window, every two minutes: The Earth, the Moon, the Sun, and the whole 360-degree panorama of the heavens. And that was a powerful, overwhelming experience. And suddenly I realized that the molecules of my body, and the molecules of the spacecraft, the molecules in the body of my partners, were prototyped, manufactured in some ancient generation of stars. And that was an overwhelming sense of oneness, of connectedness; it wasn’t ‘Them and Us’, it was ‘That’s me!’, that’s all of it, it’s… it’s one thing. And it was accompanied by an ecstasy, a sense of ‘Oh my God, wow, yes’, an insight, an epiphany.” – Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 Astronaut

And now for some questions…

42 – What is the meaning of life, the universe and everything?

When the fictional supercomputer Deep Thought is asked what the answer is to life, the universe and everything in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy it comes up with the rather wry answer ’42’. But there may be deeper, symbolic significance behind this humorous answer.

Data – Is information the only thing that exists?

‘It from bit’ is a phrase coined by John Wheeler, which encapsulates what some physicists believe; that physical reality, the ‘it’, is ultimately made from information, or bits. However, what then is information? Is it a physical ‘thing’ from which space, time and matter emerge? Or is it simply something that just represents our knowledge about reality?

Fermi Paradox – Where is everybody?

There are an estimated quadrillion stars in the universe. Almost every star hosts a planet, with around 1 in 6 stars having a planet similar to Earth and i has been estimated that there could be 600bn Earth-like planets in the Milky Way alone. Yet no alien signal has ever been detected.

Leibniz Conundrum – Why is there something rather than nothing?

This truly fundamental question about existence has been posited by a range of philosophers including Leibniz and Wittgenstein. Attempts to answer this question in terms of the quantum vacuum state seem to require a redefinition of the word ‘nothingness’.

Interconnectedness – What does inseparability imply?

‘Pick a flower on Earth and you move the farthest star’ said Paul Dirac. If all that exists is fundamentally interconnected and inseparable then does that logically precludes the existence of anything in true isolation, including phenomena that emerge from the physical such as consciousness, observations and measurement?

What is consciousness?

“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” – Max Planck

Perception – What in reality is reality?

We see less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum. We are traveling at 220km per second across the galaxy. The atoms in your body are almost entirely empty space and came from a star, 90% of the cells in your body carry their own microbial DNA and are not “you”. The existence of the rainbow depends on the conical photoreceptors in your eyes; to animals without cones, the rainbow does not exist. So you don’t just look at a rainbow, you create it. What then, is reality?

Perspectives – What is humanity’s place in the cosmos?

“Once we see that the probability of life originating at random is so utterly minuscule as to make it absurd, it becomes sensible to think that the favourable properties of physics on which life depends are in every respect deliberate … . It is therefore almost inevitable that our own measure of intelligence must reflect … higher intelligences … even to the limit of God … such a theory is so obvious that one wonders why it is not widely accepted as being self-evident. The reasons are psychological rather than scientific.” – Fred Hoyle