"We are already disappearing up our own brainstems."
- Paleontology has shown that organic life evolved quickly after the Earth’s surface cooled and became life-hospitable. Given simple life forms, evolution shows progressive trends toward larger bodies, brains, and social complexity. Evolutionary psychology has revealed several credible paths from simpler social minds to human-level creative intelligence. So evolving intelligence seems likely, given a propitious habitat—and astronomers think such habitats are common. Moreover, at least 150 extrasolar planets have been identified in the last few years, suggesting that life-hospitable planets orbit most stars. Yet 40 years of intensive searching for extraterrestrial intelligence have yielded nothing: no radio signals, no credible spacecraft sightings, no close encounters of any kind.
It looks, then, as if we can answer Fermi in two ways. Perhaps our current science over-estimates the likelihood of extraterrestrial 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. Maybe extraterrestrial intelligence always blows itself up. Indeed, Fermi’s Paradox became, for a while, a cautionary tale about Cold War geopolitics.
I suggest a different, even darker solution to the 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. Once they turn inwards to chase their shiny pennies of pleasure, they lose the cosmic plot. They become like a self-stimulating rat, pressing a bar to deliver electricity to its brain’s ventral tegmental area, which stimulates its nucleus accumbens to release dopamine, which feels…ever so good.
NQSFW source: Uncanny Vulvas
See also
- Evolutionary mismatch, also known as mismatch theory or evolutionary trap, is a concept in evolutionary biology that refers to evolved traits that were once advantageous but became maladaptive due to changes in the environment.
I never really internalized it until I went to my first launch but one way to look at the Saturn V/Eagle combo is that it takes a 40-story building full of kerosene and liquid oxygen to get a VW bug with three dudes in it to the moon and back. The Voyager probes are that same VW beetle, without the dudes, on half the rocket... and it's taken 30 years to get them past Uranus. We're still spitballing the technology to get so much as a post-it note to Alpha Centauri which, true, outlines the argument of the author... but we're four generations from learning to fly and three from learning to split the atom which is about 20 generations less than the Romans lasted and they pretty much accomplished "concrete" so it's not like technological progress is predictably linear or anything. We don't have any little green men visiting us at night because the energy cost to travel to another solar system with life is astronomically more than the resources you'd gain in doing so.
- Not the Assyrians The author has made a career out of the notion of Fisherian runaways as the proximate cause of all that afflicts the world. Which is more than a little disengenuous considering he wrote a dating book with Tucker Max that's got an endorsement from Neil Strauss on the cover. Evolutionarily speaking: IF: cybersex becomes the ultimate goal for both sexes THEN: any member of either sex with a genetic aversion to cybersex (puking in VR, say, or inner ear problems) becomes the dominant strain within very few generations THEREFORE: cybersex ceases to be a problem from a civilizational standpoint. QED. It's easy to get eyeballs by saying "this time it's different" and whatever malady is afflicting us has never afflicted us before. Historically speaking, though, vast swaths of humanity go through life just doing their thing without moving the needle. If 999,999 men buy RealDolls but one guy improves lasers, it doesn't matter that 99.999% of all men have disappeared up their own fleshlights. Lasers are still better. Is the innovation factor above or below replacement? Well, I've seen the ZOMG VR Apocalypse decried three times in my life now and here we are, six years after the kickstarter, two years after they showed up at Best Buy, and I know one (1) person with an Oculus. He bought it for work. With their money. Because they heard VR was going to be a thing now. Uncanny Vulvas, by the way, is a 5,000 word elaboration on the Robert Heinlein assertion that sex is the prime motivator behind all art and technology in the history of civilization because try and think of a single invention or major work of art by a eunuch you can't can you see I told you so.Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching.”
“Human bipolarity was both the binding force and the driving energy for all human behavior, from sonnets to nuclear equations. If any being thinks that human psychologists exaggerate on this point, let it search Terran patent offices, libraries, and art galleries for creations of eunuchs.”
More seriously: I think a big part of the the Fermi Paradox is that our RF signals fall below the noise floor well before they reach another star. Any similar communication from other star systems are not detectable from Earth. So when we look up and don't see any signals from other stars, that's not terribly surprising, because it would take a massive amount of power and/or a conscious effort to send a signal specifically to us. As for why we haven't seen a Von Neumann probe? Well, we haven't looked very hard, for one. All we know is we haven't seen one on Earth or the moon or 1% of Mars.
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