Where is everyone? Based on how quickly our technology has advanced and how old our galaxy is, it seems as though intelligent life is rare in the universe. My bet is that very few other intelligent civilizations exist across the vast expanse of the universe.

It’s enough to give a guy religion. :)

How do I come to such a heterodox conclusion? There are three components I reasoned through to get here.

1. Our science has gotten us to the cusp of having technology that is distinguishable to others in the galaxy. Unless we are rare, others should be ahead of us.

2. Our science has not yet been able to repeat the inorganic to organic transition. It seems as if the early soup of the planet was only able to produce life once as well, there is not a forest of life but a lone tree.

3. A counter-argument is that the emergence of complex life through the entire universe progresses consistently against the speed limit of Assembly theory. This puts a bound on life’s formation, not more complex emergent properties like societies, but the idea is that all technologically advanced life in our galaxy was assembled at a similar speed.

The timescales available to more advanced intelligent life forming, even just in our galaxy, are many orders of magnitude greater than our short, parochial fiddlings in science. If alien intelligent life had science for 5,000 or 10,000 years, and was a million years earlier to it than us, a drop in the bucket on the galactic scale, one would assume that they would have come to a point where they had Dyson swarms around their stars or were able to project their artificial intelligence into space within the galaxy, not to mention the longer times to traverse intergalactic space. We would see some evidence of those AIs.

We are closer to a Dyson swarm—a collection of structures proposed by Freeman Dyson that capture a star’s energy—than most people might predict and even if we weren’t there for centuries… a drop again in the time scales of the universe. While detectability might well depend on what civilizations build and where we search, any such creation would stick out like a sore thumb in the night sky, and we just don’t see it.

While I’ve already said that our time in creating a technological society has been short, one of nature’s solutions that we haven’t been able to recapitulate in the lab is the formation of simple life from inorganic material. Indeed, nature was only able to get through this filter one time to form the entire tree of life. Only once in the early soup or shortly after did life form from matter.

The conditions must be just right, so it seems like a mistake to believe that life is everywhere just because there are so many planets that could be responsible for our form of life.

Figuring up the likelihood of if we should be seeing the indications of alien AI in our solar system is tricky. One calculation I’ve worked, the Drake equation, combines astronomical factors with estimates of life’s emergence, intelligence, detectable technology and its duration. Additional factors like the probability of travel (or worse colonization) of alien AI or the likelihood of our tech seeing their tech needs to be estimated.

All these highly subjective probabilities led me to Assembly theory. Assembly theory measures complexity through the minimum joining steps needed to build an object. It suggests that conditions in the universe—the complexity, environmental selection pressures, and resources available—might set a “speed limit” on the assembly of complex molecules, cells, and basic forms of life.

In Life as No One Knows It, Sara Imari Walker, one of the leading theorists of assembly theory writes: “Even when using assembly theory to look for life elsewhere, we are still confronted with an urgency to resolve our expectations of how common life is. To do this, we need to solve the origin of life.” Her argument is that if we knew the mechanism, we could constrain the odds.

I think the next revision of assembly theory could help us gauge the rate at which complex organisms assemble into intelligent and technologically-advanced civilizations. There might be a spectrum of when there is enough intelligence, knowledge and material complexity in bits and bobs of the universe for these things to assemble. It isn’t tied down to a specific period of time, but perhaps has some band on it. A 10,000-year band, a 100,000-year band, a million-year band is still a drop in the bucket in the universe.

Let’s call my framing assembly theory 2.0. It might be interesting to do something similar with the creation of first simple machines and then complex machines by an entity like ourselves on a particular planet, and see if we can build up to the sort of technology and collective action that we have through governance, governments and democracy. Could this conjecture extend to biological traits, culture, and science and technology? Modern assembly theory’s count of construction steps does not yet supply a timescale.

But does it offer a range? Are we within the speed limit, vastly under the speed limit, or over the speed limit in terms of the technology we can concoct? If we imagine our progression from the Stone Age to nascent AI, with roughly 500 years of science, can it be said that we are somewhere in that band? Can we construct that band better given assembly theory 1.0?

I think the comparison in intelligent assembly could be against every other entity on this planet. Take the complexity of our brains compared to an orangutan’s. Could we get to bits per unit complexity, per unit of evolutionary time? Can’t we use something there to get to why humans have language and intelligence in ways that similar species don’t? Is there a gap in their assembly to intelligence that we can construct? Does it never become complex enough? And like all other questions in this vein, what is the minimum assembly time and how does that compare to the evolution of the universe or the Milky Way Galaxy.

I want to remain consistent with as much of assembly theory 1.0 as is humanly possible. I understand the convoluted nature of using orangutans, but I think that can be addressed with good statistical tests. Maybe it’s a complexity structure: orders of complexity, or modularity in the brain, that we might be looking at. Or simply not counting brain regions as the same thing if they’re different allowing us to use the reuse rule of assembly theory. The reuse rule allows previously assembled substructures to remain available, that is any subsequent joins using the same assembled structures still count. However, the reuse rule currently establishes neither biological construction nor a brain measurement, it is only applicable to more simple, defined parts and operations.

Is there anything in assembly theory 1.0 that would give rise to a Great Filter early on? The Great Filter being the gap between single-cellular and multicellular life, or from inorganic material to the creation of a memory system like genetics. The intuition pump of the Dyson swarm silence could also be answered by a filter in which AI kills all life forms on a planet, or by technological warfare, global warming or some other planetary collapse.

Walker goes on to say that “our best bet for making contact with alien life forms in the near terms may be to evolve it from scratch in the lab.” There may be an even larger universe of chemical possibilities we need to explore to find them.

Maybe we can finally band assembly theory 2.0, the life-to-technology scale, with some decent comparisons to other terrestrial life forms or in our creation of simple machines from simple instructions. We return to the great question of the Fermi paradox, is our progress just more advanced, speeding with abandon against assembly theory 2.0’s spectrum or are we rare? Will Dyson swarms become apparent as we are building our own or will ours continue to be the only one? Maybe assembly theory 2.0 will tell us we are not rare, but instead at equal intelligence strength thanks to the multifactored reasons for it to arise across the universe.