If there’s life on Europa, then there’s likely life in lots of other places. We bring up the Fermi Paradox quite a bit when we talk about life because if life is common, then intelligent life must be nearly as common within a few orders of magnitude. And over the 14 billion years the universe has been here, that’s more than enough time for us to be swimming in species capable of at least Kardashev Type 2 technology. Why wouldn’t we see them? That’s the paradox right? There is a simple answer: we’re not advanced enough to see them and/or they don’t want us to see them.

There are still vast gaps in our knowledge and our science. Great oceans of darkness where we have yet to shine a light. We’re young, and insignificant. Why wouldn’t they want us to “see” them? Easily enough explained, even if we only observed from afar with telescopes and signals... we could divine some of their technology. We might even suss it out before we were ready for it, which would be bad for us. Even if they could snuff us out with literally no more effort than pressing a button, why bother with even that when you likely won’t have to. Why take a chance that we could get something that brings us into contact before we are ready for it? There’s nothing to gain for them and everything potentially to lose. Our desires don’t enter into this equation.



And their tech might be undetectable by us. Maybe there’s billions of civilizations that harvest the cold, unused gasses between the galaxies. Countless trillions upon trillions of beings who have mastered all the techniques and can extract energy from total conversion with vast structures that interact weakly or perhaps not at all with the EM spectrum as we know it. Who knows... maybe that’s the dark matter and energy we seek?

Answers always seem obvious in hindsight. I suspect we have already seen some hints as to why we have this paradox. We think too highly of ourselves, after all. We suppose that we’re important, that we’d naturally attract all the universe’s attention because we’re special. That’s our creation there - and the only people who feel that way about us live on one tiny, insignificant world orbiting a mostly insignificant star in a rather uninteresting patch of space in an average galaxy in an average cluster in a rural part of the universe.

The fermi paradox is a rather silly thing when you consider all the potential ways someone even just a bit more advanced than we are has available to them to hide their presence, how short the time is that we’d detect them, and how few people actually care about the paradox itself to actually invest in a real search to prove it one way or another.



If there’s life in Europa... there’s life in lots of places. Its just another step on the road.

