The Great Silence is one of the more fantastic names that has been slapped onto a concept in recent decades. For those who might not know, The Great Silence – a.k.a. the Fermi Paradox – refers to the ongoing and somewhat baffling lack of any evidence *at* *all* of technological civilizations elsewhere in the universe. Even pessimistic estimates of such things suggest there should be thousands of high tech cultures in the galaxy, with tens of thousands more having existed in the past; if so, where are they? Why can’t we hear them chattering away? Are they hiding from us? Are they communicating via means we can’t detect? Or are we just alone?

A new hypothesis has been put forward to explain this. And, spectacularly, the authors reference the Cthulhu Mythos in doing so.

That is not dead which can eternal lie: the aestivation hypothesis for resolving Fermi’s paradox

The paper proceeds from the assumption that civilizations arise in sizable numbers and rapidly technologically progress. They survive all the dangers and proceed right on to Singularity-level tech and power. But here’s the thing: if you have advanced so far that it makes more sense to download all your peoples minds into computers and run the simulations, rather than living in meatspace, the current universe may not be the best one for you. What you might want rather than this universe of  bright stars and a warm background temperature of several degrees kelvin is a cold, dark universe where computational systems will run *extremely* efficiently. Even if the systems are low power, so that the simulation may run thousands or even billions of times slower than real life, if you are running the system in the far future after most of the stars have burned out, you could be dealing with time scales *trillions* of times longer than you might currently envision. So the math works out that for any set amount of natural resources – in this case, energy – you might want to go to sleep for a *really* long time and wait for the stars to die out, *then* wake up and begin the true living phase of your culture. You might live a billion times slower than modern day humans, but you might be dealing with a potential lifespan of your computational system that is ten to the power of a very large number of years.

This sort of thing was discussed – sadly, without reference to Cthulhu – in this video from about a year ago. Here, the idea of a truly advanced civilization is proposed, setting up shop around a large black hole, harvesting it for energy. If you know how to do it, black holes could be the ultimate energy source: you drop a rock into one, and, over time, the black hole loses the mass of the rock through Hawking radiation. It’s the one method known for conversion of mass into energy at essentially 100% efficiency. Sure, antimatter/matter reactions will do that, but the manufacture of the antimatter in the first places is *stupid* inefficient. On the other hand, if you are content to wait a really, really long time, harvesting a black hole might just keep your civilization ticking along for, say, ten to the power of fifty or a hundred years.

So, put it all together. An advanced civilization realizes they need a cold, dark universe before they can really live efficiently. They might find themselves a super-massive black hole at the center of a galaxy, and be content to wait a few dozen billion years for things to cool down, then they wake up and start doing their thing. A civilization like this would be far beyond us, but so long as we didn’t go poking them with a stick, we should be ok. But consider the same sort of civilization, but one *determined* to live just as long as possible. 10^100 years isn’t enough, they want 10^120 years. How could they make that happen? Well, for starters, they’d need to shut off not only new star formation, but stellar fusion. The Sun, for example, will burn itself out in five billion years or so and then go kerflooey, leaving behind a white dwarf that’s only a fraction of the suns current mass.All the mass that gets converted into photons and neutrinos is lost, as far as the aliens are concerned. but of course, right now they’re sleeping away the strange aeons.

But their servitors might be prowling around. What would *their* task be? Well, if the aliens are not only waiting for cold and dark, but also depend on the mass-energy of the supermassive black hole at the galactic center, then the servitors should be wandering around carving up stars. Using starlifting techniques, they can draw off a large fraction of the hydrogen from a star. This hydrogen can be turned into a vast number of, say, brown dwarfs; fusion has shut off, the hydrogen is now in long term cold storage in convenient bite-sized chunks. The brown dwarfs are put into orbit around the central black hole, and one is dropped in every however many billion years to keep the black holes mass relatively constant. Alternatively, stars could be converted into neutron stars or black holes through means I couldn’t begin to guess, for eventual dropping into the main black hole.

This would end up with sleeping beings of godlike power, waiting for the stars to be right (in this case, dead and “off”). They have semi-sentient servants skulking around out in the darkness carrying out missions that are totally indifferent to the suffering and desires of pissant fleaspeck beings like us. Missions we probably wouldn’t understand either the “why” or the “how” of if we saw them, and would be wholly incapable of doing anything about.

So, yeah. Lovecraft nailed it.