The rise of space AI might explain the Fermi paradox

Artificial intelligence (AI) is continuing to have a disruptive impact on ever more parts of humanity. But what does it mean in the long run? A new paper, available as a preprint on arXiv from Austrian researcher Sergey Ivliev, extrapolates what the wide-scale adoption of AI means for the future of humanity in space—and in particular, what it means for the ultimate question of whether we’re truly alone in the galaxy.

A framework for much of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence came from famed physicist Enrico Fermi, who simply asked, “Where is everybody?” at a lunchtime discussion at Los Alamos in the 1950s. Though never officially published, Fermi’s lunch partners from that day passed down an oral history of that conversation that cemented it into the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), at least until Michael Hart formally laid out the argument and mathematics behind the underlying question in a paper in 1975.

There are plenty of potential answers to the Fermi Paradox, many of which can be found floating around the internet—and some are likely more valid than others. But Ivliev, who has a Ph.D. in mathematical economics and is founder of environmental project consultancies such as Peatland Ecosystems and Vlinder, suggests a new resolution: the Quiet Expansion filter.

The central argument of the paper is that there aren’t thousands of alien megastructures lighting up the night sky because once a civilization reaches the threshold of Autonomous AI-Cosmoindustry (AICI), “loud,” resource-hungry empires motivated by prestige or romance become irrational. However, this does not mean expansion stops; instead, it shifts to a “quiet” mode driven by rational goals like survival diversification, knowledge preservation and scientific observation.

The AICI threshold is reached when a civilization possesses a self-sustaining off-planet industrial and computational system capable of designing, manufacturing, repairing and launching space hardware through AI-mediated autonomy. We’re already taking tentative steps in this direction with the advent of space-based data centers, but true AICI—where a civilization can extend its infrastructure beyond its home planet without continuous biological intervention—is leaps and bounds beyond our current capabilities.

In this vein, Ivliev draws on work done by astrophysicist Sergey Popov, who noted that a truly rational AI system would reject human-like motivations for space travel—such as romance, conquest or prestige. Instead, AI would view space expansion as simple risk management.

To an AI, putting all your eggs in one basket—whether that basket is a single planet, solar system or even galaxy—can lead to a single point of failure. Therefore, expansion is highly logical as a way of mitigating the risk posed by that single point of failure. At the point where we have reached AICI, the cost for sending a 10-kilogram (22-pound) interstellar probe to another star at 1% of the speed of light is roughly 4.5×10¹³ joules—a tiny fraction of the overall energy budget of such a civilization.

One key aspect is that the 10-kilogram (22-pound) probe doesn’t contain any actual people—it simply holds the “seeds” to restart life elsewhere in case a catastrophe happens back in the home system. It would contain a civilization’s knowledge, and possibly some of its biological material, enabling a sufficiently advanced AI to rebuild the entire civilization from scratch. This is the “Quiet Expansion,” where an AI sends low-mass and hard-to-detect “seed systems” instead of moving millions of biological entities around in massive interstellar spaceships.

There are some additional constraints on this method of expansion, including selecting promising exoplanets discovered by remote sensing and deploying minimal local resources to maintain the systems until needed. Additionally, the AI would restrict self-replication of the probes in order to avoid any “gray goo” scenario with a probe attempting to take over entire swaths of the galaxy.

This has obvious implications for why we’ve never found “loud” technosignatures. In this scenario, a “null” result of being unable to find the thermal signature of a Kardashev-III-scale civilization doesn’t mean a galaxy is empty. It just means that successful civilizations are residing in a “quiet” state in case their backup plans are needed.

But there’s another, more ominous implication from this framework. If interstellar backups are cheap to make, and we haven’t found any in our own backyard, that means either we’re one of the first civilizations to make it to that point or the transition from a planetary industrial society to a space-based one is a narrow path to tread.

Admittedly, the probes such civilizations would send out are probably hard to find even in our own solar system, but if we’re unable to, it means we’re entering uncharted territory—and might just run into a filter that has silenced the rest of the galaxy. That’s a sobering thought, but one to keep in mind as we start to advance our own AI capabilities.

The paper is published on the arXiv preprint server.

Who’s behind this story?

Gaby Clark

MA in English, copy editor since 2021 with experience in higher education and health content. Dedicated to trustworthy science news.

Full profile →

Andrew Zinin

Master’s in physics with research experience. Long-time science news enthusiast. Plays key role in Science X’s editorial success.

Full profile →