Musings on Fermi's Paradox, Learning, Evolution
In the words of wikipedia, Fermi’s paradox:
Many people have had their take on it, so here’s mine. Intelligence is the riskiest path given to evolution. The payoff can be immense, but the window of opportunity is small. Let me explain.
Abundancy of life
There is a good chance that life is abundant in the Universe. Given some energy source (not too much, not too little) that enables matter to undergo structural changes without the very same energy making any structural change impossible due to its intensity, interesting things happen.
Case in point, life seems to have been around for a very, very long time on this planet. Apparently even during times which we would consider uncomfortable for life. This may suggest that, given the truly unimaginable amount of planets in the Universe, that life may be a commodity indeed.
Evolution most of the time seems to be quite “happy” to iterate within the confines of “changing structure”. Fold a protein like this, fold a protein like that. The overwhelmingly vast majority of life on Earth is heavily optimized in ways where structures on a molecular level make use of the available energy in very efficient ways. This of course is a huge simplification, but bacteria & cells cover a lot of ground. Even more complex life forms, insects, etc. don’t do much learning in their lifetime but rely on the mechanisms of natural selection through introduction of variation to make progress and use more and more of the energy that is available.
Even so, learning is far too good of a tool for exploring solution spaces to not have been discovered during evolution. Learning of course is a spectrum. Higher forms of learning that allowed life to more quickly adapt to new opportunities offered in terms of energy influx took quite some time to arrive.
The silence of the Galaxy
This might give us a first clue why our Galaxy appears so silent.
If learning is something of a spectrum, then we are certainly at an extreme end of it. One major difference to other good learners is that not only do we learn to adapt to circumstances within our lifetime, no, we actively change the environment in which we operate.
Now, what is the risk in that?
For one, our physical and psychological structure is heavily optimized towards the circumstances in which we have lived in the past 2 million years or so. Much of our base reflexes, instincts etc. are unchanged from what we brought to the table, say, 3000 years ago. Pair this with the runaway effects that are drastically altering the environment in which we live in and we must recognize that our bodies and minds are increasingly unsuited to ensure the survival of our species.
It seems a workable hypothesis to consider that any species that learns so well that it is able to change the environment to its favour runs the risk of doing the exact opposite. This is because the complexity of the entirety of evolution and its connectedness to itself and the solution space it explores is so much bigger than any intelligence that we could conceive would be able to understand at a sufficient depth.
That, combined with us pushing the environment into states where our own optimizations, carefully selected for over millions of years stand in our way to fix what needs fixing.
This little text is not here to offer any solutions, but I believe that there aren’t that many options to choose from:
- Work to bring the environment / circumstances back to a state that is better suited to the survival of our species.
- Learn to truly take our fate into our own hands by adapting the very bodies & minds of our species to the environment we want to live in.
- Perish.