Exponential Solitude

Why the Fermi paradox is anything but.You and me and the kid next door. We all were lied to. By the ones we truly trusted: James T. Kirk, Spock, Yoda, and even E.T.All the Star Trek episodes are big fat lies. And Star Wars and E.T. They should have told us upfront: we will never meet intelligent aliens, become friends with them, or wage war against them. Never.We might one day hear echoes of civilizations long gone, yet we will not meet. Humans are condemned to eternal solitude by the rate of our technological progress and the scale of interstellar distances. As Princess Neytiri remarked in Avatar, “This is sad. Very sad only.”The Neanderthals, with whom we mated and then exterminated, were our last Star Trek.Enrico Fermi casually asked a great question: if the galaxy is so old and so full of sun-like stars, where is everybody? Hidden inside it are really two questions. First, could we ever talk to another civilization? Second, a harder one: why do we see no trace of them at all? No signals, no spaceships, no engineered stars, nothing. This essay answers both. And the answer to both turns out to be a function of time, distance, and, most importantly, accelerating progress. Here is the story of how these delivered us into solitude.I. We shall never speakBy any measure, the long history of life on Earth is a story of acceleration. It started slowly, taking over 3 billion years to progress from single cells to primitive animals. It then took 400 million more years to move from primitive animals to mammals, then some 100 million years to early primates, and around 40 million years from first primates to our ancestors. Nearly 6 million years separate humans and chimpanzees from our common ancestor. We Homo sapiens are only 0.3 million years old. We have been able to speak for about 0.1 million years. Writing, and thus all recorded history, is less than 0.01 million years old.On a human timescale, it took millions of years to develop speech, then 100,000 years to develop