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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.
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)
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.
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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)