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

Yea

[Seriousity]

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!

Re:Yea

[impaledsunset]

That's one of the most ridiculous hypotheses I've ever read. Sure, it is possible, Sure, everything we know about aliens is based on speculations that don't go against our knowledge. But most speculations at least seem plausible and match the only example of an advanced civilization we know of.

And this single example has shown us a few things for which I would be surprised if they don't apply universally. The first is that no matter what the general population are, there would always be deviations and a small percentage of people who are different is enough to affect world-wide matters. The second is that if these different people don't exist or are unable to push the rest of the society like we do, the whole population would probably still be in the caves, because most of our progress depended on them.

Well, the last one seems plausible, though. However, I thought that the possibility that all aliens are still in the caves was already considered, and thus this story brings nothing new to us.

I don't think there's one reason for it all, though.

1. While I want to believe that life is abundant in the universe, complex life as ours might turn out to be rare.
2. For four billion years all life here was essentially living in the caves. We created our civilization in a wink lasting the mere fifty thousand years because homo sapiens somehow managed to look outside of the box by chance. Sure, being intelligent was an evolutionary advantage for the billions of years that the homo genus survived, so we didn't come out of nowhere, but there's still no guarantee that this happens often in the universe. We might be one of the few advanced civilizations.
3. What makes us think we can hear them? Have they developed the radio? Do they use broadcasts? What if they use encryption making the signals indistinguishable from noise? Why would they care to send signals to us? Maybe some of them "know" that there's a little chance that there's someone out there?

Re:Yea

[RickyG]

Yes! I await that defense! "Mom, I wasn't looking at Porn, it was those lazy aliens using our WiFi!!!"

Re:Yea

[rhsanborn]

I suspect this was far less of a hypothesis about aliens and far more social commentary on humans.

Re:Yea

[hazah]

Statistically, the probability of life in the universe is exactly 100%. I leave it to you to figure out why that is the case (hint: we are talking to each other). To say that it's "mathematically impossible" displays a lack of understanding of the term itself. Perhaps your conviction in the matter is a bit misplaced?

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

[wjousts]

There are no Genghis Khans anymore, nor Alexander the Greats.

I'm not sure that isn't a good thing. Maybe you should pick some less psychotic examples.

Also I'd add that "greatness" is something that history tends to assess post-hoc. In 100 years time there maybe many 20th century luminaries who are considered as great and as significant as Genghis Khan or Alexander.

Re:Yea

[mcgrew]

I think everyone completely misses the fact that space aliens are going to be nothing like us whatsoever. A bird evolved on the same planet as us, in the same environment, gravity, atmosphere, etc but is little like us at all. A squid evolved in the same planet; how much different will space aliens be? You're not going to see Star Trek's Klingons and Romulans and Ferengi, period. Birds have feathers, we have hair, space aliens are unlikely to have either, but have something completely different that serves the same purpose.

There are some pretty wierd creatures on earth, and if there are other planets inhabited by sentient beings, they will be less like us than squids are. And not only in looks and biology, but social structures, psychology, interaction, communications, etc.

The second is that if these different people don't exist or are unable to push the rest of the society like we do, the whole population would probably still be in the caves

Or still in the farrnglottispods, or whatever you call those wierd things those strange beings lived in when they were more primitive.

While I want to believe that life is abundant in the universe, complex life as ours might turn out to be rare.

And it may turn out that we're the first planet to form life; if there is life on multiple planets, one has to be first.

For four billion years all life here was essentially living in the caves

For most of that time, the caves were underwater; life began in the oceans. But actually there was as much life outside of caves as inside; most animals don't live in caves now, and no more lived in caves then.

We might be one of the few advanced civilizations.

Or one of trillions, or the only one in the universe. Since we've not even found evidence of primitive life anywhere else (yet), it's all just speculation.

What makes us think we can hear them? Have they developed the radio?

For that matter, do they even have the same senses that we do? They may have developed senses we lack, while being blind and deaf.

Re:Yea

[drinkypoo]

You're not going to see Star Trek's Klingons and Romulans and Ferengi, period.

That's a pretty bold statement that's not particularly backed up by anything. Our sample size is 1; by the available evidence, that's the only life we should see that's achieved anything of note. Since we know that 1 is not a useful sample size, of course, we know that's false; but you might as well say anything, since we have no basis for comparison.

It's particularly telling that we are not the only creatures on this planet with a well-developed brain. Our form factor is our primary distinguishing characteristic. But what we need to make statements about the likelihood of encountering intelligent bipeds is to encounter some other life not based on [our] DNA. It seems that the arrangement of eyes, nose, and mouth on the head are biologically convenient; food doesn't fall into the nose, nor snot into the eyes. Quadrupeds are naturally less agile than bipeds, which indeed is likely why one sprang from the other on this planet, so bipedal life is highly likely. So where I am going with all of this is that by the available evidence, Klingons are at least as likely as some insectoids.

Also, in Trek the galaxy was seeded by a master race using pieces of their own DNA; such is not impossible in the really real world, either, only unlikely. But then, how unlikely is intelligent life?

There are some pretty wierd creatures on earth,

but none of them use fire, so zero of them are candidates for space travel, present or future. That's a necessary step to that level of tool use.

For that matter, do they even have the same senses that we do? They may have developed senses we lack, while being blind and deaf.

If you can develop touch, you can develop hearing; A sense of sound is probably one of the senses they're most likely to have. But it's true that they could have some EM sense that made it unnecessary to have either. But then they'd still probably use amplifiers to communicate over long distances, and there would be patterns in their communication, because that's the nature of communication.

Re:Yea

[BobMcD]

The oldest star in this galaxy is around 13 billion years old. Five million years is a tiny fragment of this, and yet we haven't found any evidence in our system of any visitation. Statistically, it seems probable that at least one civilisation would have reached the required level to be able to explore the entire galaxy in this time, so where are they? Why haven't we seen any evidence of them?

I'm confused as to how the larger numbers are making more of an impact on you than the smaller numbers. Five million years compares to ten thousand years exactly how? Some examples...

If the aliens had stopped by, say, twelve thousand years ago, what would be the result? Cave paintings, religion, etc. These would, of course, be dismissed out of hand by modern day scientists as false.

If the aliens had visited twenty thousand years ago, would we have even had the language to communicate with them? Wouldn't we have just run in fear and/or tried to kill them?

One hundred thousand years ago, which is still pretty recent in terms of millions of years, we would have been more zoological than societal. We likely wouldn't have even noticed.

Never mind the time of the dinosaurs, or times before that. We're just getting into ridiculousness at this point.

This is hubris, really. "We don't believe any evidence that aliens exist, so where are they?" As if the existence of alien life is somehow contingent on humanity being present to observe it? Or is it that our brains are so perfect that they could never have visited four million years ago without our noticing it?

It sort of frames up all the tales of gods from on high, the Nazca Lines, the speculations of life on Mars, etc. All of this could have been alien life, but if it happened before the Renaissance, our hubris would require that we deny it.

Let's not project human attributes onto aliens.

[master_p]

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'.

40 years of search is nothing. We may search for another 10,000 years and find nothing...in cosmic terms, even 10,000 years is a drop in the bucket.

OP failed Evolutionary Biology

[ShooterNeo]

This theory is ignorant, and wrong. Think about it for a second. Suppose you have a large population of sentients : not just individual beings, but competing societies and civilizations. Now, some of these populations succumb to the lures of computer games and fast food and porn more than others do. What does this cause? DIFFERENTIAL REPRODUCTIVE SUCCESS. The invisible hand of evolution correcting the problem, again. This may ultimately mean that the eventually 'victors' in the recent rat race (USians) lose to other societies that are better at breeding. (such as India)

No, the reason we don't see SETI signals is obvious. IF alien species are within our light cone, they are using communication systems that are indistinguishable from noise, since maximizing entropy in a radio signal allows you to pack the most data into an available slice of spectrum.

But, more likely, there are no alien sentients who have developed radio and the light has traveled to us already. (remember, anything we see now from earth is thousands to millions of years out of date) It took 3.5 billion years for life on earth to go from self replicating molecules to us, which is about 25% of the total age of the entire universe. In earlier eras, the Universe was much, much hotter and less hospitable to developing self replicating molecules (too much reactivity for stable self replication)

Call me bizarre but theory sounds backwards

[mnmlst]

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.

Re:From the TFA

[Thanshin]

Great job, if you can get it: spend government money to study if aliens are busy playing videogames

Massive fail if you lose the opportunity of spending government money on the study of junk food and porn.

Re:From the TFA

[mindbrane]

Geoffrey Miller is an assistant professor in the department of psychology at University of New Mexico.

Lucky bastard, obviously the peyote still grows wild and free in abundance down there. Although, given the hypothesis as put forth in the article, I sense there's a pipeline for good B.C. bud running down there too.

Or maybe on the contrary, let's

[Moraelin]

Or maybe, on the contrary, let's really project human motives upon them. But the real ones, instead of idiotic bullshit designed just to make headlines.

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? Did any country yet starve because they were too busy playing to go to the supermarket, or go open the supermarket for that reason? No? Then why should we assume that any aliens would?

Because colonization was usually driven by wanting some resources which are abbundant over there, and are in short supply over here. Even if sometimes that meant "living space". That's what drove people to put a lot of money into building a big ship and risk their own lives on the high seas. Or by extension in the void of space. If you're going to invest billions in a space freighter and risk perishing to a micrometeor impact between here and there, you'll expect some suitable ROI. That ROI is what would drive people to do that.

So if there actually was that ROI to be made in space travel and colonization... am I the only one who thinks it's idiotic to imagine that a whole civilization, down to the last member, from CEOs and presidents to the last bum on the street, would go "nah, we'll just sit and grind the epic gear, thank you very much?" How do they survive at all, if nobody is even interested in working or making some form of income?

And if they are, how come they'd reject _only_ space colonization in favour of sitting and playing games, but not the other forms of work, including making those games?

Or maybe the more mundane reality is that that ROI just isn't there. Maybe the energy to haul stuff between stars really doesn't make it economical to mine the dilithium some 20 light years away.

And if c really is the speed limit, and space being that big, maybe nobody is interested in investing now in a ship which would return with the goods in 1000 years. Just because they don't even know which resources will actually sell that far in the future. Less than 200 years ago, aluminium was more expensive than silver or even gold, so I guess if we sent a ship to establish a colony and mine the most expensive stuff we can get there, it would have been aluminium. Then almost over night a new process was invented for producing it, and price fell like a rock. Or as little as 100 years away, coal was the fuel of superpower navies, and wars and willy-waving games were waged over access to it and to coaling stations. Then it all moved to oil, and now to nuclear reactors.

Or maybe they just don't need the extra space, and hence the colonies. Everywhere on Earth where we got sanitation, antibiotics, etc, population stopped growing and in fact started to decline. People used to make a lot of kids to beat the odds, but if their survival is all but guaranteed, they stop after 1-2 kids. We already simply don't need to offload some population somewhere else. In a million years (if we don't nuke ourselves first) the whole Earth population might be in a couple of quaint villages surrounded by thousands of miles of woods. And need colonies like a fish needs a bicycle.

But, of course, those are rational reasons. Nah, let's go with a sensationalist idiocy instead, like "maybe they're playing video games." Geesh.

Re:Or maybe on the contrary, let's

[jonadab]

> And if c really is the speed limit, and space being that big

The speed of light is only theoretically the speed limit, an absolute upper bound. In practice, nothing with enough mass and complexity to be alive, much less intelligent, can travel at anywhere near c and hope to survive. Interstellar travel is wildly impractical. It makes for interesting fiction, but unless our understanding of physics is TOTALLY messed up (*way* more flawed than we currently think pure Newtonian physics was), there's absolutely zero practical application, ever.

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. It'd be like trying to read the Voynich manuscript, only much worse (because the Voynich manuscript was written by a *human*, and furthermore by a human who was obviously familiar with a number of popular human writing conventions that we understand; an alien message wouldn't be so comprehensible). You almost certainly wouldn't be able to figure out for sure if the signals you were getting were language and represented actual meaning or not.

If there were any *intelligent* aliens, they would eventually figure this out and give up on the idea.

Re:Or maybe on the contrary, let's

[Smallpond]

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 ...

Re:Or maybe on the contrary, let's

[timftbf]

Right now, we are very close to having 4 day work week purely because most of production systems are more efficient and require less human labor.

No, we're not. We really should be, but we're not.

How many CEOs do you know who would choose the same amount of productivity for less employee time (maybe less employee cost), over more productivity? Growth is the only metric that counts, it seems.

How may workers do you know who would campaign for a four-day week at the same pay over a five-day week for more pay?

Both sides still put too much value on Stuff...

Re:Or maybe on the contrary, let's

[chocapix]

And on the seventh day, God said : "299,792,458 m/s is enough for everyone".

Re:Or maybe on the contrary, let's

[MBGMorden]

It'd be like trying to read the Voynich manuscript, only much worse (because the Voynich manuscript was written by a *human*, and furthermore by a human who was obviously familiar with a number of popular human writing conventions that we understand; an alien message wouldn't be so comprehensible).

Sort of, but with a very (very) important difference:

The Voynich Manuscript - if it isn't a hoax containing just gibberish (which is actually a likely reality), was written by a human with the goal of making it as difficult as possible to decode. It's intentionally HARD to figure out. Messages between civilizations would be the opposite. You'd know just as little going in, but they would instead be crafted to be as easy as possible to decode.

Re:Or maybe on the contrary, let's

[TapeCutter]

"liquid water is the only environment where life has a chance to appear spontaneously"

That's a reasonable assumption from what we can observe about life.

"It is bad practice in statistics to use only two observations to do a projection."

It's not a reasonable asumption that people are simply extrapolating from what we see on Earth. They are looking at the spectra of the cosmos and finding that there are billions of galaxies chock full of hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and carbon. These elements condense into gigantic clouds light years across that are composed of the same organic building blocks we find on earth. In fact the silicon, iron, nickel, etc, that you are standing on are much less abundant in the universe than the basic organics and water you and I are made from. As Carl Sagan once said "we are star stuff".

"and that the earth is really the only one with liquid water and liquid water"

Hydrogen and oxygen are the 1st and 3rd most abundant elements in the universe and spontaneously react to from water. Given what we know about galaxy composition and the formation of planetary systems the odds that Earth has the only surface level ocean in the cosmos are so impractically small that they could be used to drive an infinite improbability machine. Just in our own solar system you have Earth's current ocean, past oceans on Mars and most likely Venus, an ocean under the ice of Europa that has more water than Earth and a high probability of smaller sub-surface oceans on a handfull of other icy moons.

Re:Or maybe on the contrary, let's

[TheRaven64]

Actually, God created light on the first day. There was nothing other than light and the void, so 299,792,458 m/s probably seemed fast enough for anyone, when there is nowhere to go. There's probably a comment saying:

/* 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...

That kinda gives me an idea

[Moraelin]

You know, actually that gives me an idea for a counter-hypothesis about how a first contact would go. I mean, if we're at attributing to aliens carricatures of human stereotypes...

April 5'th, 2063, 11:00 AM: The USS Phoenix, the first warp-capable Earth vessel, launches with Zephram Cochrane aboard.

April 5'th, 2063, 11:30 AM: The USS Phoenx deploys the warp generators and breaks the warp barrier.

April 5'th, 2063, 11:35 AM: The warp surge is detected by the Vulcan ship T'Plana-Hath.

April 5'th, 2063, 11:45 AM: After a brief attempt at hailing it, the Vulcans conclude that the alien craft must contain tentacled aliens intent on raping their women, as documented in the several Hentai transmissions they had intercepted.

April 5'th, 2063, 11:50 AM: The T'Plana-Hath unloads all its fore torpedo tubes into the Phoenix.

April 5'th, 2063, 11:55 AM: The T'Plana-Hath deploys several quarantine beacons beyond Jupiter's orbit to warn other ships to stay away from the newfound menace.

Re:Oh stop

[Shakrai]

a single century of consumerist society in the presence of industrial technology has brought us to the most rapid phase of extinction in the history of the world.

I don't think you've studied the history of this planet very well if you've concluded that this is the most rapid phase of extinction in history.

what are the chances that the agricultural resources of the planet will be able to continue to feed us?

They will feed us just fine. Even discounting the fact that there is untapped arable land out there, the agricultural system as it exists now is riddled with inefficiencies. The simple act of cutting our meat intake would result a sizable expansion of calories available for human consumption.

We now face a decision: become rational really fast, or die.

How many times in history have we heard some variant of this prediction? We are still here.

Re:Oh stop

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

We now face a decision: become rational really fast, or die.

How many times in history have we heard some variant of this prediction? We are still here.

Actually we've heard this many times. And we've died by the millions many times. The holocaust, the soviet genocides ("engineered famine" is the preferred term, although how exactly that covers shooting civilians is beyond me), the muslim massacre on armenians, the rwanda massacres, the (ongoing) muslim-on-sudanese genocide against blacks, ...

And that's just the 20th century. Many idiots seem to think the 21st century will be different because they live in the by-far longest stable state (ie. the United states) where this hasn't happened for over 200 years. Hell, even Europeans, whose last genocide was little more than 10 years ago (but far away from Western Europe), the last Western European genocide was about 60 years ago, which is more than 1 generation ago. So everyone thinks these things "don't happen" and somehow believe that "diplomacy" (or worse : "international trade") will prevent another one. Or perhaps just the inherent human goodness will prevent it. Meanwhile that inherent human goodness doesn't seem to be stopping sudanese muslims from raiding, killing and enslaving like their religion demands ... Also one is to ignore that the peak year for international trade in the 20th century was 1913 (that level, as percentage of global gdp, was only surpassed in 1996), and 1939 was arguably the year the most money was invested in diplomacy.

The key is evolution. Everyone does things differently. Some people don't defend themselves, some others beat the crap out of any attackers, ... and some survive and some die. Evolution. Whichever tactic works will be the surviving one. Maybe comitting genocides is the key to survival, maybe not doing anything against these things is the correct tactic, maybe wars are the correct tactic.

The same goes for food production. Many people will try, some will have working strategies and live, some will have failing strategies and die. Of course this is "unfair" although what exactly is so very unfair about living in reality is beyond me.

Of course, this is how evolution works :
1) breed, making small mistakes in copying genes (and ideology)
2) die "en masse"
3) goto 1

Everyone seems to be skipping step 2, especially when professing to "believe" in evolution and what that supposedly means (you know the "evolution means jesus doesn't exist, but has nothing to do with children or death" crowd. Hell I've actually heard one person claim that genes were unfair and that "therefore" evolution cannot have anything to do with genes. Although I must agree with the part that genes are VERY unfair things indeed)