Millions of years ago, mankind was born. More than 5,000 years ago, human civilization was formed. Hundreds of years ago, mankind embarked on the path of technological development. Throughout the entire history of mankind, although he has experienced countless sufferings, mankind has not been small, and has grown step by step from a weak primitive civilization to a relatively advanced technological civilization.
With the help of science and technology, human beings have gone out of the earth and have seen the vast universe. The rapid development of science and technology is inseparable from those great scientific basic theories. Newton’s law of universal gravitation allows us to realize that gravity is closely related to the world, and Einstein’s mass-energy equation allows us to realize that there is no difference between mass and energy. They are two manifestations of matter, under certain conditions. Can be transformed into each other.
The theory of relativity allows us to recognize the basic mysteries of time and space. In the exploration of the scientific field, countless scientific research scholars have put forward many important scientific theories, and some scientific theories have even subverted our cognition.
Even the various theories that subvert our cognition do not make people feel scared, but are full of curiosity and endless desire for exploration. However, the emergence of a scientific theory made people feel confused and even made people feel desperate and afraid. It heralded the end of mankind. So which scientific theory is it that makes people feel desperate? Let’s discuss it briefly below.
The desperate Fermi paradox. When human beings walked out of the earth to see the vast universe, they all thought of the same question: Does alien civilization exist? From the perspective of the earth, many people may think that alien civilization does not exist. But from the perspective of the universe, it is difficult for us to believe that alien civilization does not exist.
Scientists basically believe that extraterrestrial civilization exists, so soon after humans left the earth, they launched the extraterrestrial civilization search program. Scientists continue to search for alien civilizations through various methods, but more than half a century has passed, and we have not found any.
In the 1950s, the famous physicist Enrique Fermi put forward a “Fermi Paradox” that had a profound impact on later. The “Fermi Paradox” is a scientific paradox about aliens and interstellar travel, expounding the contradiction between the overestimation of the existence of extraterrestrial civilization and the lack of relevant evidence.
Speaking of the universe, I believe many friends will think of a word: vast. That’s right, the vastness of the universe can be described as vast. At present, the observable universe of mankind has reached 93 billion light-years. Is this range large? It is too big for us to imagine. But for the vast universe, it is only an observable range, and there are unknown endless unobservable areas outside it. The true scope of the universe may be a terrifying number that suffocates us.
Let’s not consider the true size of the universe. It is only the currently observable range of 93 billion light-years. The information contained therein can also directly hit our souls and shock mankind. According to current observational research, scientists believe that the entire observable range is about 1,000 billion “Milky Way.”
And every Milky Way has at least tens of billions of stars. According to this data, the number of stars within a range of 93 billion light-years will reach trillions, and each star basically represents a star system, and there are a number of them. Various planets exist, including gaseous planets and rocky planets. Calculated in this way, the number of planets in the observable range is too large to estimate.
And every star system should have a habitable zone, with one or several terrestrial planets existing. In theory, as long as the rocky planets in the habitable zone have the conditions to form an ecological environment, they all have the potential to become a living planet. . Therefore, even if a civilization is born with a small probability, theoretically there will be a very large number of alien civilizations in the universe.
And it has been 13.8 billion years since the birth of the universe. Under such a long span, there should be life planets and civilizations in the same period of time. It took only a few hundred years for mankind to develop from the initial industrial age to the current technological age. Hundreds of years have allowed mankind to walk out of the earth and become a technological civilization that can initially explore the solar system.
All this tells us that once there is a civilization with a technological development time of more than 100,000 years, or even a civilization of more than 1 million years, then their technological level is no different from spells in the eyes of humans. For a civilization that looks like a god in our eyes, crossing the stars to the solar system is no problem at all. But why have we not found any traces of the activities of alien civilizations in the universe until now? This is the core of Fermi’s paradox.
Fermi’s paradox tells us that theoretically there should be a large number of interstellar civilizations in the universe, which can easily shuttle through various galaxies, leaving a large number of traces of activity. But the reality is that nothing has been discovered. Why is this?
In order to explain this weird situation, scientists have put forward many hypotheses that have opened up their minds. No matter how attractive these hypotheses are, brain holes are just brain holes after all, and not many scientific circles recognize them. At present, the mainstream view of scientists on this weird situation is that the technological gap between alien civilization and us is not big.
Due to the exaggerated scale of the universe, if you want to shuttle freely between the stars, you need to master the technology of super-light flight. At present, the curvature engine theoretically researched by scientists can achieve preliminary super-light speed flight, but if you want to achieve a larger span of interstellar shuttle, only the legendary wormhole can do it.
Without mastery of curvature engine technology or wormhole technology, civilizations cannot meet each other. Seeing this explanation of scientists, many people may be confused again: the age of the universe is 13.8 billion years old, how can the scientific and technological strength of alien civilization be similar to that of human beings? If this situation is true, then we will have to think of a terrible cosmic rule “big filter”.
The so-called “big filter” means that the development of cosmic civilization will go through various stages, and there is one stage that is very difficult to cross, and that is the threshold of interstellar civilization. Only by becoming an interstellar civilization can you initially shuttle between various galaxies, and becoming a symbol of an interstellar civilization is to have superluminal technology, that is, to master the preliminary curvature engine technology.
This is a space jumping technology realized by using the theory of space distortion. The technological development of every cosmic civilization is very fast, but in the end they are all stuck by the speed. The theory of relativity tells us that the speed of an object cannot exceed the speed of light, but can only approach the speed of light infinitely, and to break the limit of the speed of light, it is only possible to break the space.
The cosmic civilization encountered the important threshold of interstellar civilization, unable to cross the past, and finally disappeared silently in the universe. We must know that the development of civilization requires infinite resources and energy. If you cannot cross out of the interstellar space, then eventually a civilization will be destroyed due to exhaustion of resources.
Maybe the universe has born countless civilizations in 13.8 billion years, but because it cannot cross the threshold of interstellar, it cannot become an interstellar civilization. After exhausting the energy of the mother star and the mother galaxy, civilization went to destruction. If other civilizations in the universe cannot cross this threshold and cannot pass the “filter”, then what reason does humanity have to pass? Perhaps the final outcome of mankind is the same, disappearing into the universe and becoming a passerby in the universe.