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Maybe the Aliens Are Addicted To Computer Games
Hugh Pickens writes "Geoffrey Miller has an interesting hypothesis in Seed Magazine that explains Fermi's Paradox — why 40 years of intensive searching for extraterrestrial intelligence have yielded nothing: no radio signals, no credible spacecraft sightings, no close encounters of any kind. All the aliens are busy playing computer games. The aliens 'forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they're too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism,' writes Miller. He says the fundamental problem is that an evolved mind must pay attention to indirect cues of biological fitness, rather than tracking fitness itself, and that although evolution favors brains that tend to maximize fitness (as measured by numbers of great-grandkids), no brain has capacity enough to do so under every possible circumstance. 'The result is that we don't seek reproductive success directly; we seek tasty foods that have tended to promote survival, and luscious mates who have tended to produce bright, healthy babies. The modern result? Fast food and pornography,' writes Miller. 'Once they turn inwards to chase their shiny pennies of pleasure, they lose the cosmic plot.' Miller adds that most bright alien species probably go extinct gradually, allocating more time and resources to their pleasures, and less to their children, until they eventually die out."
Who here doesn't think a TNG-style Holodeck would lead to the downfall of our civilization?
The bastards keep hacking into our WiFi and pirating Starcraft! Now our ISP is sending us cease and desist notices! We tried to tell them it was the aliens but they just referred us to a local psychiatrist!
This post was made in complete sincere seriousity; as such any attempts to derive humour are doomed to instant failure.
...did-just-one-too-many-dailies dept.
This-one-just-sucks-alot. Give-it-up-you-morons-please....
Geoffrey Miller is an assistant professor in the department of psychology at University of New Mexico.
I'm sure the guy is looking for a government grant, to study this intriguing possibility. Great job, if you can get it: spend government money to study if aliens are busy playing videogames
What would you do after all the research you find that the answer to the greatest mystery in life is... 42?
You go like... "Is this it?!"
-"Damn... for the love of telepathy, what do we do now?"
"Fsck it, let's fire up Quake 25!"
Here be signatures
I am a highly evolved alien living among the humans. While I will admit to a mild addiction to Slashdot and Drudgereport (some days these are very similar), I don't play computer games or watch television. I literally have no time for either as I am so busy watching the humans and pondering all the different recipes that would make them tasty. Not to mention that as an alien, I haven't figured out how to make much money and can't afford cable or satellite TV. I tried "bunny ears" for a while, but they quit working last Spring and I haven't missed the TV much. When I did watch it, I just kept seeing fellow aliens (Nadya Suleman, Marilyn Manson, Lady Gaga, Sheyla Hershey, et al.) entertaining the humans.
This theory that aliens are highly evolved and addicted to electronic entertainment is backwards because we know better than to end up sitting in Plato's Cave staring at flickering images when there is a marvelous world waiting to be viewed and humans, fattened in caves while watching flickering images, waiting to be devoured.
In principio erat Verbum.
Why do we believe that aliens will be preoccupied with themselves and ignore the cosmic plot, just like we humans do? perhaps aliens evolved from a kind of ants, for example, where the 'we' is above the 'I'.
Instead of "I'm going to play Half Life" the ants would be saying "let's play Half Life." Same end state.
That's exactly what they want you to think. Hang on, BRB, mysterious glow in the sk.kz'&^u ] @.
n o c a r r i e r
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
What kind of conversation could you have, EVEN if you already spoke the same language?
I know you will be surprised to hear from me, as we have never met. I have recently come into possession of 25 billion galactic zorns which belonged to the late Supreme Ruler Zardoz ...
why 40 years of intensive searching for extraterrestrial intelligence have yielded nothing: no radio signals, no credible spacecraft sightings, no close encounters of any kind
Self-replicating planet-destroying machine army released in a war 3 billion years ago are exterminating any sign of intelligent life as soon as they see the first radio waves. The closest were 41 light years from us.
Even interstellar *communication* is wildly impractical. I mean, come on, latency measured in *years*? What kind of conversation could you have, EVEN if you already spoke the same language? And if you don't, how are you going to learn it? Cultural immersion is NOT possible. Back-and-forth dialog isn't even really possible. With no pre-existing linguistic information to help you bridge the gap, *and* no interaction, how would you characterize an alien language? You could spend centuries analyzing a single hour's worth of message and get nowhere.
But something as a big as a recognisable alien communication would be enough in itself to prove the existence of aliens (or a deity with a sick sense of humour). People would happily devote centuries to studying such a message. If we even just swapped Wikipedias that would give enough data to be getting on with for at least a few centuries.
And on the seventh day, God said : "299,792,458 m/s is enough for everyone".
Do humans get so busy with computer games that the whole species, all 6 billions of us, forget to even mine the resources we need or trade or plough the fields?
Resources? Do you mean... vespene gas?
Circumcision is child abuse.
My preferred version:
299,792.5 km/s - it's not just a good idea, it's the law!
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
/* Note: I picked a pretty big number for the speed here. It ought to be fast enough, but test it during QA - we can always increase it later if it isn't. */
Unfortunately, the seventh day was the one reserved for QA, and after creating cannabis on the third day, things started to go a bit wrong...
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