(Published in Business Day – 17 September 2024)
Some apparently unique business ideas go boldly where no one has thought to go before, while other ideas fail because they have been tried before, but have been filtered out by some intrinsic flaw. Where is the difference?
Let’s turn to the Fermi paradox. The physicist Enrico Fermi, in conversation with other famous physicists in 1950, apparently posed the question, “But where is everybody?” He was referring to aliens that probability would suggest ought to have visited us by now. Remember these are serious, renowned scientists.
The question is even more pertinent today as better instruments lead to the discovery of more and more rocky planets that inhabit the “Goldilocks” zone around their stars. That’s the region that is not too hot and not too cold, where life would be sustainable.
Our sun is just one star among billions in the Milky Way, which is just one galaxy. No one knows how many galaxies there are, but estimates go up to 2 trillion. I don’t know who counted, but apparently that would make more stars than the grains of beach sand on earth.
Many of these stars have planets like earth, and many are considerably older than our sun. So statistically speaking, one would expect life to have emerged many times over.
How intelligent would that life be? Consider that homo sapiens has evolved fairly recently and science has only been an occupation of our species for a few thousand years. Consider that we developed flight from the Wright brothers to visiting the moon in just 66 years. The Wrights were alive when the lunar astronauts were born.
Medical science has evolved rapidly from letting blood to editing our DNA gene code. We are on a breakneck race to create machine intelligence that should extend our capabilities in unimaginable ways, and probably enable us to explore space at speeds and durations human bodies would not tolerate.
In a trivially short period of mere centuries, we have evolved superhuman capabilities. Imagine what technology an extraterrestrial intelligence, even if only a few thousand years ahead of us, might have reached by now. And there could be some that are billions of years ahead – enough time to send probes streaming across the Milky Way.
So where are they? There is a Great Silence.
Maybe we are a unique creation. Maybe superintelligent civilisations are too smart to advertise their existence. Maybe we, uniquely, have already survived a Great Filter that killed off all previous life forms. Or the Great Filter may still lie ahead of us – maybe they all reached a level of technical capacity that exceed their moral capacity, and destroyed themselves.
If all prior civilisations destroyed themselves, how far might humanity be from that point? At times it feels very close, as our global leaders, clearly lacking super intelligence, blithely argue about the size of their deck chairs on the global Titanic.
The Fermi paradox draws attention to the lack of evidence some would expect. If your brilliant young business idea is unique, why? Were those who tried it before you filtered out at any earlier stage than you have reached, because they lacked your expertise or resilience, or did they fail after you? If after you, what filter awaits you around the corner?
What are you not seeing? Who is seeing it? Andrew Grove suggested that only the paranoid survive. That’s a bit exaggerated, but a dose of paranoia is definitely worth adding to your regular strategic tools.
Your staff, suppliers, customers, competitors, even your children probably have insights that could prevent a catastrophe. Listen to them and don’t fall victim to the business equivalent of the Great Filter.
Meanwhile, let’s all help our leaders face the many potential filters facing our species.
Jonathan Cook chairs Thornhill Associates.