Robin H. D. Corbet recently shared a preprint paper on Arxiv.org “A Less Terrifying Universe? Mundanity as an Explanation for the Fermi Paradox” that is getting a little press (if we can still call online dissemination “press”…). Corbet’s paper “examines…the lack of strong evidence for the presence of technology-using extraterrestrial civilizations (ETCs) in the Galaxy,” a lack explained by “the prospect that the Galaxy contains a modest number of civilizations…, where none have achieved technology levels sufficient to accomplish large-scale astro-engineering or lack the desire to do so.” In the course of his argument, Corbet exhibits a perversity of thought that the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is particularly useful for exposing, which suggests a more humbling implication of “the Great Silence” than SETI researchers seem able to face.
The perversities I refer to are found in the paper’s second section, “QUANTIFYING TECHNOLOGY LEVELS.” Corbet begins by summarizing the Kardashev scale, which classifies civilizations in terms of their “power utilization.” He then recognizes
[o]ther proposed scales [which] include Sagan’s, based on information storage and Barrow’s, based on how small a scale objects can be manipulated. Other characterizations might involve the maximum spacecraft velocity achieved or the intelligence level attained by computer systems….Yet another measure of technological development might be extension of an organism’s life span.
This section betrays some curious implications. However much the “Kardashev scale has limitations in that it only considers power utilization and no other facets of development” (my emphasis), those “other facets of development” Corbet lists are remarkably narrow. One might immediately object to this judgement, that these measures are intended to be pertinent only to a civilization’s being detectable. “Power utilization,” for example, is a factor in a civilization’s developing those technosignatures that would reveal them to our instruments, such as artificial electromagnetic signals or signs of astro-engineering, but “power utilization” along with those others—“information storage,” “the intelligence level attained by computer systems,” and even at “how small a scale objects can be manipulated”—all seem more to be what keeps Sam Altman up at night, i.e., the present concerns of “our” own so-called “advanced” societies. (Even the “extension of an organism’s life span” is the focus of some of Altman’s tech bros). Indeed, the concept of development itself implies a linear scale whereby civilizations can be measured as more-or-less developed, a line of thinking employed by the European colonizers of “the New World” to assert their own superiority and one which was weaponized during the Cold War as Development Politics. These proposed “scientific” measures of “development,” however much they are overtly formulated to help solve the central problem of SETI, at the same time betray the intellectual prejudices and social investments of the researchers, as active participants in the fields of the sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and members of the earth’s “advanced” societies. This unconscious conflation of civilization with technological development is readable even at the level of Corbet’s language, where, in this section, he writes ‘civilization’ nine times, more or less framed by the single repetition of ‘technological development’ at the beginning and end of the section.
These considerations lend an irony (to say the least) to Corbet’s writing that “the goal of [his] paper is to consider not especially exciting solutions to the Fermi paradox, based on the concept that the most mundane explanation(s), if physically feasible, is/are most likely to be correct. This follows from the Copernican mediocrity principle, where humanity does not occupy a special place in the Universe” (my emphasis). The measures of development Corbet posits contradict this mediocrity principle, for, not only are they not even, strictly, geo- or even anthropocentric, but are modeled on but one social inflection of Homo Sapiens, an inflection that itself comes to be only in the context of “civilization,” a “development” that occurs only within less than a twentieth of the time our species has inhabited the planet. That is, the very schemes of civilizational classification (even within the very narrow confines of SETI) assume as paradigmatic the social formation of the so-called “First World,” that “humanity,” in the guise of the “First World,” does occupy “a special place in the Universe,” namely, as exemplary of the kind of civilization SETI might eventually detect. The Great Silence might then be taken to declare, ironically, not so much that ETCs may not have “achieved technology levels sufficient” for SETI to detect them but to declaim all the louder that the “First World” is hardly a standard by which technological or civilizational development can be measured, being rather merely a momentary, singularly unique social organization of a small, self-important minority of but one species on earth. This revelation may not be terrifying or even necessarily humbling, but hopefully inspiring of some circumspection.
Skunkworks 