The Message is the Medical Medium

Was reading an interesting article about exocommunications. Started a train of thought - we assume that aliens will want to communicate using some kind of a language. Speech, sound, symbolism. Pictures. Mathematics. 

And they will come in person, holding their placards and speaking through mikes, or telepathically, or via stylistic dance and sign language, or broadcasting from a transmitter in orbit or somewhere in the system via radio / laser pulse. 

How ethnocentric is that?

The're alien. We can't speak to dolphins and dogs. We can barely communicate with chimps. 

We know nothing about them, what they breathe, how many legs they have, are they carbon-based, silicon-based, liquid metal, supercooled helium.

Here's what I think. They're already trying to talk to us. We just don't see it as communications at all. 

Here's the alien civilization, studying us from far, far away.  

They see this planet. 

There's... something on it, something that replicates and evolves, adapts to environment, interacts with others. This something has developed a language, a means of communication. It has a memory and a population spread in billions across the globe, just beginning to venture into space. 

So they send a message, in a form and format suited to this life-form. Maybe they send several variations, for the several variations of the life-form, if they have difficulty in telling which is the dominant one. 

The message's content may not be immediately understandable, but it sees that the life-forms are interacting with it, responding to it. 

The dominant life-form, as defined by an ability to learn from experience, adapt to environment, interact and grow and evolve, and develop a sophisticated support system to sustain itself - this defines DNA, doesn't it? 

Our bodies are just the vehicles that allow it to propagate. 

So here comes the message, in the form of protein chains, a 4-character code from space that interacts with the double helix of code in protein molecules that dominates the planet. 

It enters the support system - our bodies - and interfaces with the DNA. Sometimes it just appends; sometimes it edits, changes. The DNA responds. Sometimes directly, sometimes via manipulation of its support systems, sometimes from outside the support system altogether. 

We call the message viruses, and we call the interaction disease. 

Every time we create an antiviral, we're sending a message. Every time a disease evolves, it's responding. 

A conversation has been underway for thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe a million years. 

We're just making the simple ethnocentric mistake of assuming that when we think about 'us', its the flesh and blood body carrying a brain that defines our identity. We're just a walking lump of code inside an organic machine, and it's our code that's been doing the talking.

We might already be a part of a galactic civilization, and we'll never know. 

The Fermi Paradox: Peeing in the gene pool!

Did I just answer the Fermi Paradox?

To summarize - the Drake Equation is a calculation of the likelihood of existence of intelligent, non-human life in the universe. A lot of assumptions, a lot of guesswork, but considering that our galaxy alone has over a hundred billion stars, very, very likely.

The question therefore was - if they're out there, why haven't we met them yet?

The Fermi Paradox is the addition of one more factor to the calculation - an unknown quantity as of right now - which prevents the existence of intelligent life.

And I think I just got what it is. It's evolution.

Or rather, de-volution.

Think about it. Right up till the Industrial Revolution, people would die of stupidity. The environment was hostile, and resources were limited. If you couldn't take care of yourself, and weren't an asset to the community, you would die and nobody would be able to - or want to - save you. Your stupid genes would leave the gene pool. Humanity would get a little bit smarter, evolve some more.

This made us all so smart over time, we became the the masters of the planet. The process took three billion years, but here we are.

And since we're the masters, we control everything. We can kill lions, great white sharks, rhinos, elephants, blue whales. We even kill them by accident, without meaning to and often without even noticing. In hundreds and thousands. It's genocide, an extermination all the more criminal in it's being accidental. If an animal competes with us for a resource, god help it. It's already extinct.

And with all the resources we now have, what do we do?

We create ideals.

Ideals of altruism. Of helping those less fortunate. Of charity. Social security.

All this makes people who were otherwise scheduled to be chucked out of the gene pool, are now allowed to hang around and contaminate it.

Think about it. How can you ever deny someone the right to breed, no matter what circumstances they are in? It goes against every ideal of liberty, equality, fraternity, democracy, enlightenment, emancipation, and personal freedom. It creates stupid children of stupid parents who are allowed to survive and breed. It creates a world where higher levels of intelligence marks you as different, strange.

Outcast.

Intelligence = success? In some ways. Short-term ways. Success in your own lifetime, maybe guaranteeing your children's. But long-term success? Like preserving ecological diversity, not poisoning the oceans and filling the atmosphere with carcinogens?

Nope.

It's just not good business sense.

So we continue to get dumber and dumber. Intelligent content dies, starved of audience and thus, money. Content gets dumber, making people dumber, and it's a vicious cycle that ends with an idiocracy.

And that's the missing link, the answer to the Fermi paradox. Any civilization which is smart enough to be the masterclass on it's planet creates in the process a situation which leads inevitably to it's own stagnation and destruction.

A few generations down, someone will hit a nuclear button and some of them will still fly. Not enough to kill all life 22 times over. Maybe just once.

And sometime, somewhere, yet another someone else will look up at the silent, starry sky and wonder why they're alone in the universe...