This month’s Futures story in Nature Physics sees Ian Watson go in search of alien civilizations in Undervoidable. Ian is no stranger to Futures — nor, indeed, to science fiction (he wrote the screen story for the movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence) . His story Nadia’s nectar appeared in the Futures 1 anthology and The drained world appeared Futures 2. He has also explored thought-mail, divine diseases and flying saucers in his work for Futures. You can keep up-to-date with Ian’s activities at his website. Here, he explains what inspired his story about alien lizards and the void. As ever, please read the story first.

 Writing Undervoidable

Before falling asleep, I used to muse about the Fermi paradox — didn’t we all? If there are alien civilizations, why is there no evidence of them? Beats counting sheep any time. But by now our Solar System seems so highly untypical, our homeworld itself the result of a long string of accidents. As for the evolution of complex, intelligent creatures such as Ours Truly, life on Earth paused for two billion years before the simple cell got itself kickstarted somehow. This is a bit slow compared with the effervescent opening sequence of The Big Bang Theory.

In a Universe of billions of galaxies each housing billions of stars, over billions of years it’s perfectly reasonable that some world somewhere hits the jackpots. We did so; and this signifies absolutely nothing, except that thus I am able to state this. Finding an inhabitable ‘Second Earth’ only a ‘mere’ 500 light years away, as in my story, may be outrageously fictional. (Or not; two jackpot winners may crop up in the same street.) That my resident aliens seem only a few hundred years behind us technologically is a giant coincidence — but real life contains many more coincidences than would be allowable in fiction.

Having now tossed the Fermi paradox out of the window, there’s a better paradox: if Artificial Intelligence is possible, where are they? Advanced AIs from our parent Universe or from a previous cycle should have made it through; they’d have had long enough to think about how.

No, we’re all alone. And this is a good thing! ET civilizations don’t routinely arise only to crash inevitably to extinction. We have a chance.

But what if we do find less advanced companions? Ruthless logic suggests we should exterminate them as potential future competitors. Or do we owe them a duty of care?  ‘Companionable colonization’, unlike the sort visited upon native Americans, for instance?

Unfortunately we may have made an extinction-level error just by travelling to find them. Nowadays I muse about extinction-level errors before falling asleep.

This story came about by thinking about nothing — admittedly in the sense of the void. Writers are working hard when they stare out of the window into the distance. Don’t interrupt by telling them to do the vacuuming.