This month’s Futures story in Nature Physics sees Norman Spinrad offer a solution to the Fermi paradox in Water worlds. Norman is no stranger to Futures — or indeed to the world of science fiction, as he has been publishing novels for some 50 years. His tale New ice age, or just cold feet? appeared in the very first series of Futures stories back in 2000, and he has since written about the theatre, recycling, medical research, driverless cars and Dying for Dummies. Here, he explains what inspired his latest story and what the solution to the Fermi paradox means for the hunt for extraterrestrial life — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Water worlds

I’ve always been interested in the Fermi paradox, a paradox that seems to get more and more central as our knowledge of what’s out there in our Galaxy, in our Universe, expands and mutates at warp speed.

When I was a boy with an introductory astronomy book called The Earth Among the Stars, the accepted theory was that the planets of our Solar System were formed by material ripped from the Sun by the happenstance of a close encounter with another passing star and were therefore rare bodies, perhaps even unique. I was already writing science fiction when the first extrasolar planets were discovered. Now we know that there are probably more planets in our Galaxy than stars, some billions of them estimated to be in the liquid water ‘Goldilocks zones’.

Enrico Fermi posed his famous paradox when what is now astronomical knowledge was only hypothetical: given that the Galaxy and the stars in it are billions of years old, statistically speaking, there should be hundreds of thousands of civilizations out there more advanced than our own. So where are they? Fermi speculatively calculated that if we are typical, if life is a common phenomenon, the Galaxy should be teeming with such civilizations. Why haven’t they contacted us? Or even tried?

This has become more and more mysterious the more we learn about the true nature of the Galaxy: billions of planets, even more moons, oceans beneath the ice verified in Saturnian moons, the organic building blocks of life discovered in a comet, perhaps even on Pluto. It seems abundantly clear that liquid water and organic molecules are abundant and intrinsic to our Galaxy, our Universe, as are planets and moons where life as we more or less know it, let alone life as we don’t know it, should likewise be abundant, and consciousness, and therefore technological civilizations, should not be uncommon.

So why have they not contacted us? Why has decades of SETI efforts found not a single signal?

So far, the attempted answers to this paradox have been anthropocentric and/or paranoid. Despite the astronomical evidence, we are alone because God wants it that way. There is something so terrible out there that silence is kept by civilizations that fear it. All civilizations end up destroying themselves. And so forth.

Another obsession of mine has been dolphin and whale consciousness and intelligence. Attempts to decipher cetacean ‘languages’ for decades have likewise failed. As have my fictional attempts to write stories from the viewpoints of whales or dolphins.

Until recently. Sort of. Somehow it came to me that dolphins and possibly whales too don’t have ‘languages’ at all — even though they are ‘conscious’ and seem to have ‘cultures’ — because they don’t need them. Their sonar senses give them direct three-dimensional and even transparent communication. They ‘see’ each other, and even inside each other’s bodies, with this sonar sense. And it is not a passive receptive sense like our sight and hearing. It is interactive. They can create three-dimensional and transparent imagery, moving imagery, that is fictional, a kind of television, that is very close to what we might call ‘telepathy’.

This allowed me to finally write a story called The Music of the Sphere, which, although not exactly told from the points of view of dolphins or whales, does present the consciousness arising out of their kind of sensoriums.

And of late, very recently, with the scientific realization that there may be many moons around gas giants with warm water oceans maintained by gravitational tide forces, that life could exist in such oceans, could even be more prevalent than life on dry planetary surfaces, it would seem there would be conscious life, intelligent life, even civilization, in those ice-capped oceans.

But they would be like those of the dolphins or whales. Non-technological civilizations because of the impossibility of the creation of, or discovery of, fire — without which artificial power to create and run technology could not be developed or exist. Civilizations with arts and histories but existing entirely in oceans under miles of water ice. Never to know the stars. Not only unable to communicate with other civilizations out there but not even have the concept of an out there.

A Galaxy full of worlds and moons, with intelligent creatures that are fully conscious enough to create advanced civilizations. But more of them than not aquatic civilizations. Non-technological civilizations.

We already have such a civilization on the Earth. That of the cetaceans.

We too are also a water world.