Author: Odon Ata

God is dead for more people than ever before. In many ways this is liberating, but much ink has been spilt over the anxiety of being pushed adrift out into the hyper-modern marketplace of ideas.

There were deep needs that most religions met.

1. Sense of Purpose
2. Comfort around death
3. Sense of community
4. Mode of moral conduct
5. Sense or order to the universe
6. An Origin story

The task of providing these has been broken down to the individual level, due to the postmodern skepticism of other meta-narratives preventing any new coherent frameworks from being mainstreamed.

To look just at the first point on that list, its been well established that a sense of purpose or meaning is essential to human well-being. And constructing one from whole cloth is no easy task (Nietzsche was right to worry). It could be argued that spiritual leaders were the first example of specialization of labor, but now each individual is tasked with this themselves, on top of their busy, modern lives. With answers to these from the divine absent, it’s natural to look to answers within national meta-narratives.

But for Americans, no national narrative is able to give meaning either. 92% percent of Republicans and 78% of Democrats say the country is headed in the wrong direction. We have no space race, or world war, or great depression, or any other unifying goal or threat to give a clear national direction. The reckoning America is having with it’s history at the center of the culture wars today has left us doubting goals the USA has claimed historically, like promoting democracy, and hesitant to respond to new national goals with anything but cynical dismissiveness.

For many, the deep human need for meaning is now left unsatisfied. So too with the rest of the needs from that list.

Did you have the experience of suddenly not believing in the afterlife, and then not being able to talk with those around you about all or the questions that cascade from that? A shared meta-narrative is what was missing.

Lets see if we can recapture what was lost with the death of religion, but without repeating the mistake of building on faith in the non-falsifiable assertions of authority that crumble under new observations.

All of this is downstream of an origin story. In order to develop modes of moral conduct, a sense of community, purpose, and a way to reconcile with death (if we must), and collective direction we need an understanding of where we’re starting from.

This isn’t the launchpad to talk about molecular biology (and how certain bubbles split into smaller bubbles when shaken and doesn’t that look just like mitosis). All that matters, for our purposes, is that life is able to arise. More relevant to us is the journey we had to go on after we arose to reach where we are today, and what that says about where we’re going and the nature of the universe. Are we alone? The first? The sole survivors of shared cataclysms? Naive latecomers?

The Fermi Paradox

The Fermi Paradox is the contradiction between the scale of the universe and the lack of visible alien life. We expect life to make some sort of changes, visible from a distance, at most stages of its development. (From filing the atmosphere with oxygen, to Dyson Spheres we should be able to see something).

Rather than summarize the whole thing here, here’s a link to an existing summary if you want more.

So, given that life can arise, and that we see none of the visible changes that successful life would likely make, we can draw some existentially relevant conclusions from its solutions.

What are the solutions for The Fermi Paradox, and what do they tell us? The exact number of solutions is debated, but I’ve been interested in this for a long time, and three main ones have stuck out to me. I see many other solutions falling under these.

Solution 1: Great Filters

Fermi Paradox Solution: Great Filters

TLDR: there are a number of “filters”, or hard steps with a low likelihood of success life needs to get through to get become an interstellar civilization (i.e. multicellular life, civilizations, interstellar travel). One of these filters being insurmountable would allow us to explain why it is that we’re here, but we see no one else. This would be a Great Filter. We’re advanced enough that we could conceive of perpetuating our civilization indefinitely in the near future. Why do we see no one else having done so? Either a Great Filter is preventing what life that arises from reaching the point we’re at developmentally, and we’re the first. Or many have been where we are now, and the Great Filter is after us. The important thing about this that explains why we’re the only ones we see because one of these filters is so difficult to overcome that it eliminates all civilizations who try.

So what would this mean as a Genesis story?

If we’re past the Great Filter then we carry the torch for all life in the universe. If its coming then we have an existentially threatening risk soon on the horizon.

Fortunately these grim scenarios fail to explain all of our observations, although great filters are an importation foundation to understand the later models which do. Unfortunately, the next one is a bit more grim.

Solution 2: The Dark Forest

Fermi Paradox Solution: The Dark Forest

TLDR: Interstellar Civs are common, but are either silent or dead because everyone is incentivized to be paranoid and take a “shoot first ask questions never” type approach. This breaks the part of the Fermi paradox where we assume that we would be able to see other life. Between the long distances, speed of attacks, evolutionary incentives for life to expand, and the explosive growth even primitive life could undergo and become a threat, its unlikely that a scenario in which life is common and but not visible to us that shakes out any other way.

This one won’t be that important going forward, though. Although the Dark Forest model addresses the part of the Fermi Paradox where we expect to see life, it doesn’t address the rate at which life arises, nor when it arises.

And when you look at those aspects, it turns out human life arose early. Like, really early, and the Dark Forest Theory can’t account for it. Even if filters are picking civs off left and right, we’re still one of the first. What can account for this is Grabby Aliens.

Solution 3: Grabby Aliens

Fermi Paradox Solution: Grabby Aliens

TLDR: the universe’s clock has been running for 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang. Habitable stars will last over five trillion years. Why did we develop in the first .28% of the amount of time we would be able to, while still seeing no one else doing the same? Life likes to expand. If life expands to fill a niche, no other life will evolve to fill the same niche. The best way we have to explain why we are so early is that we actually aren’t. We are actually representative of a typical space-faring civilization in terms of start date bemuse life expands quickly then prevents other civs from spawning on planets they occupy. So the only life that able to arise does so early, before another lineage of life expands into where their home planet would have been.

The implications of this model are that its very common for life, when it does develop, to expand quickly (30-90% of light speed) and then stabilize.

The future we can expect for humanity, given this scenario, is quite bright.

How would a meta-narrative using this as a Genesis story work? What sort of modes of moral conduct would this inform? How would this impact ones sense of purpose? Community? What would your sense of order to the universe be if you based it on this?

Conclusion

Logistic growth is a fantastic model for the growth of life. If we’re just starting out and about to expand as the Grabby Aliens model predicts, then we’re on the early part of the curve right now. And until we start to bump into other space faring civilizations, this is going to feel more like exponential growth. This means a very small change in the present will have a massive impact on the lives of our decedents.

If the lives of future people have value and this is the prediction for our future, then modes of moral conduct, a sense of purpose, and a sense of order to the universe all flow naturally from this. With an origin story obviously fulfilled by this, all that is left to replace the void religion left is a sense of community and comfort around death. People are easily able to find community wherever there are shared goals, so all that left is comfort around death.

And that is a story for another time.

So: it turns out human life arose early. The universe’s clock has been running for 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang, and some stars will live over five trillion years. Unless these stars (red dwarfs) aren’t habitable due to some mechanism we don’t yet understand, some other force must be biasing life to arise as early as we did in order for us to be typical.

That’s where Grabby Aliens come in. Life is evolutionary selected to expand. If life expands to fill a niche, no other life will evolve to fill the same niche. That’s about it.

These are some of the predictions made by this model, which we should expect to apply to us as well.

• Civilizations likely expand very quickly relative to the speed of light.
• Grabby civilizations typically control 10⁹ to 10¹⁵ stars before they bump into another.
• We will meet another grabby civilizations in 50,000,000- 50,000,000,000 years.

This is quite the optimistic forecast for us. We’re looking at a few million to billion years of expansion at high speed. This even makes it look likely that we will overcome Climate Change and other Great Filter level threats.

I’m going to restrain myself from just retelling everything that the original paper and these videos do a better job of. (I did a draft of that and deleted it). I want this to just be a quick explanation that will equip you for other posts, with references if you want to dive in further.

On that note here are two really good videos that explain the Grabby Aliens Theory in more depth. Pick your poison: animated European dogs or PBS.

The Dark Forest is a solution to the Fermi Paradox in which the absence of observable life is explained by a pressure towards cautious silence and a “shoot first ask questions never” type approach to first contact.

So there’s this Chinese sci-fi book by the same name (this will be quick, and its relevant I swear) in which The Dark Forest Theory is crucial to the plot. In the book, the theory is introduced by 3 Axioms:

1. “Suppose a vast number of civilizations distributed throughout the universe, on the order of the number of observable stars. Lots and lots of them. Those civilizations make up the body of a cosmic society. Cosmic sociology is the study of the nature of this super-society.” (based on the Drake equation)
2. Suppose that survival is the primary need of a civilization.
3. Suppose that civilizations continuously expand over time, but the total matter in the universe remains constant.

This basically sets up a Darwinian competition for survival, but on a galactic scale. In this scale communication takes years. In this state of nature, languages, biology, cognition, and values will all be alien.

Other civilizations are threats not only for their present capacity for violence, but for their potential to make technological leaps ahead of you, while the speed of light keeps this hidden from you and slows your communications down AND means any attack you made on them would take substantial time to reach them (cruelly giving the edge to preemptive strikes).

On earth we have a hotline between our nuclear powers’ heads of state. Real time communication with translators. In The Dark Forest, alien languages and cognition make it hard to understand them enough to trust them enough not to attack them, and even if you do, how sure are you that they trust you? Worse yet, how do you convince them you trust them enough that they believe you and don’t feel compelled to attack you out of self defense?

If this is true what does it mean?

First things first, as a civilization, we should probably shut up. This is pretty self explanatory. We should also probably hold off on things like Dyson spheres/swarms, or any other mega-engineering projects that would be apparent from a distance, lest we blow our cover.

The universe isn’t dead, but is instead teeming with life! It’s just all scared for its life waiting to kill you (just like nature intended).

To be fair, this somewhat lowers the stakes from some of the worldviews I described arising from The Great Filters interpretation. We don’t carry the torch for life all on our own.

In this case, we should do our best to expand quietly, if at all.

The concept of Great Filters are one solution to the Fermi Paradox in which the absence of observable life is explained by the existence of a number of thresholds life must to cross in order to become an interstellar civilization. Essentially, Great Filters simultaneously allow us to explain why it is that we’re here, and why it is that we see no one else. As it stands, we are advanced enough that we could conceive of perpetuating our civilization indefinitely in the near future. Why do we see no one else doing so?

This paradox can be explained by the presence of a Great Filter either before or after our current epoch, and both cases have powerful implications for humanity as a whole.

If this is true what does it mean?

As a species, it is clear we are past the “filters” of things like cooperation or tool-use (or industrialization, depending on how granular you’re trying to make your metaphorical filters here). We’re currently working our way through the filter of having the capacity to destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons. We’re approaching filters like actually deciding to expand to other worlds, not destabilizing our planets chemical cycles with our newfound industrial capacity, and having the capacity to destroy ourselves with antimatter weapons.

Any of these may be the big one.

Given this, there are two possible scenarios, depending on if the Great Filters preventing other civilizations from existing are behind us, and each hypothetical holds great significance for meaning making.

We may be the first to make it this far. In this case, the hardest filters are behind us and we carry the torch for all life the last few meters to safety. The impact that we would have on the fate of life in the universe by simply not making any unforced errors this close to becoming a stable interstellar species could imbue any daily task contributing towards this goal with cosmic purpose.

If its common for life to make it to the point we’re at, and yet we still see none, then that’s a grim forecast for us as a prospective interstellar species. More likely, the filter that has defeated every civilization before us is on our horizon. So time to gear up. We’re about to have a civilization ending threat sometime soon. We need to mobilize.