More For Fermi's Paradox

I mentioned Fermi's Paradox the other day, the conflict between the lack of clear, obvious evidence for extraterrestrial life and various high estimates for its existence. I was watching a new TV series, Expedition Deep Ocean, which covers what seems to be in some measure a vanity project by hedge fund guy Victor Vescovo to dive to the deepest points of the world's oceans. (The internet gives him a net worth of $1-5 million, which is your normal bourgeois couple these days, but the show claims he funded a $50-million dive vehicle from his own resources. Guy seems just a little hinky to me, but let that go.)

The big thing that struck me about the first two episodes of the show was images like the one above from the bottom of the deep-sea trenches from "landers" with cameras and bait that are sent to the bottom at the same time as the main sub. At depths of over 25,000 feet, in water with sub-freezing temperature and completely dark under extreme pressure, little shrimp-like creatures swarm to get the bait like bugs drawn to a patio light.

Here's my immediate problem with this. Why didn't we see this with the first Mars landers? Professors of cosmology will tell me this is a silly question. It's because in the history of Mars, the frammis equation dislocated the continental shift, which in turn degraded the nitrogenous humors and deprived the planet of Van Allen belts, such that the solar winds bewildered the mRNA capacity of the genetic folderol, or something. But before his happened, maybe three or four billion years ago, life reached a certain point, but then it went away. According to the models. We're gonna find the fossils, any expedition now.

But the pro-alien life faction turns around and argues just seconds later that on earth, microbes live in boiling water around volcanic vents on the ocean floor, and bacteria thrive a mile under Antarctic ice. So life is so robust that it must exist under conditions that we would think impossible, like, say, on Mars. Just look at the pictures Victor Vescovo brought back from the South Sandwich Trench, shrimp-like creatures swarming the base of the lander!

Except we go to places like Mars and Venus, where Science Tells Us there's no reason there can't be life under those conditions, and we don't find it. And it seems to me that if there were life, it would be swarming like the life we keep finding in the most inhospitable places on earth. Even Walt Disney saw that in The Living Desert. And beyond that, on earth there are both fossils of old swarming life and swarms of new life. Even if the big asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, somehow the cockroaches kept on keepin' on. Why didn't it persist on Mars if it had no problem doing it here?

Life swarms. Life persists. Those seem to be properties. It sure isn't swarming on Mars.

Fermi had a point. Where is everybody?