The Fermi Trap
In 1950, Enrico Fermi, the famed Italian-American physicist, wondered where all of the space aliens were. Even 76 years ago, it was clear that there were billions upon billions of planets, and a great proportion of those planets were likely to have the conditions to make life possible. Yet, nothing. No flashing lights, no radio signals, no visitors in spaceships. Nothing.
There are a number of possibilities to explain what came to be known as Fermi’s Paradox. One possibility is that these aliens are hiding from us. Why they would hide from us isn’t clear. Perhaps they are shy. Another possibility is that we just can’t see them. Maybe they are technologically beyond emitting any signals that our technology can detect. Maybe the galaxy is teeming with life, life everywhere, but all of it somehow more advanced than us, somehow all invisible.
The most likely possibility, however, and one that doesn’t suffer from obvious objections, is that these other civilizations destroyed themselves. That there is something about technology that follows the same basic path every time, in every place, and that once science and technology reach a high enough level to send signals out into space, that civilization has also advanced far enough to build powerful weapons. The time between the discovery of radiation and the end of a civilization might ever be a short one, greatly reducing the number of sufficiently advanced but still active civilizations out there in the skies that we might see. They are out there, but then they flicker into sight, and then they are gone.
Fermi was certainly familiar with powerful, civilization-destroying technologies. He led the team at the University of Chicago which, in 1942, created the first sustained nuclear reaction—the first nuclear reactor and a necessary precursor to building an atomic bomb. He was one of the key members of the Manhattan Project team at Los Alamos, during the war, that designed Little Boy, the uranium bomb that was later dropped on Hiroshima, and Fat Man, the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki. He was present at the Trinity test, just before the atomic attacks on Japan, witnessing the first man-made nuclear explosion, the dawn of the nuclear age at dawn out in the Alamogordo Desert in New Mexico.
Nuclear weapons would explain the absence of other visible civilizations out in the stars. After hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, once a species develops a nuclear bomb, it is only a chronological eye-blink in time before that bomb is used on a wide enough scale to reduce that species to a primitive way of life, invisible to other planets. Like in the early sci-fi novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, the civilization perhaps rediscovering these same destructive technologies again and again and destroying itself again and again. If the species survives at all.
The danger isn’t limited to nuclear weapons.
Bioweapons can do much the same damage. Supercharged by artificial intelligence and gene editing techniques advancing so quickly that even the recently developed CRISPR technology is already being superseded, it will undoubtedly be possible, very soon, to custom-make your own pandemic virus, narrowly striking whatever world demographic best suits your hate, a virus needing only the services of a small bio lab to produce.
AI itself is a great danger in and of itself. With the technology race completely out of control we went from a neural network that could reliably identify cats from dogs just a few years ago to one with AI agents organizing and operating on their own, open-weight AI models, distillation, rogue, morality-free AIs hacking into other companies’ computers, undiscovered but by luck, to foreign AI firms releasing the technology to the public on the same theory used by gun nuts who want to arm every teacher and store clerk, the good guy with a AI defeating the bad guy with an AI in some edge-of-your-seat technicolor showdown.
It’s like another Manhattan Project, this time in the private sector, out in the open, with no specific goal and no oversight. Just go go go.
It’s all too much to keep track of, there is no time to think, we are stumble-walking to the end of (our) history, amused to death, as predicted, by our everyone-is-a-publisher media, fed little byte-sized distractions as the doomsday clock ticks and ticks and ticks.
American Nukes seeks to push back on that, to tell the story of the development of nuclear weapons, with so many parallels to the development of artificial intelligence and other world-destroying technologies. American Nukes, shows each of the nuclear weapons that were deployed as they can be seen now—embedded in our country and in our country’s history. There’s an Honest John nuclear artillery rocket in front of a middle school, an Air-launched Hound Dog cruise missile rusting outside of the small-town American Legion post. There’s a Mark IV bomb in a parking lot, a Redstone long-range missile (Verner Von Braun’s first creation for America) standing proud outside of a church in New England, and a towering Titan ICBM, now a young couple’s kissing spot at the interstate off-ramp south of Atlanta.
The greatest worry about nuclear weapons isn’t their explosive power but that we’ve forgotten about them, the weapons themselves faded into abstractions, a bomb, a missile in a movie plot. The real weapons are more complicated, but not too complicated to understand, and by forgetting, by not striving for a better understanding of these terrors, we only increase the likelihood of their use.
And that likelihood is high. During the early years of the war in Ukraine the fear that Russia would use a nuclear weapon grew so high that the Russians were explicitly warned that if they did then the United States and NATO would destroy (with conventional weapons) every Russian military unit in Ukraine. Think about that for a second. It’s all down to a bluff, one that only grows weaker as our own military weakness is revealed in the recent attacks on Iran. There hasn’t been a nuclear weapon used in war in 81 years. That run of incredible luck could change any day now. The world could change, the danger, too late faced, any day now.
Yet look at the concerns that dominate the headlines and social media feeds of the world. We are sleepwalking, by turns bemused and outraged by memes in one never-ending doomscroll.
American Nukes offers not only a history, it offers a vocabulary, it offers a framework to think about not just nuclear weapons and all of the policy implications they present, but also a way to think about AI and bioweaponry and all similar destructive technologies. It offers a way to push back hard against the inevitability of the answer to Fermi’s Paradox, to know the trap, the better for us to avoid it.