Suppose for the moment that one is a science fiction writer. Suppose further that one desires a universe in which intelligence is fairly common and interstellar travel is possible. Suppose that, for compelling plot reasons, one wants humans to be the first species to develop interstellar flight. What, then, could keep all those other beings confined to their home worlds?
Here are options, presented in order of internal to external.
The easiest method, of course, is that while our Hypothetical Aliens—Hypotheticals for short!—are just as bright as we are, a glance at human prehistory suggests that there is no particular reason to think we were fated to go down the technological path that we did. Sure, the last ten thousand years have seen breakneck technological development, but that’s just a minute portion of a long history. Anatomically modern humans date back 300,000 years. The last ten thousand years have been highly atypical even for our sort of human. Other human species appear to have come and gone without ever venturing out of the hunter-gatherer niche.1 Perhaps the development of agriculture was a wildly unlikely fluke.
Humans were lucky enough to be surrounded by plants that could be cultivated and animals that could be domesticated. However, most plants and animals remain wild. It’s easy enough to imagine Hypotheticals in ecosystems entirely lacking in agriculture and domestication-appropriate species, which could well be a significant handicap in developing technologically sophisticated civilizations.
We can even speculate that our Hypotheticals are a bit more intrinsically anti-social than humans. We may think that humans are exceedingly violent, but in fact we’re pretty good at tolerating each other. We think nothing of cramming a couple of hundred humans onto an airplane. We expect for all of them to arrive alive and unharmed. Frans de Waal’s Chimpanzee Politics suggests that a few hundred unrestrained adult chimpanzees on a plane might well fail the “all alive and unharmed” test.
On the grand scale, chimpanzees are not all that different from us: ants make primates seem like saints when it comes to unrestrained violent impulses aimed at other communities. Hand a human an H-bomb and they can refrain from using it for decades at a time. Would that be true for intelligent ants? Would they even be able to cooperate on the community level long enough to acquire nukes?
Humans are also fortunate that cultural continuity between generations is possible. Consider, for example, salmon. Once they spawn, they die. If there were such a thing as an intelligent salmon, each generation would have to start from scratch. Even if work-arounds were possible (like a caste of teachers who forgo reproduction so that they can live long enough to educate the kids), that probably wouldn’t be enough to allow complex societies.
What if the Hypotheticals don’t have hands or similar gripping appendages? The utility of hands cannot be understated. Other species also can use beak, claw, or trunk2, but they aren’t as dexterous as human hands. Nor can they safely be used to manipulate anything sharp or poisonous. The average lifespan of a crow chemist encountering fluorine for the first time cannot be all that long.
Environment counts. Humans have been lucky to find abundant resources in places they could reach and in forms they could exploit. Result: increasing sophisticated resource extraction.3 That was in no way inevitable. For example, ninety percent of today’s coal beds date from the Carboniferous and Permian periods, which represent one fiftieth of Earth’s history. Had geology played out a little differently, our coal resources might have been far more meager than they were, greatly impeding industrial development. One could easily imagine a world whose geology is broadly Earthlike but deficient in easily exploitable resources.4
Should inconsiderate geology prove insufficient, consider that most of the Earth is covered in oceans. Imagine the bright Hypotheticals confined to an ocean. Entire pathways of development, particularly those involving fire, would be far more difficult for aquatic Hypotheticals. It’s even worse for Hypotheticals who hail from frigid ocean worlds like Europa. Not only is the ocean ten times deeper than Earth’s ocean, not only do exotic ices pave the ocean floor, making access to heavier elements harder…but the universe is on the other side of a layer of surface ice. All humans needed to start developing astronomy was to look up. Hypotheticals on a frozen-over Europa would find the task much harder.5
Lastly: Self-extinction. All we need for our imaginary, plot-driven purposes is for most intelligent species to go extinct stumbling over the first steps to space-age technology. Thus when humans venture out, they’ll find only young and low-tech species.
Of course, this is nothing like a comprehensive list. No doubt you can think of other scenarios that would explain why humans would be the first to travel the stars. Feel free to mention them in comments below.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and the Aurora finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award, is eligible to be nominated again this year, and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]This is a gross simplification of human lifestyles prior to agriculture in all its forms.
[2]What about tentacles, you ask? …Look, the Winged Victory of Samothrace!
[3]Not that resource extraction and use will inevitably lead to further development. The Old Copper Complex cultures (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Copper_Complex) had access to abundant copper nuggets in forms that could be worked with available technology. This did not lead to the discovery of bronze- or iron-working (as far as we know); instead, after its heyday copper use declined, largely displaced by other technologies for reasons not fully understood.
[4]There is of course the special case where a planet had abundant, easy to reach resources in the past, all of which were used up by one or more previous technological cultures. After all, nothing says a planet can only have a single instance of bright tool-user. If humans obliterate ourselves, the intelligent racoons of AD One Million will curse us when they start looking for accessible reserves of petroleum.
[5]Not all SF authors think a fluid environment precludes technological life: see John Wyndham’s “The Kraken Wakes.” However, that we’re looking for here is an explanation suitably plausible for a story.
And of course I forgot a really good one: what if Earth is just smaller than most worlds with indigenous intelligent toolusers? Rocket mass ratio is M/m = e^(delta vee/exhaust velocity). As it is, we need behemoth chemical rockets to get off the planet. If escape velocity was higher, the mass ratios might be unworkable.
I wonder at what planetary mass an Orion type drive wouldn’t be powerful enough to reach orbit
Species using nuclear putt-putts to launch from planetary surfaces would be well-advised to have better resistance to radiation than we do. Although as I recall Dyson’s book on Project Orion, at least the fallout from US-launched Orions would have tended to come down on non-American territory.
Regarding footnote 4, I remember reading an article in Omni by Ben Bova many years ago in which he noted that this might well be the only time in the life of this planet that it’s possible for a species to achieve space flight and actually expand off the planet, as the raw materials necessary to build the technological civilisation will no longer be readily available unless we start bringing them in from elsewhere. I often wonder whether planets that breed spacefaring civilisations are like dandelions — the seeds are scattered to the wind, leaving the empty planet behind.
The answer to the Fermi Paradox may well be that each world gets only one chance, and most species blow it.
That was a popular argument back in the 1970s. Its roots may go back to The Challenge of Man’s Future in the 1950s but it got a huge boost from The Club of Rome. It’s useful to convey urgency to the tax-payers, although as we saw not effective enough. The twist in the 1970s was that we only had about 30 years of oil left, so obs without SPS civilization ground to a halt in 2000 or thereabouts.
As I recall, Michael Kube-McDowell’s twist on this was peacenik scientists inventing a Nuke No More field that quenched all fission triggers on the planet just before the oil ran out. It then became clear the field did not distinguish between warheads and reactors. Cue long planet-wide depression during the search for new energy sources.
The Mote in God’s Eye has the Moties having to go directly from post global war stone age to nuclear fusion. Time after time.
At least the Moties left themselves notes.
That 10,000 year time mentioned in the third paragraph is interesting for another reason. If you look at Earth’s climactic history — well, what little we know about Earth’s climactic history — that last 10,000 years have been remarkably stable. It may have been a fluke, which has interesting repercussions for the future.
Relevant to 8 – most known extrasolar planetary systems (admittedly, a biased sample) are more densely packed than our own, with more planets in the inner systems. This could drive stronger orbital cycles – planet/planet interactions could result in significantly less stable climates. For example, in some planets in the Trappist system, orbital eccentricities and tidal heating vary year to year – https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-017-0129#MOESM169
Salmon-sapients wouldn’t have to teach their own children. They live for years in the sea between hatching and egglaying; there’s plenty of time for the school to teach new members. (It’s even called a school!)
ObSF: the aliens of of Genesis Quest by Donald Moffitt (the Nar) are essentially coelenterata I believe. They die in order to spawn. But it’s many years of life before spawning, so they’ve acquired a very high civilization. Extremely high bandwidth communication via cilia helps.
If this is a “name the story” exercise, aliens who are barely able to cooperate appear in James White’s volume “Star Healer”, on planet Goglesk, in his “Sector General” series. Dr Conway is on holiday on Goglesk.
Then there’s what I call the Even Stronger Anthropic Principle.
In quantum theory, pace decoherence, a system remains in a suspended condition of uncertainty until observed. Then, the Universe will be uncertain until an observer evolves in one of its eigenstates. The first planet to develop sentience and sapience gets to determine (without knowing it) the whole enchilada. Or chimichanga, whatever. The point being, in this eigenstate (allowing for the multiple-universe hypothesis), Earth was, purely by chance, the first planet to develop observers, and the eigenvector collapsed around that fact.
How about a flying bird/bat like species that can travel long distances (Yes I have stolen this from Ken Macleod). Suppose also the species values the inventiveness and quality of its musical songs but does not separate music and mathematics.
For generations their brightest minds would travel to meet each other and their scientific development would be close to the fastest possible (insert fix here to allow their engineering to keep up).
As a bonus they would be predisposed toward space travel to find other ‘brilliant’ minds.
Perhaps the ultimate expression of interstellar civilisation is a kind of mathematical Eurovision song contest
@13
Didn’t Scalzi write novel with that plot, sort of
Huh. Question marks at the end of sentences appear to get stripped out.
@13,@14,
Try Catherynne Valente’s Space Opera.
Wasn’t there a Nick van Rijn story where the two species- one, a large creature with a trunk, and the other, a small creature with cilia or tentacles combined to make one sapient individual?
@7 – wouldn’t the Moties have left themselves noties?
@15: the last character of my posts *always* gets eaten here, so I add a sacrificial space at the end.
Or use Poul Anderson’s approach (from Tau Zero) and be the first high-tech civilization in the universe by flying your Bussard ramjet through the collapse of the universe and big bang then colonizing one of the first solar systems to form in the next iteration of the cosmos. What could possibly go wrong?
What was that about less than fifty colonists, radiation, and genetic diversity?
@16: That’s Hiding Place. Poul Anderson also revisited symbiosis in The Rebel Worlds (where the Didonians are a combination of three individuals of differet species), and in Fire Time (though in that case the Ishtarians’s “plant” skin symbiotes are more analogous to our gut biota).
Footnote 5: The Seedling Stars – a short story collection by James Blish. The story Surface Tension (1952) is about a water world and the efforts it took for Hypotheticals to see the stars for the first time.
One point I’ve thought about for decades: an intelligent species needs to be relatively weak in its home environment … tigers don’t need to think too much.
@1- How about a Babylon Gun type system? Still need a doozy of an energy expenditure, but might it mitigate the “need fuel to carry the fuel you need to carry the fuel you need…” problem? That is, if you can get it built without suspicious neighbors rendering fatal objections…
It’s fairly obvious that Humans are not the first species to do this. We haven’t done it yet. How arrogant to assume we would be the first.
@12: There’s an Egan novel that uses that idea.
Leaving aside the boring answer of “there are no ETI,” the answer would be “dumb luck.”
If the various octopus species did not die after they spawn, what might the accumulated wisdom of their species produce? They already learn skills by watching each other. If they could live long enough to collect the body of their knowledge and pass it on, we might have a set of home grown aliens to contend with. They are certainly dexterous and good at problem solving. They also exhibit curiosity (or is that boredom from living in a lab?) There is that water thing, though, although fish once solved that problem by evolving into reptiles. What would an octopus evolve into and what would it’s brain/mind be like? Would it communicate with color? Hmmm . . . . .
#21– I just finished Andy Weir’s Hail Mary in which the Hypothetical race is blind (with sonar). He postulates all kinds of interesting side effects.
As fanciful as these points are, they draw up the archive of imperial, colonial themes within SF, in which humanness is conflated with the idea of a white, able-bodied liberal humanist subject. Sure, we can say there’s a lot that points to Man being resourceful in a speculative future, but wouldn’t it be better to imagine futures where humans come into contact and grow alongside with others, if not ignore the drive to compare “species” and group longevity? Thinking in terms of resources itself reproduces a capitalist sense of ownership and claim, let alone an imperialist one (one world seeing itself more resourcefully advanced than another).
This piece is a big ouch.
@13, @14, @16: the famous “Alien Space Bats”, huh. Maybe they are singing on Earth and we can’t hear them because they are so high pitched.
@16: James White’s “Sector General” hospital also has Tralthans. Species classification FGLI is described as “elephantine”. Their symbiote species is OTSB. FGLI has the brains, and OTSB, which not all of them choose to have, has super-sensitive eyes and tentacles. So, they’re doctors – and in particular, surgeons.
There are a lot of assumptions in this article. How about if we are the only intelligent species in the universe? What if by a bizarre set of cosmic events life began on Earth randomly and could not be replicated anywhere else? Scientists and astronomers are beginning to ponder whether any intelligence life exists out in the cosmos. It just may be that creating life is incredibly hard and the rise of intelligent life even more so by orders of magnitude. I hope to be proven wrong and that we find some intelligent monkeys living on a distant planet.
Example of “inconsiderate geology/astronomy” category would be Nightfall by Asimov / Silverberg (depending on the version), where the planet is always covered by at least one sun, which restricted the world view from ever wondering if there’s anything else beyond the suns in the sky.
In regard to your note about planet size, I’d note there’s some suggestion that Earth may be just barely squeaking into the range of planets large enough to support complex ecosystems and lifeforms. If intelligent toolusers are more likely on super-earths, then the problem of accessing space may be a really big deal.
My biggest objection to the pessimism of the Fermi Paradox is the question of motivation. I don’t see that we can assume that other species will have the same motivations we do, so maybe they don’t want to expand, but are contemplating their navels instead, etc. I find a lot of it raging anthropomorphism.
@26 Children of Ruin (Adrian Tchaikovsky)?
From the article title I expected discussion of competitive racing of spacecraft, but perhaps we get that story more in sci fi TV shows. I’m not thinking of “plot where Flash Gordon has to get to Neptune before Ming the Merciless does”, or the collection of “plot coupons”, but a formal contest, and actually, none come to mind. Maybe it’s not great in print.
@35: Arthur C. Clarke wrote a story about a race between light-sail ships called “The Wind From the Sun,” which was collected in an anthology of the same name.
Tim Marshall’s “Prisoners Of Geography” presents some compelling arguments about the influence of climate and terrain over the rise of technological civilizations. He suggests that favourable geography in Mesopotamia, Western Europe and China encouraged agriculture, urbanisation and trade, while adverse geography in central Africa and the Americas discouraged the same – although the raw material of homo sapiens was present everywhere. It’s easy to imagine how these ideas could be extended to any intelligent species having the dumb luck to emerge in a fertile environment for technological advances, or being forever stuck in a place where their potential cannot be realised.
rja-carnegie@35: Space racing also figures in at least one of the The Expanse novels, in which the pilot finds out the hard way what happens when one enters the Sol ring at speed.
@16 Also check out Julie Czerneda’s Assemblers. Wierd (Very Wierd!) creatures, they.
I can envision (not bloody likely! but envision, anyway) a species who achieves a significant level of advancement, but having achieved what they consider to be the ultimate, has bred driving ambition and most curiosity out themselves. Those aapects being the bane of “stable societies”. Their planet (or evn postulating colonization of severl worlds n their system) provides them with all they need. So they expand their minds in more inward-facing pursuits.
Sounds kinda boring, but then, I’m a barbarian, curiosity-driven, biped.
@30 Of course there are a lot of assumptions in the article. It’s explicitly based on them. It’s saying “Assume we want this particular kind of SF scenario. What could make it plausible?”
It’s not actually one of my favourite SF scenarios because it’s been done to death and it is kind of human-centric/imperialist/triumphalist.
But I won’t say it’s unlikely. One potential problem is that the galaxy is really, really big and has an awful lot of stars–quick google–like a hundred billion. The “Humans first to space” scenario becomes a lot more plausible if there are only a few dozen other intelligent races in the galaxy, not a few million. So before we even get to reasons the intelligent species didn’t get to high tech and/or space, we need to trim the numbers down. Now, back in the day we used to think there might be rather few planets out there, period. Turns out that’s not the case, which is nice but means there’s lots of places for life to develop. But it seems like if you get too close to the middle of the galaxy, there’s a ton of radiation sleeting around. So the action is out in the spiral arms; that cuts out a lot of real estate especially since the core region is a lot denser with stars. Thinking of radiation, otherwise habitable planets might have serious problems if they don’t have a magnetic field to bend a lot of the nasty stuff away from the inhabitants. Many star systems seem to have planets, but none in the “Goldilocks Zone”. Really old, first generation stars would have few or no heavier elements, and by heavier I mean things like “carbon”, “iron”–planets would be basically just gas giants. So they’re out. Maybe even second-generation would have too few heavy elements; the sun is third I believe. Big, fast-burning stars like blue giants are probably out too, because their neighborhood is too violent and anyway they live fast, die young, blow up before life can really get started. There are a ton of factors that might make seriously habitable planets pretty rare in the first place, leaving little enough life, and so little enough intelligent life, for it to make some sense that none of those few made it before us.
When it comes to why some other intelligent life wasn’t in space before us, there’s always the boring reason: They’re working on it. We just had a head start–our sun’s a smidge older, or earth solidified slightly sooner, or evolution had one less disastrous setback here, and so the aliens are still in the stone age or whatever, and might get there in the future if it weren’t for the fact that we’re going to conquer their planet, settle it with humans, and steal all their stuff. Some of them might get to see the stars as flight attendants, though.
@35 There is a bit of stuff about competitive racing of spacecraft. Often it’s a side plot, but for books completely built around the idea, off hand I can think of “Roger Zelazny’s Alien Speedway” and an oldie but fun, “Rocket Jockey” by Lester del Rey.
@0: It’s easy enough to imagine Hypotheticals in ecosystems entirely lacking in agriculture and domestication-appropriate species i.e., a more-stringent version of Guns, Germs, and Steel?
@0: my partner asks “Does footnote 2 mean that the WVoT has tentacles?”
An early Clarke story (possibly “Rescue Party”) hypothesizes that Earthlings just progressed faster than every other species — IIRC nobody else thought of spaceships until they’d had airplanes for hundreds of years. There was no explanation for this, but it probably pleased Campbell. Poul Anderson, OTOH, had us arriving at a planet where the inhabitants are clearly brighter than us but started enough later that they haven’t caught up — so we ~assimilate them; I’m blanking on the title, but it has a memorable first line: “Please, mister, can I have a cracker for my oontatherium?”
@strueb I always imagine a civilization like that of the Mystics from The Dark Crystal. Just vibing for millennia, highly advanced, but not coveting the stars.
Thank you for pointers to “an actual race through space” stories!
@42: “Rescue Party”, to read on Baen’s web site but you probably own a copy anyway, does mention surprising progress by Earth society – from no intelligent life 400000 years ago (harsh? it’s an observation by aliens) to (unintended) interstellar radio signals – though at the same time, I have an idea that in “The Early Asimov” stories, possibly in the “Homo Sol” sequence, a similar idea appeared. Of course, famous editor John Campbell liked “Humanity? My Goodness, Yes!” stories.
Clarke’s aliens’ observation may be harsh by present-day understanding, but our knowledge of our intermediate ancestors has increased massively since he wrote the story; ISTM a lot of fruitful digs were started in the wake of Lucy (1974).
The simplest way one species might beat another to space is just having the luck the be older.
Lets assume Humans and Hypotheticals are identical in every way, with identical planets. But the universe is ~13.7bn years old, and Earth ~4.5bn years old. Planets and stars didn’t all form at the same time, and, assuming there’s life elsewhere, no reason to assume that it takes a certain amount of time for life to arise from the primordial soup (or whatever theory of abiogenesis you prefer.)
So even given a perfectly level playing field, Humans might beat Hypotheticals just because our planet coalesced out of the protoplanetary disk a few millennia sooner.
In fact, it’s incredibly unlikely that any two civilisations would achieve spaceflight at even close to the same time, unless intelligent life is incredibly abundant in the galaxy. It took (very approximately) 3.7bn years for humans to evolve from single-celled organisms. If we assume that’s a typical timescale, then even a variance of ±0.1% is ±3.7 million years. And that’s without factoring in the different times it can take for a star and planets to form.
We might be right next door to a civilisation that went extinct around the time mammals evolved, or one whose ancestors are just starting to leave their oceans.
46. mishagale, your comment reminded me of Jared Diamond’s book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, where Diamond lays out the argument that Western societies advanced faster than others (Africa, the Americas, Indonesia) because luck provided them with resources and the right animals to support a thriving civilization (for example, there were very few domesticated animals in the Americas). Luck in the form of resources plays a part in the development of a civilization. Hypotheticals could actually be more intelligent than humans, but not have the right resources to make them a space faring species.