A Dark Answer to Fermi's Paradox

[Absurdity]

The story goes like this: Sometime in the 1940s, Enrico Fermi was talking about the possibility of extra-terrestrial intelligence with some other physicists. They were impressed that our galaxy holds 100 billion stars, that life evolved quickly and progressively on earth, and that an intelligent, exponentially-reproducing species could colonize the galaxy in just a few million years. They reasoned that extra-terrestrial intelligence should be common by now. Fermi listened patiently, then asked simply, "So, where is everybody?". That is, if extra-terrestrial intelligence is common, why haven't we met any bright aliens yet? This conundrum became known as Fermi's Paradox.

The paradox has become more ever more baffling. Over 150 extrasolar planets have been identified in the last few years, suggesting that life-hospitable planets orbit most stars. Paleontology shows that organic life evolved very quickly after earth's surface cooled and became life-hospitable. Given simple life, evolution shows progressive trends towards larger bodies, brains, and social complexity. Evolutionary psychology reveals several credible paths from simpler social minds to human-level creative intelligence. Yet 40 years of intensive searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence have yielded nothing. No radio signals, no credible spacecraft sightings, no close encounters of any kind.

So, it looks as if there are two possibilities. Perhaps our science over-estimates the likelihood of extra-terrestrial intelligence evolving. Or, perhaps evolved technical intelligence has some deep tendency to be self-limiting, even self-exterminating. After Hiroshima, some suggested that any aliens bright enough to make colonizing space-ships would be bright enough to make thermonuclear bombs, and would use them on each other sooner or later. Perhaps extra-terrestrial intelligence always blows itself up. Fermi's Paradox became, for a while, a cautionary tale about Cold War geopolitics.

I suggest a different, even darker solution to Fermi's Paradox. Basically, I think the aliens don't blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they're too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don't need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today.

The fundamental problem is that any evolved mind must pay attention to indirect cues of biological fitness, rather than tracking fitness itself. We don't seek reproductive success directly; we seek tasty foods that tended to promote survival and luscious mates who tended to produce bright, healthy babies. Modern results: fast food and pornography. Technology is fairly good at controlling external reality to promote our real biological fitness, but it's even better at delivering fake fitness — subjective cues of survival and reproduction, without the real-world effects. Fresh organic fruit juice costs so much more than nutrition-free soda. Having real friends is so much more effort than watching Friends on TV. Actually colonizing the galaxy would be so much harder than pretending to have done it when filming Star Wars or Serenity.

Fitness-faking technology tends to evolve much faster than our psychological resistance to it. The printing press is invented; people read more novels and have fewer kids; only a few curmudgeons lament this. The Xbox 360 is invented; people would rather play a high-resolution virtual ape in Peter Jackson's King Kong than be a perfect-resolution real human. Teens today must find their way through a carnival of addictively fitness-faking entertainment products: MP3, DVD, TiVo, XM radio, Verizon cellphones, Spice cable, EverQuest online, instant messaging, Ecstasy, BC Bud. The traditional staples of physical, mental, and social development (athletics, homework, dating) are neglected. The few young people with the self-control to pursue the meritocratic path often get distracted at the last minute — the MIT graduates apply to do computer game design for Electronics Arts, rather than rocket science for NASA.

Around 1900, most inventions concerned physical reality: cars, airplanes, zeppelins, electric lights, vacuum cleaners, air conditioners, bras, zippers. In 2005, most inventions concern virtual entertainment — the top 10 patent-recipients are usually IBM, Matsushita, Canon, Hewlett-Packard, Micron Technology, Samsung, Intel, Hitachi, Toshiba, and Sony — not Boeing, Toyota, or Wonderbra. We have already shifted from a reality economy to a virtual economy, from physics to psychology as the value-driver and resource-allocator. We are already disappearing up our own brainstems. Freud's pleasure principle triumphs over the reality principle. We narrow-cast human-interest stories to each other, rather than broad-casting messages of universal peace and progress to other star systems.

Maybe the bright aliens did the same. I suspect that a certain period of fitness-faking narcissism is inevitable after any intelligent life evolves. This is the Great Temptation for any technological species — to shape their subjective reality to provide the cues of survival and reproductive success without the substance. Most bright alien species probably go extinct gradually, allocating more time and resources to their pleasures, and less to their children.

Heritable variation in personality might allow some lineages to resist the Great Temptation and last longer. Those who persist will evolve more self-control, conscientiousness, and pragmatism. They will evolve a horror of virtual entertainment, psychoactive drugs, and contraception. They will stress the values of hard work, delayed gratification, child-rearing, and environmental stewardship. They will combine the family values of the Religious Right with the sustainability values of the Greenpeace Left.

My dangerous idea-within-an-idea is that this, too, is already happening. Christian and Muslim fundamentalists, and anti-consumerism activists, already understand exactly what the Great Temptation is, and how to avoid it. They insulate themselves from our Creative-Class dream-worlds and our EverQuest economics. They wait patiently for our fitness-faking narcissism to go extinct. Those practical-minded breeders will inherit the earth, as like-minded aliens may have inherited a few other planets. When they finally achieve Contact, it will not be a meeting of novel-readers and game-players. It will be a meeting of dead-serious super-parents who congratulate each other on surviving not just the Bomb, but the Xbox. They will toast each other not in a soft-porn Holodeck, but in a sacred nursery.

Source (approximately halfway down the page)

Thoughts?

 

[own8ge]

Here is a suggestion: Some highly intellectual species thought: "Lets create an universe containing only 1 intellectual breed to then find out how they stumble and deal with their lonesomeness"
You see... If there would be an super intellectual species. Why not do your experiments by stimulating them? It seems an inevitable pursuit.

I like your suggestion. It has something to it. At the very least, it seems more liable than the presented self-slaughter suggestion.

 

[Hayyel]

At this point I don't see this happening at all. Mostly because there are countless of poor people who survive out there just fine. There are still more people out there who prefer to spend time with other people. Just because we now hear more about people who prefer to stay home in front of a comp, doesn't mean anything- we only see eachother because we are the only ones here, while most others do whatever a "normal' person would do.

 

[Duxwing]

Source (approximately halfway down the page)

Thoughts?

I'll further Hayyel's main point. While the article makes a logically valid point, its conclusion is trivial, and the article itself seems to be little more than a vehicle for Luddite doom-saying and (lest I be unclear) Luddite fear mongering, along with a bizarre blend of religion and Social Darwinism that fails to understand even basic precepts of ecology and simple facts of history. For example, the birth rate decreased not because Man read books, but because he discovered the means by which to assure that his progeny would survive childhood, thereby decreasing the number of births necessary for reproductive success and because populations that cannot expand (any one populations's domain was very limited when books were invented... thousands of years ago, and were quickly filled up throughout later millennia) tend to stabilize at a level equal to the carrying capacity of their habitat. I suggest avoiding this author in the future.

But I will disagree with one detail that Hayyel asserted: the proposed species needn't be as primitive as we to wipe themselves out. And also with own8ge's argument: the argument for creation is unparsimonious (we could have arisen via evolution, and what of the beings who allegedly created us?) and rests on the assumption that intelligent species would do such a thing at all. Not every human of leisure plays the Sims.

-Duxwing

 

[Absurdity]

At this point I don't see this happening at all. Mostly because there are countless of poor people who survive out there just fine. There are still more people out there who prefer to spend time with other people. Just because we now hear more about people who prefer to stay home in front of a comp, doesn't mean anything- we only see eachother because we are the only ones here, while most others do whatever a "normal' person would do.

My understanding of the author's argument is that the best and brightest are the ones spending too much time with computers when they should be exploring the universe, building things, etc. These people are the ones with the potential to change the course of civilization.

That's not to say lesser individuals don't matter. In many ways they preserve more authentic ways of life and prevent knowledge of these practices from vanishing entirely. However (to not be romance them too much), they're also the ones caught up in sports, celebrity worship, and other vapid pursuits more rooted in virtual enjoyment than in physical, immediate enjoyment.

While the article makes a logically valid point, its conclusion is trivial, and the article itself seems to be little more than a vehicle for Luddite doom-saying and (lest I be unclear) Luddite fear mongering

I don't see how advocating space exploration is remotely related to Neo-Luddism.

 

[Duxwing]

My understanding of the author's argument is that the best and brightest are the ones spending too much time with computers when they should be exploring the universe, building things, etc. These people are the ones with the potential to change the course of civilization.

To my knowledge, they are; from behind a computer screen, where intellect can flourish. Not every bright young man or woman wants to join the astronaut corps or become a foreman or an inventor. Some would rather make headway in mathematics, computer science, or physics; others would rather be doctors, police chiefs, and lawyers. The outlets for intelligence are many.

I don't see how advocating space exploration is remotely related to Neo-Luddism.

Odd, where did they advocate that?

-Duxwing

 

[Absurdity]

Odd, where did they advocate that?

-Duxwing

Fourth paragraph:

I suggest a different, even darker solution to Fermi's Paradox. Basically, I think the aliens don't blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they're too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don't need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today.

 

[Absurdity]

Here is a suggestion: Some highly intellectual species thought: "Lets create an universe containing only 1 intellectual breed to then find out how they stumble and deal with their lonesomeness"
You see... If there would be an super intellectual species. Why not do your experiments by stimulating them? It seems an inevitable pursuit.

Reminds me of Huxley's quip that Earth may just be another planet's hell.

Despite the fact that proving we are alone in the universe is logically impossible as far as I'm aware, if we were somehow able to it would be a colossally profound discovery, and probably renew interest in some old, cast-aside books that claimed as much.

However the odds that there is life elsewhere in the universe seem to be as close to certainty as possible.

 

[Vrecknidj]

“Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is quite staggering”


― Richard Buckminster Fuller

 

[Hayyel]

This whole alien life somewhere out there seems like a certainty to me too, based on simple logic. However we tend to think about alien life as something that is similar to our lives, which might be the problem. Tho nowadays people are more open about these things, so I guess trying to find other living beings would turn into looking at it from other angles- not humanoid, not based on the elements we are based on, etc. I remember reading a book. That shortly mensions some astronauts finding alien life out there,, and thinking they are alien insects or something, they annihilate the whole species. Only later it turnes out they were tiny intelligent beings with a whole culture and art.

 

[Duxwing]

Fourth paragraph:

While I agree that space colonization would have prevented such a result in the hypothetical civilization, you're missing the greater thrust of the essay, which speaks at length about genetic fitness and advocates a reactionary version of what Teddy Roosevelt would call "the strenuous life" as a solution.

-Duxwing

 

[BigApplePi]

We don't have to stand for that. Specialists can overcome. There are those who still wish to explore the universe. Let those tied to Earth do what they want.

Technological civilizations are not so easy to come by. What if some past intelligent civilization blew DNA/protein into outer space and let it settle where it may? Then life would be created anywhere. But timing?

Conditions would have to be very favorable for intelligent life. If the dinosaurs had not died out, there would be no humans today. Besides how long can a technological civilization last if renewable sources of energy can't be found or excess population destroys everything? Five thousand years?

Send me a message in 6013 A.D. and I will give you an update. There WILL be a year 6013 ya know. Not like 3,000,0000,013. There won't be that year.

 

[Absurdity]

While I agree that space colonization would have prevented such a result in the hypothetical civilization, you're missing the greater thrust of the essay, which speaks at length about genetic fitness and advocates a reactionary version of what Teddy Roosevelt would call "the strenuous life" as a solution.

-Duxwing

And you seem to be equating Neo-Luddism with reactionary political views, which is unfair to say the least.

Nor are space exploration and a "strenuous life" mutually exclusive. In fact I can't imagine any trial greater than leaving the planet for extended periods of time.

 

[Cognisant]

The reverse side of this is the increasing gamification of reality, civilised people don't beat each other to death anymore, we blast each other with missiles and drones, so though I agree games can be a massive time sink we gamers are going out into the real world and making a game of it, y'know it's the white man's way to make the game then change the rules so nobody else can play.

Some new super virus could wipe out half the world's population.
Of course the surviving half will mostly be the socially inept shut-ins

 

[Hayyel]

Of course the surviving half will mostly be the socially inept shut-ins

If you think about it, they(we?) might actually have a chance. At least where it comes to not going totally mad from the lack of human contacts.

 

[Magus]

I've had this thought myself actually. Some of my friends seem to spent half their life playing computer games, which I can't help but feel is just a waste. The amount of hours they've clocked up online, literally into the thousands would have been enough to learn a language or reach a high level in something like chess; though perhaps I am just old fashioned.

Its almost like Nozick's experience machine a.k.a the matrix. From wiki:

"Nozick asks us to imagine a machine that could give us whatever desirable or pleasurable experiences we could want. Psychologists have figured out a way to stimulate a person's brain to induce pleasurable experiences that the subject could not distinguish from those he would have apart from the machine. He then asks, if given the choice, would we prefer the machine to real life?

Nozick also believes that if pleasure were the only intrinsic value, people would have an overriding reason to be hooked up to an "experience machine," which would produce favorable sensations."

P1: If experiencing as much pleasure as we can is all that matters to us, then if we will experience more pleasure by doing x than by doing y, we have no reason not to do x rather than y.
P2: We will experience more pleasure if we plug into the experience machine than if we do not plug into the experience machine.
C1: If all that matters to us is that we experience as much pleasure as we can then we have no reason not to plug into the experience machine. (P1&P2)
P3: We have reason not to plug into the experience machine.
C2: Experiencing as much pleasure as we can is not all that matters to us.

Its a sobering thought. As the article says we have preferences for certain things, sweet foods etc because given our evolutionary development these were more favourable and so became inherited characteristics/intergenerational memes yet these things may ultimately not be in our best interest as far as a species progression view is concerned. Should we constrain ourselves to 'the real'? But if we experience it, isn't it real to us? etc. etc.

 

[Absurdity]

An article I recently came across has prompted me to engage in some procrastinatory necromancy with respect to this topic.

Perusing Nick Land's blog, I came across his most recent post Abstract Horror (Note-1), which linked to an article by another great thinker, who coincidentally is also named Nick, Nick Bostrom.

He argues that there is a probabilistic barrier, which he terms "the Great Filter," that prevents the emergency of spacefaring civilizations. There are a few possibilities here. The first is that the emergence of life itself is a Great Filter due to its improbability: space faring races have not been encountered because the emergence is life is so rare, meaning we may be the only form of intelligence life within our galaxy (or at least a large district of it). The other, more menacing prospect, is that the Great Filter is some law of technological development that awaits us in the future, that something occurs in the development of civilizations that causes them to either annihilate themselves or decadently backslide into ruin (personally, I'd bank on the latter).

He begins the piece with the fervent hope that the most recent Mars probe finds no life. For if it was to find life, be it microbes or something more complex, it would suggest that the emergence of life is not so rare, and therefore not a Great Filter. This would mean that we, as a species, have yet to run the gauntlet of the Filter, and that we may never live to reach the stars.

The article is very readable and interesting. Here is a link to a .pdf file from Bostrom's website.

Edit: Of course, if we humans do manage to found a successful multi-planetary civilization, it may very well be in the form of a Neo-Confucian empire.

 

[redbaron]

I wish I knew where to actually start with the article in the OP. Its validity rests almost entirely on false dichotom(y/ies) that seem to stem either from the author's lack of understanding, or disingenuity. Either way I can't be bothered deconstructing them.

 

[Ex-User (9086)]

For too long to readers:

Why Fermi Paradox is associated with horror themed threats? If a civilisation fails to advance up the ladder, thats not dark, thats how it is supposed to be for them. Recognition of failure is more important than foreboding sense of fear.
Really just look at yerself humanity, you don't need prescience, divintation and other cosmic stuff. Look at yerself and estimate; Am i going to ruin myself?
source

This article in summary: If we know something we don't want to know, we may lose hope, so better not to know it. If we know just enough so that we feel nice and sound we still have hope.

Spoiler

Really even on the second page he delves into pop-science? For us the dumb monkeys to see a gamma ray burst is a miracle, we have seen even less star quakes on magnetars, yet we would find some diminished energy of information in a form that is understandable for us?

Right so we now only see the world as a probabilistic great filter hypothesis. How about something happened and our galaxy is the only one that has single lifeform? It indeed is probable looking at how many other galaxies we have seen. And we will never be able to check up on other galaxies according to standard laws, except for Andromeda.

Another thought, if we base intelligence evolution on human evolution, then it is highly probable that humans are one of their kind and intelligence progressed on other planets in ways that we cannot compare.

Why it is so natural to assume that every or most intelligent species would go and conquer the galaxy? Maybe this great filter makes them control their populace and resources in order to preserve and stabilise their living enviroments.

I read a good sci-fi book on the topic, however its unavailible in english. It divided post singularity human species on two groups; preserving themselves homo sapiens that when curious use "extensas", advanced brain interfaces that send long replicating probes around the universe and help the user to experience and understand everything around. The other group were post singularity transhumans that created virtual terminals in their brains able to simulate any condition and universe, they simply placed universe inside their heads and needn't look for anything else. Story culminated when one extensa user found part of the galaxy with remnants of a different civilisation. This was so rare and suprising that some non-extensa users decided to investigate this thing that was not possible in their inside-universes. They sought contact and finally tried to merge with alien intellect in hopes of finding new points of view to their internalised experiences.

P.7 Again, why disaster? Even if mankind destroyed itself now with nuclear war, there would be no doubt that it was a choice rather than disaster. Why would you fear own hatred and lack of responsibility, I see no disaster in this end, rather a logical and desired possibility.

A potentially great future for humanity?
And what if we view life as a stage play? It has a beginning, main body and end. It may be beautiful because it is a complete creation. A grand interplay of matter, temporary denial of entropy. Fine spectacle to take part and behold. Neverending stories tend to get boring.

Some obvious/probable/pseudo-pseudo scientific stuff on the fermi paradox and colonising the universe.

Spoiler

It seems very likely to be possible to efficiently spread in the matter of millenia, there are some supposed answers that actually panspermia/indirect colonisation occured because someone used von neumann probes on our solar system.

Most of the points is obvious, but analysing it from our perspective is certainly interesting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTfuI-9jIo

Also it is a good point that it would be more efficient to send messages via probes, rather than light/waves.

 

[The Void]

The ETs are ruling you, using filtered biased science, and religions and other shits.
Humanity is trapped within a psychological matrix created by the ETs.
There is not much exposed info about Et because the ruling ETs are hiding their existence for more efficient control!
We are the game, we are the pawns in the hand of ETs, we are getting played!

That is another possibility.