On January 6, 2021, a disorganized mob of Trump supporters
batter-rammed their way into the Capital building of the United States
and forced Congress to flee. Those supporting this action, and there
are plenty still out there, saw this as the next “Spirit of 1776”
revolution by true patriots. The image and parallels I get from this
are far more disturbing. I might compare this to the first sacking of
Rome in 410AD; an event that saw the beginning of the end of a
civilization that over the next 66 years unraveled and collapsed. Even
deeper though, this may suggest something far more deeply flawed about
the entire human species and our prospects.
Most interested in space and astronomy are familiar with Enrico
Fermi’s question “Where are they?” concerning intelligent life.
This so-called Fermi paradox poses the Copernican Principle, that any
region of the universe is not unique and so life must be universal,
conflicts with the lack of any evidence of intelligent life. So far,
the SETI program has found radio noise and silence after several
decades of looking. Of course, so far only a small segment of this
galaxy has been searched, so the prospect is maybe still open. Yet,
Fermi’s paradox remains, because if any form of intelligent life
were to persist it suggests they, or maybe their robotic emissaries or
successors, would move through the galaxy within a period of a million
years or so. So far astronomical evidence reveals no instance of some
intelligent life modifying a stellar system in any large manner. So,
where are they?
It is best to consider what we mean by intelligent life. Cetaceans are
clearly intelligent in some way, even if very different from human
intelligent. However, they do not modify their environment by
controlling energy and materials. Humans do, and this started with a
branch of Homo erectus called Homo ergaster that emerged around 600
thousand years ago. This species in the hominid lineage learned to
control fire. At this point a life form on this planet learned to use
energy outside of its metabolic needs, and to grow this energy use far
beyond metabolic needs. Also, the manufacture of flint axes and stone
tools began to accelerate. To make a stone axe requires a considerable
amount of neural processing to know from the appearance of a flint the
planes of crystallization and how it will fracture. With these
developments it is evident hominids began to modify their environment
and evolution was a coordinated selection process that saw
modification of species and the ability to modify their immediate
environment. With the evolution of Homo sapiens some 100 to 150
thousand years ago the adaptation of the environment by intelligent
thought surpassed biological evolution. We now life in conditions
where this has exponentially accelerated to extreme dimensions.
Some conservative politicians complain we are on a Ponzi game. Sure,
we have been in a Ponzi game for at least the last half million years
with using ever more energy and environment.
What does this have to do with Fermi’s paradox? Life on Earth, and
presumably this would hold with life on other planets as well, evolves
by natural selection. The white noise or Markovian statistics with
single nucleotide polymorphisms and other mutations is run through a
filter of fitness. The output is then a form of pink noise or
sub-Markovian statistics that have structure. This is a remarkable
process, and one that I think has deeper aspects in physics. In this
way life evolves into forms that have greater complexity. Compare the
complexity of an advanced mammal such as a human, whale, elephant and
even a dog, with that of a fish. Or for that matter compare an insect
with a bacillus. Such life forms evolve to fit an environment, and
while such evolution does modify the environment as well, such species
do not engineer their environment. We humans engineer our environment
and in doing so we set ourselves in an environment that becomes ever
more different than what we evolved to fit within. It is plausible
that any form of intelligent life in the universe that engineers its
environment may do much the same.
There are several examples of this. Human beings are not entirely
peaceful. As much as we want to think we are creatures of peace, there
are plenty examples of subsistence or tribal cultures that engage in
warfare. In fact, the African slave trade emerged from a practice of
tribal raids that captured individuals for slaves. Archeological finds
in the American southwest have found kivas filled with burned remains
of people, who were evidently burned alive by people from another
tribe or culture. Of course, our history is packed with examples of
wars. Then with the end of World War II came the atomic bomb and the
realization that total war is not possible, However, humans persist in
building or trying to acquire nuclear weapons. It may only be a matter
of time before something goes terribly wrong. Another example to this
is our impact on the planetary environment. Humans are erasing arable
land and active biology on this planet by an area equal to about one
Belgium per year. Human populations are growing, and declining arable
land is a problem. The oceans are dying off at an alarming rate and at
end of this decade the mass of plastic in the oceans will exceed that
of ocean life. Of course, then comes the warming of the climate by our
burning of fossil fuels that produce CO_2. This may in time render
this planet uninhabitable, and already regions are becoming difficult
with fires.
We might think that we can solve these things. However, increasingly
we seem paralyzed by ourselves. Of course, a part of this is the
massive denial of any problem with the environment, and in particular
climate change. There has been a growing “alt-science” cult
development, and this extends in general to what Trump’s spokeswoman
Kelly Ann Conway said with, “We have our alternative facts.” We
have seen the rise of anti-vaccination movements, at a time of a nasty
pandemic, and the rise of increasingly tribalistic politics that seeks
to raise conflicts between people. These things are becoming ever more
political.
This rise of denialism saw its first rise with the creationist
movement with fundamentalist or evangelical Christians in the United
States. The rejection of biological evolution, something that began to
rise in force in the 1970s, saw the social rejection of a branch of
scientific work. Biological evolution has a massive amount of data to
support it, and this extends from the paleontological work with
fossils to molecular biology of genes. Yet fully 50% of American
refuse to admit evolution, and this trend is being proselytized into
the rest of the world. This “alt-science” denialism has found
other expressions from anti-vaxxers, climate denialism, geocentrism
and in recent years the ultimate absurdism with flat-Earth ideas. This
reflects very possibly the advance of mythic based psychology over
reasoning, and this is finding a wide variety of forms. It is also
being promoted most successfully by the computer, which is ironically
a device developed by the epitome of rational thinking.
The idea human intelligence evolved primarily to solve rational
problems is probably false. It probably mostly evolved to promote
communications between members of any group. Think of this as the
evolution of language. The evolution of language probably came about
to communicate information about the environment. This involved
probably the projection of the human mind onto the world combined with
the ability to express this in a narrative format. Projection is a
power psychological tool, and the young Einstein in effect projected
his mind onto a reference frame moving at the speed of light to
realize a paradox. We do this in fiction with structuring fictional
characters, and we project our minds onto the world in the form of
spirits or gods. This may have had a survival advantage in
communicating information about the environment in a story format.
With this has come religions and narratives about supernatural beings,
that in late ancient periods of history and religions from the iron
age involved an infinite being. By the medieval period monotheist
religions had a firm grip on societies from the Indus Valley to
Ireland. This changed with the rise of science, where with Copernicus,
Kepler, Galileo the culminating in Newton saw a world view completely
at odds with theology. The return of Halley’s comet in the later
18th century saw calculation as a predictor work, while prophesy
waned. The age of enlightenment came and brought about the idea that
reasoning, measurement and phenomenology were the basis of the world.
Even Christianity amongst the educated turned into deism, a shadow of
its former self.
In modern times this has shifted again. With the rise of monotheism
was the rise of alpha-numerical formats. Paleo-Hebrew and the Greek
linear-b script were a part of a transition from pictograms to
complete symbolic forms. The Commandment “Though shall have no
graven image” in its strict form means there are to be no pictures,
certainly not of people and even more against images of God. It takes
little thought to realize with television and now computers this has
been overturned utterly. While Christians obeyed this commandment in
serious breech, consider the barrage of pictures of Jesus, at least
most information was communicated by writing. Now in this age of the
internet and social media we have utterly turned about. We may in fact
be approaching a post-literate age or culture.
With this has come the rise of what I might call cybermythos, or the
emergence of world views that are very specific, even tribal with
tribes defined ideologically, and not based on reasoning or evidence.
There is a fragmentation of cultish tribes, from reptilian-people
ideas, to flat-Earth, to QAnon and of course traditional religion. We
should be aware how this all involves a lot of magical thinking. The
book of Revelations has Jesus coming back and sweeping all the clouds
away, and the story of Cinderella has her “wish upon a star” and
her fairy godmother comes to turn a pumpkin and mice into a horse
drawn carriage that in the end takes her to “happily ever after.”
The thinking is really the same. Magical thinking, where we might at
least cite the story of Cinderella as honest in admitting it is a
fairy tale, while the second coming of Jesus keeps being hustled off
as ontological or truth. The rise of conspiracy narratives, I avoid
the term “theory” because these are not theories, is a sort of
magical suspension of reasoning and the belief in some guru, Alex
Jones comes to mind, and a focus on there being a “plot” we must
all beware of.
Maybe we are backing away from this, if at least in a temporary and
halting way. The electoral defeat of Donald Trump, where there is a
sizable cult following saying he was in fact elected, may be some
response to this. However, there are problems with the political left
as well. George Orwell in his treatise on the psychology of
totalitarian power, written in fictional form 1984, warned of the
compression of language and its reduction to tiny, fragmented terms,
and we see this on both the left and the right. Trumpism brought us
MAGA, Stop the Steal and Q (amazing a political ideal can be
compressed into one letter), but on the left we have BLM and Defund
Police and other calls. The whole language is reduced to the smallest
possible, and it reflect our trajectory into a post literate culture,
which has a pernicious effect of leading us into a post-truth culture,
What does this have to do with the Fermi paradox? It points to how we
are emerging into conditions that are impossible to sustain. I have
done a fair amount of computer programming in my time, and a
post-symbolic or post-literate culture will fail to cultivate people
who can actually program computers. Will AI ever get to the point it
can program itself? That remains to be seen, and the short science
fiction video “PETS” makes some point about this prospect. This
might mean the format for promoting this cybermythos may not be long
lived in the future. Further, if humans are thinking this way, we will
become ever less capable of solving problems. Through my lifetime
there is only one environmental problem that was nearly completely
solved, the CFC induced ozone hole problem. With everything else we
have honestly not really solved anything. We still have nuclear
weapons, and this contradicts our warring tendencies. Curiously, this
inability to solve much corresponds a lot with the rise of right
winged politics. We have in effect developed an environment that we
are not adapted to or have evolved to fit into. This in various ways
may occur to intelligent life in the rest of the universe.
The late comedian George Carlin has a routine, “Saving Planet
Earth.” It starts out as an anti-environmental rant, where George
was cleverly prepping the audience. He then transitions with the line
“Earth is not going anywhere. WE ARE! Pack your shit folks, we are
going away.” He then makes the point that Earth will survive. 20
million years from now life on Earth will probably be carrying on very
well. We will not be here. He further makes some interesting comments
of a cosmic nature. Is there any cosmological reason for us being
here? Maybe John Wheeler was onto something with his idea of a
self-excited universe, this is maybe a possibility. Wheeler also
proposed how a measurement made at one time can select states at an
earlier time, the so called Wheeler Delayed Choice Experiment. This
has been experimentally demonstrated. Possibly, if we measure
neutrinos or even gravitons from the early universe, we may select the
quantum states or even the strength of coupling constants that make
the observable universe possible. Think of this as a cosmological
Wheeler Delayed Choice experiment. It might be possible, though I have
no idea how we can ever know we end up playing this role. Maybe
intelligent life in the universe forms a statistical sample space of
such outcomes that in some average selects the quantum states of the
observable universe.
It might be that George Carlin’s “big electron” or this sort of
self-excited cosmology are real. It though does not seem as likely
intelligent life develops in most science fiction paths as star faring
beings. If this happens for even a significant fraction of them, we
would probably know it. I suspect intelligent life in the vast
majority of cases develops an environment they are not really evolved
for and then snuffs themselves out.
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