Apes or Termites

It's the year 1950 and a group of scientists are on their lunch break at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The scientists are discussing aliens tongue-in-cheek -partly due to a New Yorker comic- when one of the scientists asks a question: "Where are they?" The scientist who asked that question was the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, and his question haunts many to this day.

There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, some a good deal older than our sun, and most stars probably also have planets around them. So you'd expect that there would be at least one civilization far in advance of us out there, but evidence of such is lacking. So the question "where are they?" remains stubbornly unanswered.

I've been interested in Fermi's paradox (the name this problem has) for a number of years now. I'm not going to list ideas on this post but rather focus on a particular solution which briefly appears in the Stephen Baxter novel Manifold: Space.

Upon seeing the activities of an alien species, character Reid Malenfant remarks on how they resemble termites in a colony. Reid then speculates that most space-faring aliens will probably be cooperative (termites), rather than competitive (apes, or humans) in nature.

Think about what it means to be "ape" in nature. Much of our competitive spirit goes towards activities that are often destructive. Demanding bigger and more wasteful houses to keep up with the Joneses, building more nuclear weapons and placing them ever closer to an antagonistic country as a form of chest-beating, maximizing profit by lobbying against environmental protections, etc.

It stands to reason that a species that is "termite" in nature would be less likely to destroy itself in this way. Instead of carbon belching to "stick it to the libs" when resources are running low, members of the species would probably just consume less. The idea of nationalism would make no sense to them because it's anathema to cooperation. You see what I'm getting at.

Perhaps the truly long lived civilizations in the form of these "termites" simply don't need to explosively spread out into space. They might only deign to leave their planet when their home system is due for destruction, and then only stick to one colonizable body in a new system rather than exploiting every astronomical body in it.

I sincerely hope that this isn't the answer, it bodes quite poorly for our civilization if it is.