So, have you heard of the somewhat recent news regarding the supposed discovery of life on Mars? For most people, especially the general public since this story went viral, this find was a bombshell revelation from NASA in September of 2025, but if you’re like me however, your first reaction was probably that of a little shock followed by the realization that this was pretty in line with what we predicted given our current understanding of microbiology. We’ve already studied prokaryotes that can survive in high salt levels, or in the extreme cold, or in the irradiated vacuum of space, so the presence of remains from bacteria-like organisms on an icy salt desert not exceedingly far from Earth isn’t too surprising. The main thing I want to discuss is of a much broader scope than just with Sapphire Canyon, as I seek to spread knowledge regarding the life sciences to whoever listens, as per my special interest. This video will be the first in a series of uncertain length, with this video’s focus being on my own take regarding the Fermi Paradox. For those not up to speed with their science jargon, the Fermi Paradox is a commonly discussed problem in Astronomy related to the lack of known credible evidence for extraterrestrial life, aka aliens. It’s quite a poor name since Enrico Fermi was a mostly unrelated chemist who obviously wasn’t the first to think of this question, nor is it really a paradox in the conventional sense as there’s no definite answer to the question to begin with. There’s been multiple approaches to solve this conundrum, so many that people have made whole books of different solutions to the Fermi Paradox, and yet, hardly anyone as far as I can tell has approached this problem in quite the way I would’ve liked, namely because a majority involved in this discussion are physicists, not biologists. I could say that this bias towards physics isn’t unique, given how a handful of terrible people have acted over the years, but that’s well outside the scope of what I’m going to say pertaining to this discussion. The main thing I want to do with this video is show how viewing the problem in a different light can yield new information, even if we are still far from solving this riddle with the existence of alien life. One common place to start would be the Drake Equation, where the number of detectable aliens is equal to a decreasing set of probabilities and the time they’ve existed for. The thing is, the Drake Equation isn’t very useful for our purposes, as we don’t know most of these variables since our only data point is Earth, although in fairness it was more meant as a thought exercise rather than an actual method of solving the Fermi Paradox. Proposed solutions usually fall into three main camps: aliens are rare or absent, aliens hide or evade from us, and aliens aren’t what we think, with that last one usually used when in conversations of potential non-carbon based life. An example from camp 1 is the rare Earth hypothesis, which posits that our planet is special in its environment being able to sustain macroscopic life, whereas the zoo hypothesis is in camp 2, being a more fanciful idea stating that we’re being held captive by aliens who cloak their presence from us, like animals in a zoo. Additional solutions include the great filter, a broad group of hurdles that may prevent a species from progressing, or the dark forest, which says that no advanced species communicates with other aliens out of fear from being killed by another alien species. For me at least, I tend to gravitate towards unicellular life being uncommon but not exceedingly rare in the universe, but that the evolution towards human level intelligence is neither probable nor inevitable for most places with life. As we lack a real world reference for how similar aliens would be to humans, we must look inwards towards our own biosphere in order to ask another question: what would aliens realistically be like? Popular notion from the general public or mass corporate media would suggest that aliens as smart as a human must be human-like in their anatomy to be considered advanced, with the usual justification being that convergent evolution makes intelligent species move towards the human body plan. This however is not how evolutionary convergence works, and it also reeks of anthropocentric thinking, as it’s basically claiming that the human form is inherently perfect and better than all other forms of life. Even on earth, animals have evolved a high degree of cognition around a dozen times independently, such as with octopus, bees, wrasse, parrots, crows, cetaceans, elephants, and of course the apes, plus that’s assuming that we’re only using intelligent species as a reference and not the vast array of other organisms found on Earth. In order to actually figure out this question, one must factor in the conditions of each life-bearing planet on a case by case basis, combine that with the knowledge of our own biological past, and remember that rewinding the tape of life doesn’t yield the same resulting species every time, essentially the thesis of Gould’s Wonderful Life. On a related note, the fact that our real life Cambrian Explosion happened abruptly and only once in geologic history implies that the evolution of animals with brains, blood, skeletons, and other complex features is a potential roadblock for planets with life, hearkening to the aforementioned great filter hypothesis. Also, as stated with camp 3 of alien solutions, life beyond Earth needn’t be made of all the same components, as life could be made from silicon based chemistry or use a liquid other than water to act as a solvent, though these routes don’t seem particularly common since water and carbon seem to be very abundant in the universe. Needless to say, cracking the puzzle of what form an alien could take is highly dependent on what factors you input into the balance, and at first the possible outcomes may seem endless, but luckily there exists known constraints on what works and what does not in the realm of behavior and anatomy. We can safely say that a species must be multicellular in order to achieve a degree of intelligence, as single celled organisms aren’t known to use tools, likewise it’s improbable for plants or other autotrophs to become sentient since they don’t have the energy to sustain a nervous system, along with ecosystems that just don’t produce enough breathable oxygen and food for a large brained creature to survive. We may also rule out a species that cannot manipulate the environment around them, as they would require an equivalent to our human hands if they want to create tools or buildings, whether it be by using pincers, paws, tentacles, talons, trunks, or something else entirely. A hot button issue in this regard is if dry land is necessary to build a civilization, given that fire, a keystone of human invention, is impossible underwater, thus leaving volcanic activity as the only probable pathway for developing metallurgy. I’m split over if this precludes aquatic aliens from developing sophisticated technology, but I more lean towards this just making land based species simply advance faster than their aquatic counterparts. Oh and yeah, upright bipedalism is almost certainly not a requirement for sapience, nor are any of these traits listed here likely to act as hurdles in my opinion. So there you have it, a confusing template alien with grabby appendages, a complex brain, and some other stuff I forgot to mention before like bilateral symmetry and internal organ systems. Admittedly this could’ve been way more fun if I just picked a series of starting conditions and made my own biosphere from the ground up, but I wanted something more generalist in approach as well. And on that note, this concludes the first video in this series, I hope it was at least somewhat entertaining for you people. See ya later.
