Sometime in the 1940s, Enrico Fermi was discussing the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence with other physicists. They argued that our galaxy holds 100bn stars, that intelligent life evolved quickly on earth and that therefore extraterrestrial intelligence must be common. Fermi listened patiently, then asked, "So where is everybody?" That is, if extraterrestrial intelligence is so common, why haven't we met any bright aliens yet? This conundrum became known as Fermi's paradox.
The paradox has become ever more baffling. Over 150 extra-solar planets have been identified in the last few years, suggesting that life-hospitable planets orbit most stars. Paleontology shows that organic life evolved very quickly after the earth's surface cooled. Given simple life, evolution shows progressive trends towards larger bodies, brains and social complexity. Evolutionary psychology reveals several credible paths from simpler social minds to human-level creative intelligence. Yet 40 years of intensive searching for extraterrestrial intelligence has yielded nothing. No radio signals, no credible spacecraft sightings.
It looks as if there are two possibilities. Perhaps our science has overestimated the likelihood of extraterrestrial intelligence evolving. Or perhaps evolved technological intelligence has some deep tendency to be self-limiting, even self-exterminating. After Hiroshima, some suggested that any aliens bright enough to make spaceships would also be bright enough to make thermonuclear bombs, and would use them on each other sooner or later. Fermi's paradox became, for a while, a cautionary tale about cold war geopolitics.
I suggest a different, even darker solution to the paradox: the aliens don't blow themselves up, they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonise space because they're too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual reality narcissism.
The fundamental problem is that any evolved mind must pay attention to indirect cues of biological fitness, rather than tracking fitness itself. We don't seek reproductive success directly; we seek tasty foods that tend to promote survival and luscious mates who tend to produce bright, healthy babies. Modern results: fast food and pornography. Technology is fairly good at controlling external reality to promote our 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 colonising the galaxy would be much harder than pretending to have done it when filming Star Wars or Serenity.
Fitness-faking technology tends to evolve much faster than our psychological resistance to it. The printing press is invented; people read more novels and have fewer kids. Only a few curmudgeons lament this. The Xbox 360 is invented; people would rather play a high-resolution virtual ape in Peter Jackson's King Kong than be a perfect-resolution real human. Teens today must find their way through a carnival of fitness-faking entertainment products: MP3s, DVDs, XM radio, EverQuest online, MySpace, instant messaging, ecstasy. The old staples of physical, mental and social development (athletics, homework, dating) are neglected. The few young people with the self-control to pursue the meritocratic path often get distracted at the last minute—MIT graduates apply to do computer game design for Electronic Arts rather than rocket science for Nasa.
Around 1900, most inventions concerned physical reality: cars, aeroplanes, electric lights, vacuum cleaners, air conditioners, bras, zippers. Now, most concern virtual entertainment—the top ten annual patent recipients are usually IBM, Matsushita, Canon, Hewlett-Packard, Micron, Samsung, Intel, Hitachi, Toshiba and Sony—not Boeing, Toyota or Wonderbra. We have shifted from a reality economy to a virtual economy, from physics to psychology as the value-driver and resource-allocator. We are disappearing up our own brainstems. Freud's pleasure principle triumphs over the reality principle. We narrowcast human interest stories to each other, rather than broadcasting messages of universal peace and progress to other star systems.
Maybe the bright aliens did the same. I suspect that a certain period of fitness-faking narcissism is inevitable after any intelligent life evolves. This is the great temptation for any technological species. But heritable variation in personality might allow some lineages to resist the great temptation and last longer. Those who persist will evolve more self-control, conscientiousness and pragmatism. They will evolve a horror of virtual entertainment, psychoactive drugs and contraception. They will stress the values of hard work, delayed gratification, child-rearing and environmental stewardship. They will combine the family values of the religious right with the sustainability values of the Greenpeace left.
Those practical-minded breeders will inherit the earth, as like-minded aliens may have inherited a few other planets. When they finally achieve contact, it will be a meeting of dead-serious super-parents who congratulate each other on surviving not just the bomb, but the Xbox.
Adapted from "What is Your Dangerous Idea," ed John Brockman (Simon & Schuster)
