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?

Comments

Simpler explanation

[Cold hard reality]

((1 MW) / ((4 light year)^2)) * (100 (m^2)) = 6.98311557 × 10^-26 watts

So even if there are aliens in the closest star broadcasting using a 1 MW transmitter, the output here is way to low to measure.

They're probably sitting there wondering why they don't receive anything either.

Re:Yea

[History's Coming To]

Point 3 is a good one - it's already been suggested that any signal that has perfect compression would be indistinguishable from black body radiation.

Re:Yea

[Bender0x7D1]

Sending something at 1% of the speed of light is not too far off our current capability.

I think you better check your numbers. The fastest ship we have launched is the New Horizons probe which is headed for Pluto. It has a speed relative to Earth of 16.26 km/s. Note: The fastest ship if we include gravity assists is Voyager 1 at 17.15 km/s relative to Earth. However, the speed of light is 300,000 km/s. So, 1% would be 3,000 km/s and we are running around 17 km/s as our best effort, which means we need to get 200x faster to reach the 1% goal.

Moral of the story: Light is really, REALLY fast and we can't build anything (larger than a few atoms) that can travel fast enough to be conveniently compared to the speed of light. (Yet.)