Can DeFi solve the Fermi Paradox?

 For a long time, I was convinced the Fermi Paradox is a proof of an inescapable trap. 

• Individuals evolutionarily select for one of two survival criteria - individual strength, or individual adaptability. 
• Strength - the T-Rex strategy - meant you would get so big and powerful nothing could kill you. You were the apex predator, top of the food chain, effectively indestructible for all other organisms on the planet - as long as nothing changed. 
• There are some examples to think about, at this stage. Sharks and crocodiles have barely changed for epochs, because their environments barely did. They were perfectly adapted to dominate their space, and as long as their world remained the same, so did they. That's basic evolution. 
• Adaptability meant you were pretty much a tasty snack for almost everyone, but you could hide in physical and/or evolutionary niches so well you would always be around. 
• Then came a third strategy - pack strength. Individually you may be a tasty snack, but in a group, you had better resources and surpluses than any individual, even the most powerful. A lone-wolf warrior in the prime of life could die of a cold, but an aging, toothless, blind matriarch of a clan would survive that same winter. 
• And then there came societal adaptability, rules and norms, the oral tradition and the written word that would permanently embed individual insight into social structure. You no longer had to invent a survival strategy, your ancestors had already done the hard work. 

Result - we rewrote the food chain. We became gods on the earth, armed with fire and bow, genetics and antibiotics. No animal could touch us, no calamity could destroy us. We spread everywhere. A tiger may eat a few of us, and would be hunted down and exterminated. A plague could wipe out a chunk of the population, but would get eradicated soon after. Droughts, floods. wildfires, volcanoes, even an ice age? We migrate. 

The trouble is, that level of competency comes with ownership of power that's not very controllable. We're riding a tiger, engaged in a perpetual arms race with the only remaining threat - ourselves - and as long as even one has more power and money than another, the second can lose everything. 

And that's where ownership comes in, and with ownership, the need to control resources to the advantage of yourself and the disadvantage of someone else. 

Money is like the ultimate expression of power. As long as everyone believes in it - and everyone does - it can get you anything you want, apart from a very nebulous individual self-actualization part that the rest of the world couldn't care less about. 

And so you have the drive towards centralization. And centralization brings with it, short-term goals. 

Consider - if you are rich, do you care that your industry is polluting a lake to the point that in 25 years, it is undrinkable poison? No. You know you can always go to another lake. And if you are too poor to move, can you stop the pollution either? No. You don't have the resources for this fight. 

Democracy tries to fix this, but it's a flawed system. It depends on access to information to work. If everyone knows the truth - and understands it - and accepts it - and reacts rationally - then, great. 

But truth is a little harder to handle than you think. Even if it can't be bought and sold, it can be twisted, out-shouted, ignored, or just buried under a mountain of eminently purchasable lies.

And so the middlemen, the elite, the resource holders and the information brokers flourish and grow, the rich get richer and wealth and power continues to concentrate.

The world continues to get poisoned, climate change accelerates, we squabble over ashes in a burning house, and the Right Thing - even if accepted - never reaches the Right Now stage.  

And I always used to think, this is it. It's a perfect trap. The only way to get out is to give up something today for a stranger to benefit tomorrow. Altruism will always lose majority to selfishness. 

This is what happens to every civilization. You reach the peak of global dominance, but without a common enemy to unite against, you fight one another. Interstellar distances are too huge to find an antagonist in the void. Each other is all that's left left, so each other we claw and tear until one all-powerful weapon falls in the hands of a short-sighted fool, and it's the reset button, ad infinitum. 

And as each civilization reaches the edge of Karashdev I, they inevitably trigger some global catastrophe that would wipe them out. 

And that is the Great Silence. 

Now, DeFi.

I'm not saying cryptocurrency can save the world - but the idea of it is something new. Something that can't be shut down, confiscated, restricted, controlled. Something that can't be limited. An economic tool that anyone can own - truly own - and the only way to destroy it is to destroy the world. 

Sure, there will be ways all of the above can happen - crypto can be stolen, compromised, snowed under, etc, etc - but the idea of it is something interesting. 

Decentralization of economy. Decentralization of computing resources and storage. Web 3.0, back to the original concept of a democratized world without power centers and owners. 

It'll be interesting to see where this goes.

More ways than one.