There have been proposed numerous resolutions by both academic and independent researchers to the grand question of why there isn't hard evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. The remarkable uniformity of the Universe supposes sustaining of a myriad of advanced space civilizations. The great number of proposed hypotheses which are flooding the pages of books, magazines, academic journals, newspapers, and the Internet indicate that there is still no satisfactory explanation of this major riddle.

INTRODUCTION: FERMI PARADOX

Enrico Fermi was a major player in the Manhattan Project for producing the first atomic bomb. A team of scientists led by Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, and J. Robert Oppenheimer developed a nuclear explosive device, and in 1945, south of Albuquerque, New Mexico, was successfully tested the first atomic bomb. The Nuclear Age had begun.

After the war, the United States and the Soviet Union captured many V-2s and used them in the research and development of their intercontinental ballistic missiles, capable of delivering nuclear arms at ranges of thousands of miles.

With these new technologies space exploration was already feasible and imminent. On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1. The Space Age had begun.

In the summer of 1947 in New Mexico, the famous Roswell crash incident occurred. Unusual debris from a downed object, supposedly an alien spaceship, was found on a ranch.

The press made a big fuss. The imagination of the public was already prepared for extraterrestrial spacecrafts due to the pulp science fiction magazines; some of them had huge print runs for the time. On the pages of numerous publications all kind of space civilizations were fighting.
Many ordinary people also believed in aliens. In 1938, a radio play based on a version of the science fiction novel War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells announced an assault on New Jersey by hostile Martian invaders. Thousands of panicked people in New York and New Jersey?not realizing that they were listening to a radio play and the announcements were only a simulation?fled their homes, creating traffic jams in order to avoid imminent gas attack by the Martians. Dozens of them were sent to the hospital for shock, hysteria, and injuries.

The U.S. authorities were very concerned about the Roswell crash and the many flying saucer reports. What were they: Soviet new generation aircrafts spying around the American nuclear secrets, escaped Nazis with their secret flying saucers looking for revenge, alien space ships?

In 1950, President Truman approved the thermonuclear bomb project. A group of physicists, most veterans of the Manhattan Project, reassembled at Los Alamos, New Mexico.

During the lunches Enrico Fermi loved to ponder scientific questions. The Roswell crash and the flying saucer sightings were discussed as well.

The story goes that Fermi formulated his famous paradox in the summer of 1950 or 1951 during a luncheon conversation with Edward Teller, Emil Konopinski, Herbert York, and other companions.

Later, Edward Teller?participant in the production of the first atomic bomb, and subsequently known as the "father of the hydrogen bomb"?remembers that the conversation was only vaguely connected with astronautics. After the luncheon the talk continued. Teller recalls that the discussion had nothing to do with astronomy or extraterrestrial beings, but was some down-to-earth topic. In the middle of the conversation, Fermi asked quite unexpectedly, "Where is everybody?" The result of his question was general laughter, but everyone around the table seemed to understand that he was talking about extraterrestrial people.

Pondering the alien hypothesis, Enrico Fermi?one of the chief architects of the nuclear age and a well trained scientific mind (Nobel Prize winner)?reasoned that all technological civilizations will discover nuclear reactions, and with rockets based on this relatively simple technology, they could travel across interstellar distances at 10 percent of the speed of light; thus, the space civilizations could theoretically colonize our Galaxy. So, if there are extraterrestrials, why haven?t they come to Earth? "Where are they?"

Enrico Fermi was the first one who formulated the notion that if there are much older civilizations in our Universe, they should already be on our planet, too.

Here is a list of hypotheses explaining the Fermi paradox:

1. Most intelligent species have a very short existence period because they develop self-destructive technologies and inevitably kill themselves;

2. Humans are the first or the only sentient beings in our Universe;

3 We are protected species in a cosmic zoo or sanctuary; we live in some sort of artificial planetarium, simulation, or cosmic nursery;

4. The aliens are not interested in space traveling and communication;

5. Singularity or transcendent hypothesis states that mature species move to another plane of being or into another dimension;

6. Interstellar travel is impossible;

7. Catastrophic galactic and planetary events are so common that complex life rarely has the time to evolve; for example, powerful gamma-ray bursts periodically sterilize the galaxies;

8. The extraterrestrials are here, but they are hiding;

9. The Universe and the mature civilizations are quite different than we can imagine;

11. The Universe is filled with killer robots (berserkers) looking for life to destroy it;

12. Rare Earth hypothesis states that Earth is unique and complex life is uncommon in the Universe;

13. Interstellar travel is very slow, too costly, and technologically complicated, which is why extraterrestrial civilizations still haven't reached us;

14. Only a few civilizations develop science and technologies enabling them to travel into space;

15. Advanced civilizations have strong ethical codes against interfering with primitive creatures like us;

16. The other alien races have become energy blobs;

17. The advanced space civilizations communicate with some unknown form of radiation that is non-electromagnetic or are using a communication technology based on principles of physics of the future;

18. The aliens have moved somewhere, shielded from us;

19. Alien civilizations prefer to study Earth and humans via nanomachines;

20. The Solar system is located in the less desirable geographic region of the Galaxy;

21. The aliens run out of resources.

There is still no truly satisfying theory explaining the obvious absence of hard evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations.
Pondering the Fermi paradox, the true question is why they haven't arrived on Earth and why they don?t roam the Galaxy, because for advanced civilizations, which are millions of years ahead of us, there wouldn't be any technological problem to travel across space. Why we can't detect alien signals or radio leakage (called also the Great Silence) is a secondary question, not the main one.

The proposed hypotheses suppose that intelligent species are emerging at a constant rate, which seems quite reasonable, because there are billions of stars much older than our Sun, and they could have Earth-like planets able to sustain life. The popular equation, formulated by Frank Drake in 1961, has seven multiplicative factors (yearly rate of star formation within the Galaxy, percentage of stars with planets, number of planets suitable for origin of life, fraction of planets with life, proportion of planets on which intelligent life evolved, fraction of planets with civilizations capable of interstellar communication, longevity of the technological phase of such civilizations), which estimate the number of the supposed civilizations in our Galaxy, the Milky Way.

Since the estimates for each of the seven factors can vary widely, the ET buffs often formulate a very large number of extraterrestrial sentient species, but for the skeptics (most of the scholars believe that skepticism is at the heart of science), it is equally easy to calculate a very small number of alien civilizations.

The Drake equation also supposes that space intelligences arise at a constant rate because stars are forming continuously, and many of them have planets which are capable of sustaining life and can develop sentient beings. But where are these older civilizations?

EQUAL START HYPOTHESIS

However, if we assume that for some reason the space civilizations in our Universe started at about the same time, we get a very elegant resolution to the Fermi paradox: the Universe is teeming with living beings, but being at almost the same level of development, most of the numerous intelligent races still haven't contacted or haven't found evidence of existence of other advanced creatures. They, just like humans, are making their first steps into deep space. The leading intelligences already travel across the neighborhood of their star system, but they are facing a lot of problems: financial, biological, technological, and so on, limiting their space expansion activities.

What could be the reason for such an equal start of intelligence?

All life in our Universe is based on hard competition in order for Nature to accelerate evolution, thus providing (bio)diversity, quality, and quantities of civilizations. The intelligent races in space can compete, cooperate, and progress successfully only if they are at about the same level of development. The later-emerging civilizations could hardly survive real competition with sentient beings which are millions of years ahead of them.

Accurate timing is of crucial importance for complex systems, because instead of universe filled to the brim with fit intelligent races, there could be only one or a few of them which would never reach the high level of development than in the case of legion hard-competing civilizations. The equal start hypothesis supposes a factor or factors providing such an equal start. It could be something that "forbids" the emergence of sophisticated life before a certain point in time, like frequent gamma-ray explosions or other devastating events on a universal scale.

But there is also a more complex explanation. There are clues and evidence that life in our Universe is orchestrated. The idea that the cosmos was invented by some creative conscious artificer is very ancient. Hindu tradition sees the Universe as a vast dream of God who is playing with the world and its inhabitants. Throughout human history were created varied images of God(s)?as shepherd, ruler, father, alien visitor, dreamer, craftsman, playing child, dancer, old wise man, supernatural being, harsh demiurge, and so on. An a priori argument for the existence of God is asserting that as existence is perfection through evolution, and God inevitably is the most perfect being, it follows that God must exist. He is the Supreme Being, ergo the Supreme Ruler. For most of today's scholars God is an unnecessary hypothesis.

There are modern scientific theories, hypotheses, and present-day myths (in some cases science, myth, and religion are mixed up) which claim that the world is ruled by supreme alien races, some sort of artificial intelligence or supercomputer, (living) intelligent fields, creative conscious energy, the Earth itself is conscious, and so forth. Rupert Sheldrake asserts that morphic resonances influence and control everything in the Universe. A morphic field is a field of pattern, order, form, or structure, organizing the forms and the development of living organisms, atoms, molecules, and all the rest.

But for now, there are only three primary groups of plausible theories on that controversial subject?Genesis and Control of Universe and Intelligence:

1. A supreme agent (consciousness, intelligence, some kind of force, or sentient being?natural or artificial) created the Universe through manipulation of physical matter and energy, and it is still in control. That external agency is assisting the development of life and intelligence;

2. Universe, life, and intelligence are a result of chance events and evolution by natural selection;

3. According to some recent ideas, the situation may be a combination of the previous two groups of theories: matter, life, and intelligence are subjects of some creative, external guiding agency, chance events, and of evolution through natural selection.

In my view, the developing universes inherit from previous universes a vector, from Latin vector, "carrier": a natural structure and mechanism which organizes all living and non-living structures in the cosmos. The vector is a vehicle for new universes to receive characteristics and models of development from preceding universes. The previous evolutions, which happened billions and billions of times, left evolutionary patterns in the vector; the development of the humans before us is written in our genome. Our genes make us. The vector makes the Universe, life, and us.

The vector and our space-time are one inseparable entity, just like humans and their genes are inseparable.

The Universe is developing strictly to a model written in the vector. Humans are developing strictly to a blueprint written in their genome.

The vector is a very sophisticated structure, and sometimes it seems to us to be a living creature. But being placed in the timeless extensions (extra dimensions) of our space-time, it can't have all characteristics of a living creature?it is not living but not dead, because it has features of an intelligent entity: creates, organizes, and controls everything in our Universe.

The vector contains information for the future development of the species in our Universe, memorized during previous evolutions. Creation and natural selection go hand in hand. Our ontological and biological future is the past of previous evolutions.

The models of future development are countless, and the vector chooses only one which then becomes our reality. There are strict rules: do not disturb the natural laws (only sometimes); keep close to the memorized model from previous evolutions; be conservative, but faster and better than before, etc.

Not everything is carved in stone. There are constant small variations and errors throughout time which should benefit the evolution.

The Universe with a capital "U" is the Universe in which we live. Universe with small "u" is any other universe besides our universe?in the past, the present, and in the future, including the predecessors and descendants of our Universe. False or quantum vacuum is a medium in which the universes exist and from which they originate. It is like an ocean of a primordial form of energy.

Every universe is born from this energy ocean, and almost everything turns eventually into energy.

The Big Bang theory works well only for the period after the Big Bang. Now many scientists are inflating the universes instead of "Big-Banging" them. In the Andrei Linde model for emerging universes, an eternal oscillating scalar field in the false vacuum is loosing energy, giving it up in the form of elementary particles which form the initial matter of the future universe.

According to the vector model, an instantaneous ripple in the ever-fluctuating quantum vacuum causes loosing of energy, giving it up in the form of a chaos of vibrating energy strings and particles which are forming the initial matter/energy of the new universe. Matter and energy are interchangeable: E=mc2. The new universe just pops into existence enormously huge; it doesn't become bigger and bigger as an inflating balloon. The universe starts as matter only, there is still no space and no time, and familiar terms like slow, instantaneous, huge, etc. could be very misleading.
But what initiates the loosing of energy into matter in the primary energy ocean? The irregularities (fluctuations) of the quantum vacuum are amplified by an external agent - the vector

After the initial genesis of matter, the vector tells the Nature fundamental laws and runs them: the speed of light, the strength of magnetism, of gravity, the masses of the elementary particles, etc. It defines also the speed of evolution, the level of competition between the sentient species, the emerging and doom of life and intelligence.
It determines the very essence of the Universe. There is no need for big crunches or eternal inflation. The universes just dematerialize again into primordial energy. This is not an instantaneous but instead a relatively long process.

The vector runs the Universe through all phases of its natural life?from birth to death. The entropy of the unfolding Universe is increasing. That means that more and more energy becomes unavailable for conversion into work. The Universe is "running down." It is a nonreversible mechanism; our world has limited resources and a limited lifetime. After the normal life period of the Universe is over, it turns again into energy.

After one life cycle is over a new one begins, and the supposed end product of the Universe - a superbeing, a great number of grand civilizations, or something else - has to move into another universe in order to survive. The adopting universe should have different natural laws which are more suitable for such advanced beings
The key question here is: why don't they (superior megaintelligences from previous evolutionary cycles of our Universe, from other universes, from the supposed other dimensions, or from wherever they are hiding) contact us officially? Why don't they give us a helping hand, saving billions of human lives from diseases, crimes, wars, and other calamities - man-made or natural? They have their good reasons for not doing what we would expect from them.

The universes are like the legendary phoenix which lives 500 years, burns itself on the funeral pyre, and rises alive from its ashes to live another period; with every new life cycle the unfolding universes are becoming more sophisticated and are producing more advanced offspring.

The new paradigm provides a rational basis for interpreting many phenomena located around the fringes of modern science: precognition (knowledge of future events, mainly through extrasensory means), telepathy, UFOs, levitation, teleportation, miracles, impossible coincidences, telekinesis, shaman healing, etc. All of these are manifestations of a natural, inheritable structure from many universes back, named by me the vector.

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