Why Have Alien Civilizations Never Shown Up? A New Take on the Fermi Paradox: Colonial Infighting Leads to Self-Destruction

If alien civilizations exist in the universe, why haven't they visited Earth yet? This question was posed by physicist Enrico Fermi and is known as the "Fermi Paradox." A science communicator on a YouTube video offers a simple and brutal answer: interstellar colonization is inherently self-limiting, and civilizations may collapse inward as they compete for a limited number of planets.

The Classic Fermi Paradox Reasoning: Exponential Colonization Should Be Everywhere

Fermi's question didn't come out of nowhere—there's a calculable logic behind it. Suppose an alien civilization masters interstellar travel and adopts a self-replicating colonization model: build two ships to fly to two planets, and the colonists on each planet each build two more ships to spread to more stars. This exponential growth means the Milky Way would be rapidly filled in a relatively short time.

By this reasoning, the universe should contain a large number of alien civilizations, and their presence should be everywhere. But the reality is, we haven't observed any conclusive evidence. The video puts it bluntly: "I don't see any aliens."

The reason the Fermi Paradox is a classic is that it juxtaposes two seemingly contradictory facts: on one hand, the Milky Way has about a hundred billion stars, a significant proportion of which have planets, and the galaxy has existed for about ten billion years; on the other hand, if even one civilization masters interstellar colonization and expands at exponential speed, by conservative estimates, filling the entire Milky Way would take only millions to tens of millions of years—practically an instant on the cosmic scale. Therefore, even if civilizations are far apart and expand slowly, the Milky Way should long ago have left numerous traces of colonization. This is the inferential basis of the Fermi Paradox: the enormous gap between theoretical expectation and actual observation constitutes the question "Where is everybody?"

The Most Blunt Explanation: Colonization Is Self-Limiting, and Infighting Leads to System Collapse

The explanation this creator offers is what he considers the "most interesting and blunt" version: colonizing planets is itself self-limiting. The core contradiction lies in resource competition—"I want that planet, and so do you." When all civilizations are competing for a limited number of habitable planets, conflict is inevitable.

More critically, this competition won't converge to some stable state. The video's judgment is: at some point, the entire system will implode due to everyone fighting everyone. In other words, the expansion logic of interstellar colonization comes with a built-in kill switch—before a civilization ever reaches us, it may have already collapsed from internal strife.

The value of this view is that it shifts the focus of the Fermi Paradox from "where are the aliens" to "will expansion behavior itself kill the expander." It doesn't need to invoke complex hypotheses like dark forest deterrence or the Great Filter—just the plain mechanism of resource competition provides a self-consistent reason for the silence.

The term "involution" (neijuan) originates from agricultural sociology, referring to the phenomenon of continuously investing more labor under limited resources without producing output growth. In the context of interstellar colonization, it's extended to mean: civilizations devote massive resources to fighting each other rather than expanding outward, causing overall development to stagnate or even regress. The key to this mechanism is that colonial expansion isn't a single-track process but multiple civilizations in parallel; when multiple expanders enter the same star region simultaneously, the original "empty space" becomes a "battlefield," and the gains of expansion are offset by the costs of competition. From a game theory perspective, this resembles a multi-player "tragedy of the commons"—every civilization has the incentive to grab more planets, but the collective result is resource depletion and system collapse.

Does This Explanation Hold Up? Three Questions Worth Asking

First, is the assumption of resource scarcity necessarily valid? If civilizations can achieve in-situ utilization of space resources—such as mining in asteroid belts or building giant space stations—planets themselves may no longer be contested ground, and the motivation for competition would weaken.

Second, does implosion necessarily occur at the interstellar expansion stage? The history of civilizational conflict on Earth shows that competition sometimes also breeds cooperative mechanisms. If alien civilizations evolve some system of coordinated allocation, the colonial involution inference may not hold.

Third, this hypothesis is hard to falsify. Our inability to observe alien civilizations can be explained either as their having already imploded, or as their never having appeared, or as their choosing silence. The video's author himself only positions it as his "favorite explanation," not a definitive conclusion.

"Falsifiability" is the demarcation criterion proposed by philosopher of science Karl Popper: a hypothesis that cannot be refuted by any possible observation or experiment lacks scientific testability. The various explanations of the Fermi Paradox—including the dark forest, the Great Filter, and the colonial implosion hypothesis discussed here—all face this dilemma: the single fact that we cannot observe alien civilizations can be explained by countless hypotheses simultaneously. This doesn't mean these hypotheses are worthless; they serve more as heuristic frameworks to help people think about the boundary conditions of civilizational expansion, rather than directly testable scientific theories.

Why This Plain Answer Deserves Serious Consideration

Solutions to the Fermi Paradox often veer toward grand narratives like technological singularity, virtual worlds, or the dark forest, and the appeal of this explanation lies precisely in its plainness: taking the logic of resource competition that has recurred throughout human history and extrapolating it directly to the interstellar scale. It reminds us that what constrains civilizational expansion may not be the laws of physics or a technological ceiling, but rather the behavioral patterns of civilizations themselves.

For readers interested in AI and frontier technology, this perspective has an additional implication: any self-replicating expansion system, whether interstellar colonization or other forms, must answer the same question—when growth hits limited resources, what does the system rely on to avoid implosion?

This video content comes from a YouTube science channel, and the author also recommends his new book "Lost in Space."

One-line Summary

A plain answer to the Fermi Paradox: interstellar colonization is self-limiting due to resource competition, and civilizations implode during expansion.

Paragraph Summary

The Fermi Paradox asks: if alien civilizations exist, why have they never visited Earth? A science communicator offers a plain explanation: interstellar colonization is inherently self-limiting. If a civilization expands in an exponential replication pattern, the Milky Way should be rapidly filled, yet humanity has observed no evidence. The author believes that conflict among multiple civilizations competing for limited habitable planets won't converge, ultimately causing the entire system to implode. This hypothesis requires no complex frameworks like the dark forest or Great Filter—resource competition alone explains the silence of alien civilizations. The article also raises questions: in-situ utilization of space resources may weaken the motivation for competition, civilizations may evolve coordination mechanisms, and the hypothesis is hard to falsify. Its value lies in shifting the focus of the Fermi Paradox from "where are the aliens" to "will expansion behavior kill the expander."