Where is everyone? (Patreon)

Hi folks! My latest comic has been a tough nut to crack! Ive had to do a lot of redrawing - as you can see from a couple of my abandoned panels above. 

This story was inspired by the Fermi Paradox. The idea that given the (apparently) high likelihood of life forming in the universe, why can’t we see evidence of alien life anywhere? Where is everyone? 

Personally I suspect life is pretty common. Fossil evidence seems to suggest that life began pretty soon after the Earth cooled enough to make it even remotely viable. 

Which suggests that statistically life is probable. 

The problem isn't intelligence either! Once animals evolved, intelligence followed in a relatively short period afterwards. And you could interpret the record to suggest that there has been an evolutionary drive towards greater complexity, but regardless, some kind of conscious minds appeared very quickly, once multicellular life appeared. 

And that's the problem right there. Multicellular life. Because that didn’t emerge quickly at all. In fact, it didn't happen for billions of years. Single cell life seems to have been the norm for a very long time. 

Statistically then, the implication here is that multicellular life is really, really unlikely.   

So. 

Perhaps that's why no one has turned up in gleaming silver spaceships? 

No hands.

Of course this is all from one data point: Earth. Which is why I'm a science fiction writer and not a scientist. I'm just making this up as I go along. 

Anyway, to wrap up my TED Talk, here's where a couple of the other ideas featured in this comic came from...

Quantum thinking is based on Orch OR - a hypothesis from the nineties. Our animal brains are too messy to use this process to think, but perhaps that's not true with simpler, more isolated systems? 

Quantum computing bending the universe out of whack? Inspired by this article.