The Fermi Paradox of Ideas 👽
A handy mental model to reflect on business ideas, build vs buy, and aliens.
A few weeks ago, while having a beer with some friends, the discussion turned to one of my favorite concepts: the Fermi paradox about extraterrestrial life.
I don’t pretend this is the stuff we discuss regularly — in fact, we rapidly went back to our nerdy zeitgeist around tech and startups. But the things were somehow connected, and I kept thinking at how Fermi’s argument could be used for much more than aliens.
But let’s recap the original paradox first 👇
👽 Where is everybody?
In the summer of 1950, while walking to lunch, Enrico Fermi discussed recent UFO reports with a few fellow physicists.
The conversation turned to the apparent conflict between the high estimates on the existence of extraterrestrial life, and the lack of obvious evidence for it.
Fermi argued that even with the slow kind of interstellar travel that is within reach of Earth technology, it would only take between 5 and 50 million years to colonize the galaxy. This is relatively brief on a cosmological scale, and since there are many stars older than the Sun, and since intelligent life might have evolved earlier elsewhere, you have to wonder why the galaxy has not been colonized already.
Even if such colonization turned out to be impractical or undesirable, we could still see signs of intelligence from a distance. Chances are advanced civilizations should be visible within the range of today’s observable universe.
🕳 The Great Filter
With no evidence of such intelligent life in places other than Earth, it must be that some step in the evolutionary process is very unlikely, and prevents the vast majority of settings from moving further.
In other words, there must be a great filter that sits somewhere between the presence of a habitable planet, and the galaxy colonization stage by a civilization born and raised on it.
Several great filter candidates have been proposed over time, like abiogenesis, resource exhaustion, or global catastrophes.
Crucially, as humans, we should hope to be already past this filter, whatever it is. We should root for the filter to be one of the stages we already went through, like the creation of life (the most accredited candidate), or the emergence of tool-using intelligent animals.
This is why many scientists argue that finding life on Mars would actually be bad news for humanity. If life is so common that we find it even on nearby planets, the great filter is likely to be still ahead of us.
Nick Bostrom, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, explained it better than I do, in 2007:
Ok, but, as amusing as it might be, why are we talking of aliens on Refactoring?
I believe the Fermi paradox is a great mental model you can use in other situations too — which arguably more useful, for the rest of us, than extraterrestrial life. My favorites are:
💡 Evaluating business ideas
🔨 Build vs buy decisions
💡 The Fermi Paradox of Business ideas
Let’s say you have an idea for building something new. Something that makes people solve a pain (or, better, do a job) 10x better than they do today.
You may ask yourself: why doesn’t it exist already?