Fermi Paradox Solution: Grabby Aliens

So: it turns out human life arose early. The universe’s clock has been running for 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang, and some stars will live over five trillion years. Unless these stars (red dwarfs) aren’t habitable due to some mechanism we don’t yet understand, some other force must be biasing life to arise as early as we did in order for us to be typical.

That’s where Grabby Aliens come in. Life is evolutionary selected to expand. If life expands to fill a niche, no other life will evolve to fill the same niche. That’s about it.

These are some of the predictions made by this model, which we should expect to apply to us as well.

• Civilizations likely expand very quickly relative to the speed of light.
• Grabby civilizations typically control 10⁹ to 10¹⁵ stars before they bump into another.
• We will meet another grabby civilizations in 50,000,000- 50,000,000,000 years.

This is quite the optimistic forecast for us. We’re looking at a few million to billion years of expansion at high speed. This even makes it look likely that we will overcome Climate Change and other Great Filter level threats.

I’m going to restrain myself from just retelling everything that the original paper and these videos do a better job of. (I did a draft of that and deleted it). I want this to just be a quick explanation that will equip you for other posts, with references if you want to dive in further.

On that note here are two really good videos that explain the Grabby Aliens Theory in more depth. Pick your poison: animated European dogs or PBS.