What could inflation theory have to do with the Fermi paradox? Quite a lot, if at least one recent paper is to be believed. The question ‘where are they’ about extraterrestrial visitation becomes even more pointed when faster-than-light technologies move out of the realm of the impossible to something that may be seriously investigated by physicists. Inflation theory, which holds that the early universe underwent a vast expansion as spacetime itself stretched far beyond the velocity of light, opens the door to technologies that might use this effect to create spacefaring civilizations spanning entire galaxies.

Just how fast did inflation occur? In a space of time lasting about 10^-35 seconds, the universe could have expanded by a factor of 10³⁰ to 10¹⁰⁰. As Brian Greene puts it in The Fabric of the Cosmos:

An expansion factor of 10³⁰ — a conservative estimate — would be like scaling up a molecule of DNA to roughly the size of the Milky Way galaxy, and in a time interval that’s much shorter than a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of the blink of an eye… In the many models of inflation in which the calculated expansion factor is much larger than 10³⁰, the resulting spatial expanse is so enormous that the region we are able to see, even with the most powerful telescope possible, is but a tiny fraction of the whole universe.

Enter Bernard Haisch (National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena), Hal Puthoff (Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin) and colleagues. The authors argue in a recent issue of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society that while General Relativity is valid, there are several approaches within it that may permit bypassing the speed of light limit (even if any civilizations that could build them might have to be more advanced than ours by millions of years):

From the paper:

Clearly when it comes to engineering warp drive or wormhole solutions, seemingly insurmountable obstacles emerge, such as unattainable energy requirements or the need for exotic matter. Thus if success is to be achieved, it must rest on some yet unforeseen breakthrough about which we can only speculate, such as a technology to cohere otherwise random vacuum fluctuations. Nonetheless, the possibility of reduced-time interstellar travel by advanced extraterrestrial (ET) civilizations is not, as naive consideration might hold, fundamentally ruled out by presently known physical principles. ET knowledge of the physical universe may comprise new principles which allow some form of FTL travel. This possibility is to be taken seriously, since the average age of suitable stars within the ‘galactic habitable zone’ in which the Earth also resides, is found to be about 10⁹ years older than the Sun…

Is the answer to the Fermi paradox, then, that we are even now being visited by extraterrestrial spacecraft whose contact strategy is based on a sense of interstellar ethics we do not yet understand? The paper argues that such visitations must be considered more likely than a ‘we are alone’ answer to the Fermi question, and goes on to consider what ethical considerations might motivate a culture investigating our planet from outside Earth. The paper is Deardorff, Haisch, Maccabee and Puthoff, “Inflation-Theory Implications for Extraterrestrial Visitation,” in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society Vol. 58, No. 1/2 (January/February 2005), pp. 43-50.