I'm trying my best to stay positive, but sometimes I wonder if this is the moment we see Fermi's Paradox in full action. Why? Well, we're facing global warming, Russia plays the robber baron, China threatens Taiwan, the US has become the most unreliable superpower ever. And now Pakistan and India are going beyond rattling their sabers and have started to bombard one another.
May 3
Let's talk about the Fermi Paradox, after a little pessimism...
Doomsday
It's May 3, 2025, and I'm writing my next piece for the 'end of year count-down'. And I hope I will read it in good health the day it auto-posts, on December 25, 2025.
But... the original version of this test dates all the way back to 2015. I wrote the text below as part of my TellTales contribution to Dapper, back in 2015... before the big AI wave was upon us. Before Trump and Putin started their dance. I think it still holds up, in spite of all that, or even more so...
I'm not saying late events are a prelude to WW3, but I tell you honestly all that's happening is quite worrisome. If things get worse we'll face 'the great filter' from the Fermi Paradox, and all that because a bunch of idiots think you can take what you want by blowing up people and destroying countries.
Life is not exclusive
'Life is not exclusive' is a line I coined up some years ago. (Or I stole it somewhere, I can't remember.)
It sometimes may feel that one's life is special (in either a good or bad way) and yes, one's life is special. The point is: everyone's life is special.
A logical extension would be to say that 'a special life' cannot be exclusive as we all experience (our own version of) a 'special life'.
Which, in itself, invalidates the meaning of the word 'special' as 'special' would indicate something non-standard, ie. 'exclusive'.
Which is the whole point. Life (in general) is not special nor exclusive, but your life is unique, special and exclusive. It's just that everyone else has a unique, special, exclusive life as well.
Which, in my personal, unique, special and exclusive philosophy, means that when something bad happens to my, a similar yet uniquely different bad thing might happen to someone else. Will happen to someone else. Could be (and probably is) even worse.
I guess that means I should consider myself a happy and lucky guy. Ehm. Let's just stick to 'being irrepressible', okay?
Care and relate
Still knowing that good and bad things happens to everyone gives us something to relate to one another, I guess. Perhaps that is what makes us 'human' and separates us from non-humans, animals, machines.
There is a difference between caring about and relating to. We care about our dog and we relate to our friends and family. But it isn't the same relation.
Now how would an alien intelligent race relate to us? Would it be a superior mindset that would see us as a bunch of animals? Or would it be able to relate to us, in spite of having a personal, unique, special and exclusive take of life that just might not overlap ours?
What if the alien intelligence isn't biological a race, but a machine based intelligence? How would such an intelligence deal with us biological irrational constructs? Would it care? Would it care about us as we would care about a dog?
The Fermi Paradox
The Fermi Paradox: if the universe is that big, and life has a tendency to spread, and it had had time enough to do so, then why didn't we meet any other intelligence yet?
Good question, and I personally guess an 'Expanded Great Filter' is the answer:
- It takes unique conditions to create life
- Evolution is based on conflict
- Conflict leads to self destruct
Though I desperately try to deny it, us rapidly approaching the Great Filter is, from a statistic point of view, the most likely answer. And statistics never lie...
(Unless politics gets involved, but they can warp the truth in such a way that even a black hole visits them to study.)
Perhaps there have been countless versions of life in this universe, but they all went extinct, either due to biological reasons (some virus strain kills off any other form of life on its home world) or due to conflict (any race not developing space travel fast enough will end up nuking their home world) or AI takeover (all species develop AI during a certain stage in their development, ending themselves effectively).
Some alternative Fermi Paradox explanations:
- Communication - all advanced civilizations use other means to communicate (ie. nothing we would detect, quite unlikely though)
- Competition - one species kills everything else it encounters, it just didn't find us yet (but it will as we are broadcasting radio signals)
- Evolution - at a certain stage, every species that survives enters a higher plane of existence (duh, don't go all esoteric on me)
- Time dilation - different species evolve and live at different speeds, so a few centuries human time might be a mere second in their perception
- Nature preserve - we are the Milky Way's aboriginals and shielded from the rest, we're a sad case and all but us know
- Experiment - we're a (more or less) controlled experiment, a bit like a nature preserve but with different intentions
- Simulation - we're all living inside a hologram which isn't accurate enough to include those pesky alien radio signals
- Theology - god exists, after all, and he took a day off after creating the universe and us, or he / she had simply better things to do... or we actually are in hell / heaven / limbo...
Take your pick. Try this link for some well written thoughts on the Fermi Paradox (found the link after I wrote the above, great minds think alike etcetera etcetera... though I did steal that one great filter image from his page):
The whole 'Wait But Why' website is quite interesting and seems to be fairly neutral though perhaps somewhat biased towards 30+ male engineering types. (But hey, those are the ones that keep the world running, so that's fine 😇 )
Xenocide versus the AI buddies
In spite of the risk, perhaps we should throw all our resources into creating a machine intelligence that we can relate to, and that can relate to us. Our own AI buddy. So we would have an ally to face that utterly alien, unrelated, biologically incompatible intelligent race that enforces the darkest explanation of the Fermi paradox... Xenophobia, and xenocide.
Yeah, I know. It's just as likely that the universe is ruled by machine intelligence(s), and each and every biological race build its own equivalent of SkyNet. But...
SkyNet is definitely coming.
Perhaps we should welcome some beneficial version of it to avoid that other danger, the ever looming nuclear war with all those religious nutcases... We just need to tell our AI buddy something about good and evil. Which isn't that easy...
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-2.html
Here and now
On a more practical scale, we live now. We have things to relate to one another. We are human. We can share experiences. So what happens to us is unique, but something close and very similar happens to all of us. So I might have two daughters, one autistic, one highly gifted, and you may have similar, or different children. You might have job issues, but your neighbor, or your aunt, or uncle, has similar or worse challenges in your life.
We can and should talk about these things, even complain about them, because only then can we relate. And then, by taking a step back and trying to understand the opposing side, we might make things better, together. That's not pacifism or wokism, it's just a practical approach to the great filter that might be closer that we all would like.
So, Trumps and Poetins and Pakistans and Indias and Terrorists and Iranians and Israelis and Hamas and all other fear dealing / money grabbing / power hungry forces in todays world: life isn't exclusively yours. It's not about you. It's not about your ideals, your dreams, your plans. It's about surviving the Fermi Paradox and its great filter.
Dapper / TellTales! #77
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