A Gamma Quadra perspective on the Fermi Paradox

[HFY Enjoyer]

I'm posting this in the Gamma Quadra forum, because I have a feeling that only this type could appreciate the sentiments behind this post.

I'm a space nerd, of the Isaac Arthur SFIA variety, and one of the most frequented topics of discussion in that subcommunity is the Fermi Paradox. That is, in a universe as big as ours, with 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and with the apparent age of the universe 14 billion years but Earth barely 4.5 billion -- where are the aliens, exactly? Why not only do we not see anyone else currently, but there has been no evidence of Earth ever being colonized or even visited?

I've heard many explanations for this apparent silence, but I notice with some dismay that most of these explanations (aside from weirder ones like, our universe was created by some other intelligence, who created humans but no other intelligent life for whatever reason) seem to have the unspoken assumption that advancement from a unicellular lifeform to an advanced spacefaring species is inevitable unless derailed. So the explanations for the Great Silence are very Beta/Delta Quadra flavored: the Dark Forest/Berserker theory (someone did reach it and maintained galactic hegemony), various scenarios of self-destruction (AI Rebellion, grey goo, even early nuclear warfare), Virtual Reality self-extinction (aliens inevitably use their technology to miniaturize and/or seal their consciousnesses into virtual reality paradises) or even Ascension theory (i.e. every alien migrates to a higher plane of existence when they reach a certain level of advancement, leaving the universe behind). There are some Alpha Quadra explanations thrown in there, too, such as 'Earth is under quarantine by the Galactic Bureucracy' or 'the conditions for Earthlike lifeforms are very rare and we just happen to be the first' or even 'the aliens are here, they are just using their technology to hide from us', but I find them reasonably plausible, more plausible than the various 'Rapture but with Extra Steps' explanations favored by Beta and Delta quadra.

I don't care much for these solutions, because as Beta and Delta Quadra especially do, it completely ignores entropy, either as a creative (i.e. evolution of biology and society) or destructive force. It assumes that once a state of local homeostasis is reached, whether invisible galactic conquerers dominating the universe or successful migration to a higher plane of existence or you blow yourself up with nukes/antimatter/AI/whatever, that's it for whatever region homeostasis was achieved in. I blame Ni + Ti or Si + Fi for this rather rigid thinking, which is why these Quadras always seem so very, very surprised when the greater flow of reality and entropy shatters their hierarchical structures, whether from Napoleon running a train on the senescent European powers or Matthew Perry later ramming a steamship up Japan's narrow, tender ports or China waking up one day and realizing that their ancient, proud heavenly kingdom is reduced to turning tricks and selling family heirlooms for opium and/or the industrial detritus of Britain.

Regardless, let's accept the epistemological assumption behind cosmic homeostasis, but with a twist: instead of this homeostasis occuring after the development of atomic weapons, what if it came earlier? Much earlier. The mass extinction caused by the Deccan Traps/Chicxulub impactor seems like suspiciously specific apocalypse, now doesn't it? It was just destructive enough to unseat the reign dinosaurs, paving the way for the rise of mammals, yet not so destructive that it reset things back to a pre-jawed vertebrate state. The timing was also pretty particular, too; if it had occured much earlier than it did, such as with the rise of the first amphibians, assuming that the biosphere recovered at all our planet would resemble that of the dinosaurs: homeostatic and stagnant, dominated by lifeforms incapable of advancing to the next phase of civilization thanks to said environmental homeostasis. If it had occured much later than it did, we wouldn't have had a chance to evolve technology-using lifeforms. After all, the dinosaurs hadn't meaningfully advanced in the direction of the production of an intelligent, tool-using species after 175 million years, what makes you think that an additional 65 million years would've resulted in anything?

Unfortunately, even if an alien civilization tries to cheat homeostasis like our tool-using non-sapiens ancestors did, the similar logic of homeostasis would've had this analog to humanity stagnate well before their version of the Industrial Revolution even if such a planet did spawn an intelligent, tool-using species. What the 'once you have technology and recognize its usefulness, ascension is inevitable' ignores one huge, overriding factor, a factor big enough to in my opinion single-handedly explain the Fermi Paradox: stagnation, not advancement, is the norm of human civilization. Consider that stupid homily, 'war accelerates technological progress'. Yeah, that's only been true RECENTLY, as in the past 250 years since the Industrial Revolution recently. Before then, war was nothing but utterly ruinous to long-term progress. At best you had a situation like the Roman Empire under Vespasian (keeping in mind that it was still some decades before the actual height of the Roman Empire's power, with Trajan), in which some ancient military superpower managed to use the misery and spoils of conquest slightly more productively than just setting everything on fire. But did Vespasian, or Trajan for that matter, or really any Roman Emperor use the bounty of domination and conquest to drag the species to new heights of advancement? Let's see what Vespasian had to say about the proposed use of a labor-saving device for this unusually (as far as preindustrial empires go) infrastructure and engineering-focused civilization:


"I need my slaves to work."

Like, forget about how powerful and productive this could've made Rome. What was more important than future prosperity, to both the oppressed Roman underclass and their overlords, was the stable continuation of an order they have always known. Not that it was actually a tradeoff between potentially apocalyptic advancement and stagnant stability, considering that the Roman Empire would still meet its end in a few centuries (which goes to show you how anachronistic that statement of 'war is good for technological advancement' is) but preindustrial people, regardless of ethnicity, religion, or even temporal era largely thought the same thing. You had what you had, and no one was going around advancing technology. So when the Roman Empire inevitably failed, as did the later Byzantine Empire and Song Dynasty and Mali Empire and Neo-Assyrians and literally every other preindustrial empire, the takeaway was not 'expansionism only delays the inevitable, society MUST progress or die'. No no, instead the takeaway was, 'we were incredible lucky to have this bounty of our ancestors; it won't last forever, but while it does, let's just keep mindlessly recreating their lowly rituals of stagnation and harmony and domination until it suddenly collapses'. The sentiment that the Roman Empire was a sad, wet fart compared to what could be was a completely alien sentiment to humanity at the time.

So going back to our hypothetic alien civilization, which mindset do you think would be more likely: that aliens would naturally be progress-focused and view whatever society they had, starting from when they were huddling around the campfire, as stepping stones to greater heights? Or would they rather see the sad, pathetic fruits of preindustrial 'civilization' (for lack of a better word) as the best that could ever be hoped for, and that if you are lucky enough to live in one of these periods of bounty you must do whatever you can to maintain it, either by vigorously seizing from your neighbors and underling (the Beta Quadra perspective) or closing your borders, championing the virtues of sustainability and hierarchy, and amusing yourself with how skillfully your geisha sex slaves play the shamisen -- just like your great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather did, down to living in the same palace?

Ah, but if things go on long enough, some young Turk, the alien version of Gamma quadra, should break through this stagnation, right? Right? Eh. Not so much. The more you look at pre-industrial world history, the more it seems that the Industrial Revolution was a complete accident, a confluence of many geographical and anthropological factors that allowed a preindustrial empire to have an injection of instantaneous loot from a highly developed but military inferior 'New World' -- rather than the planet being dominated by one empire early in its history or the two empires being of equal strength making conquest ruinous instead of lucrative or simply just not anyone there to already build the workforce and gold/silver mines to be? Of course, without this instantaneous injection of wealth, there would never be a need for a politically and militarily independent set of working nobles and courtiers to administer the loot and slaves without supervision from the metropole. But without this prerequisite, you never get a meaningfully sized middle class. And without a middle class, you have no source of inventors, entrepreneurs, merchants, adventurers, and financiers. And without that class of highly productive scoundrels, you don't have an Industrial Revolution. That it could be otherwise, an Industrial Revolution occurring without this hard step of a society that was directly primed for advancement, is an Alpha/Delta-quadra view of technological advancement, where progress is the result of a few plucky inventors bravely forwarding their product, whereupon it gets slotted neatly and peacefully into society. In the real world, the best you have a bunch of idiot monarchs taking a drunken piss all over Leonardo DaVinci's drawings that could never be before telling him to get back into the field. A few cool one-offs like Baghdad Batteries and Aeolipiles, but nothing that would lead to true industrialization. And with no industrialization, no space-faring alien civilization, unless your vision of alien interstellar colonization looking like a particular Harry Turtledove story I am going to link below.

But anyway, there's our stagnant preindustrial alien civilization, permanently caught in the cycle of Empire, where no one gets much further than, say, China 1450 AD. What do you think our empire will look like in a hundred thousand, or a million years? Assuming some planetary disaster doesn't wipe the slate scene, and another set of aliens from the same planetary lineage gets their own chance to set up their stagnant, doomed, somewhat-sustainable-if-you-don't-have-valued -introverted-intuition civilization and repeat the same mistakes... I don't see a bright future ahead for these aliens. I'd expect the moments of unexploited mad genius, those mad lads brave enough to go up to the Emperor and tell that worthless empire 'sure, this will undermine the foundation of your ancestors, but think of the POTENTIAL', to become less and less frequent over time, as they inexorably always do in empires that prioritize stability and harmony and social hierarchy, but I repeat myself. First these moments become less and less likely culturally as the weight of tradition and past glories, along with the lack of knowledge of something more -- then biologically. Because this is not an environment that favors the long-term evolutionary mindset of advancement. Authoritarianism, conservatism, stoicism, sustainability, endurance, wisdom, ritualism, sure. Progress? Hardly. I see a vision of the future where the aliens peaked millions of years ago, having evolved to best fit themselves into a cozy little box called 'preindustrial civilization'.

And here's the thing about entropy: it will get you in the end, if you let it. It will get humanity in the end, too, unless we find a way to defeat it once and for all. Which is why I am not very sympathetic to other Quadra's complaint that modern civilization is degrading and unstable and evil and that we should all Return To Monke and live in harmony with the environment. Yes, the road we're on has a high chance of getting us all killed, and in fact just seeing how many near-misses humanity had with nuclear warfare odds are we humans SHOULD be dead. Or reset back to a state of existence where homeostasis was the norm. But here's the thing: stability and harmony and sustainability will strike humanity or whatever comes after us just as dead as reaching for the stars and failing. Once you realize the stakes, harmony and homeostasis is a point of view that can only be justified by 'we hunter-gatherer Eloi living the same lives as our ancestors tens of millions of years ago got ours--where's yours, heh' cosmic selfishness, ignoring that the slow expansion of the sun's luminosity isn't going to just swiftly and relatively scorch the planet, like killing an ailing but blissfully unaware pet in its sleep -- but instead make the planet increasingly hellish both literally and figuratively, where those who come after us get to experience the millions if not tens of millions of years of transitioning from Mad Max to Children of Men to a version of Tengan Toppen Gurren Langan thousands of years after Kamina tripped on a rock a split his head open before escaping the underground. Each year further foreclosing the possibility of escaping the extinction of our entire biosphere. But hey, that was a really fun 500 million year romp in nature, wasn't it? Eating berries, singing songs around the campfire, wiping our asses with leaves, cringing in fear of animal predators like a goddamn prey animal, watching the occasional Bronze Age asshole briefly rise from the harmonious, pleasant-smelling slime known as Homeostatic Human Civilization before being cast back down in the mud and tribal nightsoil pools with the other devolved humans. Totally worth it.

So here's my solution to the Fermi Paradox: our Galaxy is in fact filled with millions if not billions of complex life-bearing worlds, but they all achieve homeostasis early on and get stuck. Whether at the 'unicellular life' stage, the 'mighty but stupid dinosaurs' stage, or for the very lucky planets 'Iron Age Empire ran by aliens more rigid, ritualistic, castebound, and internally harmonious than even the most decadent human empires'. You can read the HFY short story of 'We Are Not Alone, But We Are Lonely' story to see a vision of this disturbing solution to the Fermi Paradox, where aliens embraced stagnation and harmony very early on. Or, if you want a more Beta Quadra-critical perspective of this solution to the Fermi Paradox, you can also read Harry Turtledove's (yes, that guy, the Guns of the South guy) short story: The Road Not Taken.

All in all, humanity was simply undeservedly lucky enough to have us forward-thinking, willful, hyperintelligent, and very handsome Gamma Quadra people to worm our way into power in the 18th century, dragging the other Quadras kicking and screaming into new vistas of progression, imagination, ascension, and human invincibility. Our species may be doomed to fail, but we still got to shoot our shot at a once-in-a-hundred-billion chance. So how about a thank you for the opportunity to be legends, other Quadras, especially you Delta Quadra? Begrudging and insincere thank-yous only, I don't want a sincere one.

[godslave]

Serendipity is the Universe gift to Humankind and the key to quantum leaps. The rest is litterature.

[HFY Enjoyer]

Serendipity is the Universe gift to Humankind and the key to quantum leaps. The rest is litterature.

Gift implies gratitude, or at least use, but I just don't see most humans taking advantage of the gift. No no the vast majority of humans, whether we're talking about animal domestication or literacy or the Three Sisters system or even the Internet, blandly integrate such bounties into their thoughtless existences without really questioning how to make it work for them. But serendipity doesn't mean much if you take it for granted, which is the same thing as letting yourself become victimized by it, which in itself is the same thing as not having serendipity at all. Cassandra's gift of foresight was only able to be twisted into a curse by Apollo because she was too stupid, weak-willed, and above-all-else unimaginative to think of a way to convince other people or take advantage of it for her own ends.

So as it goes with humanity. I would like to say that the evils done by European colonial powers to Mesoamerica -- and the karmic backlash to said colonial powers after the Conquest of the Americas led to an unprecedentedly economically, politically, and then militarily powerful middle class, itself leading to capitalism, the Scientific Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution -- was a grim tradeoff, the sacrifice of the old order on both continents to benefit the new. But let's be real here: if the European powers of the time knew what Columbus's genocidal stunt would lead to, he and every other adventurer would be executed as traitors to the crown, their wealth (rightfully) seen as the slow poison that would destroy millennia of pre-industrial 'civilization'. They would foreclose this future not because of moral concerns -- which would be understandable, even admirable, but keep in mind that this worthless loser queen expelled the Jews and Muslims and gave the Spanish Inquisition even more power, and she was one of the more sane and moral monarchs -- but simply because they prioritized present safety and stability over taking a risk on the future. The fact that their senescent feudal order wasn't going to last regardless, both that particular Trastamaran dynasty or any other hopeless, preening, stagant, parasitical royal lineages that would interminably arrive after them until some slightly more apocalyptic event Volcanic Winter of 536 CE permanently reset if not extincted humanity? La la la la la can't hear you over the worshipping of our even more worthless ancestors who gave us these pathetic riches~.

These monarchs, with such knowledge of the future, would be like Cassandra, self-victimized by their congenital inability to use their anachronistic knowledge constructively.

This applies to Gamma Quadra, too, by the way; keep in mind that the worthless slug known as Hernan Cortes (typed as LIE by Stratievskaya, and I bet that Columbus would also be a Gamma Quadra personality, too) just wanted to be King Vermin of Trash Mountain, and given how most Gammas, even ESIs who should really know better, use Fi-Ni-Se-Te for selfish and destructive purposes. Glad he died in poverty and disgrace after being unable to find another people to ruin on another genocidal 'adventure'. There was rarely a downfall so just. Regardless, there's a reason why I, smugness aside, keep emphasizing the accidentally serendipitous aspects of the progression to the Industrial Revolution, culminating in the horror of the Cold War -- in case you were wondering why I don't feel THAT bad about Delta Quadra, despite my disdain for their Si-valuing ways, taking the keys to civilization away from Gamma Quadra. Humanity was lucky, not clever, and if my solution to the Fermi Paradox does turn out to be the case, I don't want to hear or see any of you dorks acting smug around the benighted alien civilizations. That also goes for any AI or uplifted animals or alien immigrants to Earthclan or whatever.