Addressing the Fermi Paradox

First, I mostly remain skeptical (philosophically and otherwise) of all these discussion (see below for some of main criticisms) but it's good fun to speculate - so let's!

1. Fermi Paradox - Essentially, we should be encountering Extraterrestrials (or life) everywhere and we don't.
2. Drake Equation - Essentially, life should be fairly abundant and have spread across the galaxy already.

Put those two together and there's the seemingly obvious cunundrum that we haven't made contact or encountered space lifeforms yet!

We shall take to referring to the two issues about in desiderata terms. Let's say that any hypothesis P that satisfies all criteria of the two issues simultaneously is a solution.

We can think of that structurally (more abstractly at the meta level). A solution P has to:

1. Take as a ground fact that life is abdundant.
2. Explain why we haven't encountered any evidence of non-terrestrial life yet.

Some Definitions

UAP and UFO:

1. Will use these interchangeably but will try to stick with the new DOD conventions.

Entities of Interest:

1. Of that larger set of bona fide unknowns, let's call the small set of really interesting phenomena for which there is at least some backing physical evidence an Entity of Interest.
2. Let's not presume it's "Physical" (as we understand today it at least - there's an active debate in Philosophy of Science and Foundations of Physics about the ultimate reality of Particles at all, Quantum Fields having come be front and center with Particles increasingly being seen as derived phenomena).

Life:

1. Keeping a fairly broad definition here.
2. Some scientists recently invented XNA (think artificial DNA) - so DNA, RNA are probably far too restrictive.
3. Don't want to rule out information theoretic or negentropy definitions either.

Prior Blog Posts

Assumptions (literary tropes) incumbent in discussions around UFO's/UAP's:

1. They tend to be the projected and fanciful artistic renderings of futuristic spacecraft by some relative decade. Over time, UFO/UAP depictions have fundamentally traced relevant/popular artistic motifs/themes in pop culture. UFO's from the 1950's look like cars from the 1950's, UFO's from the 1990's look abstract/polygonal, and so on. We rarely see those artistic categories overlap which suggests such renderings are grounded in objective science.
2. They tend to be human-sized.
3. Extra-terrestrials tend to be depicted as bipedal/humanoid, carbon-based, manipular (using hands), endowed with human physical senses (sight, touch, smell, etc.) etc.

Ditto for Technology Schemas.

1. Science fiction usually anthropomorphically cross-applies human technological and cultural schemas when inventing aliens.
2. They have "translatable languages", diplomacy, human-size battlecruisers, giant mech robots, lasers/phasers/blasters (extensions of human handheld devices, tools, weapons), clothing, etc.
3. That's probably profoundly incorrect (the more reasonable comparison would be something deep sea lifeforms and terrestrial human civilizations - extremely disjoint not overlapping).

Per the Silurian Hypothesis discussed by NASA (that there's room in the geological record for a human-like species to have evolved, risen, achieved high technology, possibly fallen before the Anthropocene Era but outside the range of our best Carbon Dating techniques), I speculated about what I thought such a species might be and want to clarify those remarks:

1. I think it likely a mammal (not an insect or the like).
2. Something like a hyper-intelligent, mass reproducing Sugar Glider.
3. Lots of population helping to guarantee survival, biological impetus toward technologies of surplus since animals that can migrate easily/long-distances have no need to evolve toward societies of surplus.

Human Institutions:

1. I now think it unlikely that the Drug Cartels have produced Entities of Interest I's although some characteristics seen in released footage about UAP's may fit with some of the published/known advanced drone programs they've been pursuing.
2. If they had Entities of Interest (or could produce them), they'd have used them at this point. Ditto for Russia.

So, anyway I think the above is good grounds to be pretty skeptical. Real UAPs, aliens, etc. would be probably be nearly ineffable, extremely difficult to comprehend, and only most jarringly align with our human intuitions (indeed those very kinds of cases are Entities of Interest). And, Entities of Interest are not likely to be encountered about the world's warring NGO's or Nation States (at present).

A Speculative Solution

I've previously, off-handedly, asserted that miniaturization and simulation are the two most viable long-term strategies for advanced to pursue. There are numerous advantages:

1. De facto immortality.
2. Fewer moving parts (less things breaking).
3. It's generally more difficult to destroy small encountered in nature.
4. Hiding is easier, detection is very difficult at smaller scales.
5. Energy consumption scales with size.
6. Intelligence correlates very closely with brain to body-mass in species.
7. Moreover, at certain level of scale, a small spacecraft can embed into an organism's nervous systems, into a mechanical network, and so on. It can interact with, modify, adjust, or alter those systems (from within, undetected, unbeknownst to its hosts).

I'd like to expand this speculative thought (mostly setting aside simulation for now - although I still think part of the picture sketched below applies in that scenario) and talk about how it structurally satisfies the criteria described at the very beginning.

Miniaturization

Call this solution the Miniaturization Milieu Scenario:

1. They're already here.
2. They're embedded inside us, our bodies.
3. They're embedded inside our machines.
4. They're embedded inside various organisms.

It meets the structural criteria in several ways:

1. It accepts as a ground fact, that life is abundant everywhere.
2. Entities of Interest are so small that they are undetectable although universally present (ubiquitous).

Additional merits:

1. It also accommodates the miniaturization hypothesis.
2. It addresses miniaturization payload concerns (vision is physically constrained by certain parameters of scale - small optical systems have low granularity). Small Entities of Interest parasitically utilize host sensing systems.
3. It may help account for surprising behavioral anomalies observed in individuals.
4. It may explain the reluctance of the government to declassify all knowledge about UAPs (despite the fact that most people already believe that extraterrestrials exist, UAPs are real, etc.). This would be a compelling concern (human history, agency, extreme scenarios of bodily invasion against the pantheon of body snatching/alien abduction type narratives, morality, etc. all come into question).

But that's not all, if true, the Miniaturization Milieu Scenario:

1. Likely implies embeddings "all the way down".
2. Entities of Interest embed themselves into Entities of Interest, and they into other Entities of Interest, and so on.
3. Perhaps this outcome isn't so surprising? That kind of scenario is readily found in nature (cells skirmishing, proteins organizing, organisms resisting disease, bacterial infighting, and so on).

When extrapolated out to its furthest extent, we may recover human agency and the like (which is seemingly erroded under such a hypothesis) finding those comforting notions once more arising from the anarchic sea of micro conflicts.