by cosmobc
Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens | Seed Magazine
[Via danielmiessler.com]
I suggest a different, even darker solution to the Paradox. Basically, I think the aliens don’t blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they’re too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don’t need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today. Once they turn inwards to chase their shiny pennies of pleasure, they lose the cosmic plot. They become like a self-stimulating rat, pressing a bar to deliver electricity to its brain’s ventral tegmental area, which stimulates its nucleus accumbens to release dopamine, which feels…ever so good.
The fundamental problem is that an evolved mind must pay attention to indirect cues of biological fitness, rather than tracking fitness itself. This was a key insight of evolutionary psychology in the early 1990s; 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. Evolution simply could never have anticipated the novel environments, such as modern society, that our social primate would come to inhabit. That would be a computationally intractable problem, even for the new IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer that runs 280 trillion operations per second. Even long-term weather prediction is easy when compared to fitness prediction. As a result, brains must evolve short-cuts: fitness-promoting tricks, cons, recipes and heuristics that work, on average, under ancestrally normal conditions.
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. Technology is fairly good at controlling external reality to promote real biological fitness, but it’s even better at delivering fake fitness—subjective cues of survival and reproduction without the real-world effects. Having real friends is so much more effort than watching Friends. Actually colonizing the galaxy would be so much harder than pretending to have done it when filming Star Wars or Serenity. The business of humanity has become entertainment, and entertainment is the business of feeding fake fitness cues to our brains.
Sobering.
[More]
I disagree with the thought that technology will prevent us from galactic travel. In fact, I think it is the only hope we have to accomplish that.
I used to think that overcoming the nuclear threat was the biggest hump for technical civilizations. In fact, many science fiction works depict this as the reason more civilizations are not found in the galaxy.
Many simply blew themselves up.
I no longer think that is true. I think the hurdle is actually one that is seen for every other life form on Earth and presumably the Universe – sustainability.
Every organism on Earth expands until resources limit that expansion, then they collapse and find a point of equilibrium where their numbers are supported by the ecological resources.
We are entering that phase with mankind. Virtually all of our problems stem from increasingly unsustainable economies and ecologies.
Civilizations that are unable to deal with that, ones that eventually crash due to limited resources, never make it. We are on that path.
Our economies are built to increase exponentially. But access to resources does not increase better than linearly. This is the principle Malthus identified.
The Industrial and Green Revolutions prevented earlier Malthusian catastrophies. Now we are on the brink of another one.
And this is the big one, the one that probably prevents other civilizations in the Universe from progressing.
Without a change, we will collapse. So, we either alter the economies, making them more sustainable and not so exponential or we find new resources to use.
Those resources are found in space. Recent research indicates that possible hydrocarbon fuel can be found on Pluto. What would have to happen for that to be economically useful?
To continue forward, we also need to deal with the increasing presence of our own waste products, ones that are also harming ourselves. Sustainability is not just finding new resources but also making the best ecology for us to survive in.
So, the big hump for galactic civilizations is finding the resources they need to continue while also dealing with the increasing waste products from those resources.
Without finding adequate solutions to both, the civilizations simply collapse. If we collapse now, we will probably never get back to this stage because we will have used up and dispersed all the resources needed to get to this stage.
The next 50-100 years will determine if mankind makes the leap to a galactic civilization or remains a shattered husk of its former self. The fact that we do not see many examples of alien cultures means, to my mind, that this last hump is try difficult to hurdle.
Given our current imbroglio I have little hope for success.
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