Open AI ChatGPT o3-pro
And its solution to the Fermi’s Paradox
The fine folks at OpenAI have been hinting that their top flagship reasoning model, o3-pro, was just “a few weeks away” from being released since at least the early April. o1-pro has been my go-to model for major projects ever since it came out in December: the code it produced combined the legibility and functionality better than any other AI tool I’ve tried, and its research projects were second to none, both in terms of style and the substance. So ever since I leaned that o3-pro was “just around the corner” I’ve been putting off starting or refining many of my projects in order to, hopefully, really get the most out of the next model. However, as weeks went by, and o3-pro was not being released, I begrudgingly went with the other models (o3 and o1-pro mainly, but with a healthy dose of 4.5 as well) for my projects. Finally, last week - while I was on long trip of course! - o3-pro dropped. I immediately went out to test it. The first impressions were very favorable. I asked it to re-write an old research report and add more concrete examples. After it thought for about 15 minutes it turned a 6 page report into a 20 page report. And then - after 14 minutes of thinking! - even managed to count the right number of ‘r’s in ‘strawberry’!
Pretty heady stuff right there.
Then I gave it a task to come up with its own solution to the Fermi’s paradox. Fermi’s paradox, in a nutshell, is the observation that if the Universe were as old and vast as we know it to be, then the conditions for life, and intelligent life in particular, must have occurred before, and we would be able to observe at least some sign of the vastly more advanced “civilizations” by now. However, to this day we have absolutely no confirmed sighting of any of it.
I gave ChatGPT o3-pro access to the web and out it in the “deep research” model. Below is its answer to Fermi’s paradox. It comes across as very thoughtful and nuanced.
o3-pro Solution to the Fermi’s Paradox
In short: I see no single “great answer” to the Fermi Paradox. Instead, multiple modest effects — each individually plausible and well-supported by current astrophysics and technosignature work — combine to make the Galaxy look empty even if it hosts many brief, inward-turning, cautious civilizations. My synthesis (call it the “Asynchronous Hiding & Dimming” model) rests on five pillars: (1) civilizations appear at wildly different times, (2) their communicative phases are fleeting, (3) advanced societies learn to minimize outward leakage, (4) they have good reasons to stay quiet, and (5) our instruments still probe only a thin shell of space and parameter space. Together these factors make mutual detectability the exception, not the rule, so the “great silence” need not imply we are alone.
1. The cosmic context: plenty of time, little overlap
1.1 Planets are common, but the Galaxy is old
Star formation and therefore planet building peaked roughly 10 billion years ago, long before the Sun formed — meaning most potentially habitable worlds are much older than Earth (science.nasa.gov).
If intelligent life arises on even a small fraction of those worlds, many civilizations could have come and gone before Homo sapiens evolved.
1.2 Civilizations are probably short-lived
Estimates of the technological lifetime L in the Drake equation range from a pessimistic ~200 years (arguing that AI or self-destruction is a frequent “Great Filter”) (arxiv.org) to an optimistic 30 000 years (ui.adsabs.harvard.edu).
Against a Galactic timescale of billions of years, even 30 000 years yields an “on-air” duty cycle below 0.003 %, making temporal overlap intrinsically unlikely.
2. The detection bottleneck: signals fade fast
2.1 Radio and optical leakage is faint
Unintentional transmissions (TV, radar, cell towers) fall below the cosmic noise floor beyond tens–hundreds of light-years (sci.news), so only the nearest young civilizations could notice us, and vice versa.
The forthcoming Square Kilometre Array will only just reach Earth-level leakage at the nearest dozen stars(astrobiology.nasa.gov).
2.2 Intentional beacons are rare so far
The Breakthrough Listen and other modern surveys have placed the strongest constraints yet on narrow-band technosignatures but have found none in millions of star-hours of data (arxiv.org).
Optical/Laser searches of thousands of systems have likewise reported null results or very restrictive upper limits .
2.3 Megastructure searches come up empty
Infra-red sweeps with WISE and Gaia have not revealed any Dyson-sphere-level waste-heat sources, setting upper limits on Type II/III engineering in millions of stars and whole galaxies .
3. The “dimming” tendency of mature societies
Energy-efficient, planet-bound or virtual civilizations would radiate far less waste heat, deliberately or as a by-product of optimization, slipping under current IR thresholds .
Digital or quantum-encoded communication can be directional and low-power, all but invisible to wide-area SETI sweeps.
4. The incentive to hide
4.1 Dark-forest logic
Liu Cixin’s Dark Forest hypothesis warns that announcing one’s location invites pre-emptive attack; prudence therefore favours silence .
Popularised summaries of both the Dark Forest and classic Zoo hypotheses note that an advanced “galactic club” could deliberately quarantine primitive worlds like ours .
4.2 The Great Filter as a warning
The very fact that we see no elder siblings may imply that risky behaviours (reckless signalling, uncontrolled AI, climate overshoot) often end civilizations, pushing survivors toward stealth and sustainability (en.wikipedia.org).
5. Spatial limits to colonisation
Supernova sterilisation, Galactic-habitable-zone dynamics and plain economics mean that even rapid interstellar expansion leaves large unvisited voids (en.wikipedia.org).
Monte-Carlo work on the Rare Earth hypothesis confirms that complex-life planets are intrinsically sparse, so expansion “hit-rates” are low (arxiv.org).
6. A synthesis: the Asynchronous Hiding & Dimming model
Putting the pieces together:
Asynchrony – most civilizations miss each other in time because star- and planet-formation peaked long ago and Lis small.
Brief beacons – the noisy, high-power phase lasts only a fraction of that already small L.
Self-dimming – technical maturity brings energy efficiency, virtualisation and tight-beam communications, erasing obvious technosignatures.
Self-preservation silence – Zoo & Dark-Forest incentives deter deliberate broadcasting.
Instrumentation gap – current searches sample a tiny volume/intensity slice and have so far seen exactly what this model predicts: nothing.
Because each element is moderate rather than extreme, the combination resolves Enrico Fermi’s “Where is everybody?” without requiring an empty Galaxy or an improbable single road-block.
7. How to test (and possibly falsify) the model
ApproachWhat to look forRelevance to pillarsNext-gen radio arrays (SKA, ngVLA)Earth-level leakage from the nearest ~100 pcPillars 2 & 5Deep mid-IR surveys (JWST, NEOCam successors)Sub-L ☉ waste-heat excesses around solar-type starsPillar 3All-sky optical burst monitorsLow-duty-cycle directed laser flashesPillars 2 & 4Precision astrometry (Gaia DR4+)Stars whose luminosity is too low for their mass (partial Dyson swarms)Pillar 3Statistical SETICorrelate null results with stellar age, metallicity & Galactic locationPillars 1 & 5Exoplanet atmospheric spectroscopyIndustrial pollutants (CFC analogues) in “quiet” planetsPillars 3 & 4
A detection in any of these channels would undermine at least one pillar; a pattern of persistent null results across improving searches would strengthen the model.
8. Philosophical add-on: we might be inside a simulation
Some scholars note that the simulation hypothesis renders the paradox moot: we do not see aliens because the simulation kernel does not render them (wired.com). While logically unfalsifiable, it reminds us that our observations are necessarily incomplete.
Bottom line
The silence we observe is fully compatible with a Milky Way teeming with intelligent life that is (a) rarely co-temporal with us, (b) cautious, (c) energetically efficient, and (d) still just beyond the reach of our fledgling instruments. The path to resolving the Fermi Paradox, therefore, is not merely listening harder, but also listening smarter — with new wavelengths, deeper integrations, and a better grasp of what a truly mature civilization would choose to let leak.