A Fake Universe?

Mystery of the Aliens (2)

ONE of the most baffling riddles in astronomy is Enrico Fermi's Paradox. It runs thus: because the timescale needed for an advanced civilisation to emerge is vastly shorter than the age of the Galaxy, then the Galaxy should be filled with advanced civilisations. But we observe none of them. As Fermi put it: ``Where is everyone?'' The implication is that something is fundamentally wrong with our view of the universe. It isn't reasonable to suppose that the Galaxy contains no civilisations but ours. But that, apparently, is exactly what it does do. So what is going on? A truly ingenious explanation comes from the science fiction writer Stephen Baxter, who suggests that a super-civilisation has constructed an artificial universe, a sort of cosmic planetarium, to hide their existence and their activities from us.* Those stars in our sky are not real stars; they are merely virtual reality projections made to look like stars. Beyond them, and hidden from us, is the evidence of the mysterious projects that the super-civilisation has decided---for its own unexplained reasons--- that we must not see.

Sistine Chapel ceiling - a cosmic planetarium?

This mad-sounding idea has quite a respectable intellectual history. Bishop Berkeley proposed in the 18th century that external objects exist only in our imagination, provoking the limerick: There was a young man who said God Must think it exceedingly odd That that juniper tree Just ceases to be When there's no one around in the quad. What kind of beings could do such a thing? Obviously, they must have an extremely advanced technology, a Kardashev Stage Three society, able, perhaps, to exploit the resources of an entire galaxy. They would have to mimic not just photons, but all the exotic particles that reach us from the heavens─neutrinos, cosmic rays, gravitational waves, the lot. Moreover, if the Cosmic Planetarium is to remain fool-proof, if it is to be indistinguishable from the real thing by any conceivable test that we might decide to carry out, it will have to be constantly updated. Before 1969, for example, the Moon could have been just a circular painting on the ``ceiling.'' But when the alien ``Managers'' heard about the Apollo Programme they would had instantly to transfer the Moon into a genuine ball of rock. The outer planets and their moons would have needed the same treatment as Voyager approached them. And when the theories of relativity were developed, the artificial universe would have to be immediately adjusted in order to be compatible with them. Maintaining and updating all this fakery must be an expensive, time-consuming project! Is this idea really credible? Probably not, since it violates the principle of Ockham's Razor that the likeliest solution to a mystery is most probably the true one. But on the other hand, the apparent absence of any advanced civilisations in the Galaxy seems just as unlikely. To paraphrase the Red Queen, one must choose which impossible things to believe before breakfast. *Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, Vol. 54, pp. 210-216, 2001.