That's one proposed answer to the Fermi Paradox.
this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2025
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Showerthoughts
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Have you read Vonnegut? Best give it a go.
Cat's Cradle is my favorite but Slaughterhouse-Five is about as good as it get in regards to overall wtf is going on here, and really explorers this idea of reality being something totally different then what we think. And do make sure to check out The Sirens of Titan for the alien zoo parts
also Breakfast of Champions
You might enjoy Dan Carlin's book The End Is Always Near. It puts everything in perspective for me - we are not experiencing a weird amount of disaster and failure, this is basically what we're like. Get used to it.
IMO this is generally true, but not always. You look at the States, roughly mid-30's to mid-70's, and it really was a period of greatness for most folks, from top to bottom. (altho not so much for various minorities, which is a real mark of shame for the first modern democracy)
Anyway yeah, the "aliens" in question are simply us, doing all this to ourselves and the very home that birthed us dangerous, naked apes.
Just because I'm currently reading "Sapiens," consider that we sprang up out of E. Africa ~70K yrs ago, and ~20K yrs later shared the planet with FIVE other human species. A mere ~20K yrs later, we and whatever other natural forces had eradicated all the others (including our closest relatives, Neanderthals). In terms of a 'murder mystery,' it doesn't look all that great of a case for our innocence, haha. 😑
We're a nightmare for hominids and most species in general. Living on a knifes edge since primeval times. Now we're cooking our planet and the worst people ever have nukes, so yeah.
We're closer to a self inflicted doom than ever, but it's hardly a new direction. Always on the brink of self destruction, but the only thing we can't kill so far is ourselves. We're everything Gwar laughed about being, but less honest.
Always on the brink of self destruction
I'm not really sure about that part. No doubt we've been self-warring for ages, but as long as there was new territory to expand in to, with new resources to be plundered and used, I doubt there was any real risk of a species self-destruction.
Really, I think it's more like a problem of: 1) spreading across almost any place inhabitable across the planet, 2) laying claim to and using up all available resources in such demesne, polluting willy-nilly, and most especially 3) thinking that "the industrial age" (combined with capitalism) was some kind of genius formula for making sapiens 'better than ever.' Creating a global, vastly-overpopulated sapiens powder keg, if you will.
OTOH, when you look at a continent like N. America-- if the natives hadn't been fucked with over & over again by Euro colonists, I would guess they could have gone on for many tens of thousands of years just like they did, living perfectly authentic, interesting, meaningful lives without all the 'advancement of technology' shizzle.
Cue Jon Belushi exclamation.....
I didn't read Sapiens, but if this book claim that homo sapiens is responsible for the disappearing of Neanderthals, you can close it. This idea was disproven by research long ago: when sapiens arrived in Europe, Neanderthals were already on the verge of disappearing.
Eh, I'm not sure it was DECISIVELY DISPROVEN. Because in science, we start with the idea that "we just don't know," then proceed carefully from there.
Of course science evolves, but that shouldn't be a reason for a vulgarization book to teach something else than the scientific consensus of the time.
Alien ant farm? 🎵
Maybe Earth is just another petri dish among thousands like it. The past 10 000 years could be a part of grand experiment to figure out if all human planets end up destroying the whole planet sooner or later. Maybe there is a genetic sequence that makes humans smart enough to avoid that catastrophe. My guess is, this dish didn’t get the winning sequence.
Even if we somehow survive, why wouldn’t the experimenter just chuck all the dishes into an autoclave when they’re done with the experiment. I mean, you shouldn’t leave an unsupervised experiment running indefinitely. It’s more ethical to stop it at some point, right?
Hmm, so I have thought about this for a while.
There isn't a ton of reason to think aliens are here.
- The main reason, is because of how things are. Things are rough and chaotic. Our leaders don't seem to even see 5 years into the future. The world is very exploitative. It's very arbitrary. It just doesn't make much sense to think that some powerful mind is in control of it. It doesn't seem planned. It seems like a bunch of hairless monkeys that live short lives developed technology a few people ago and are stumbling through everything.
2.Aliens if they have the tech to visit earth. Are very likely to be post scarcity, and to have less competitive ideas. The values of our leaders do not align with the idea of aliens at all at least in all likelihood.
3.Anyone who isn't a child or short on intelligence probably realizes that everything on TV and the internet is pretty much a lie, intentional or not. Humans barely know anything about anything as it has always been, and the world is very much controlled by the upper class of wealthy people.
There is maybe a shred of reason to think they may be here. One is that life on earth has continued for many billions of years, which is amazing when you really think about it. The conditions required for life to perpetuate are quite narrow.
Another piece of evidence is virtually all of human history for many thousands of years revolves around extremely religious people and magic and all this stuff.
Another thread of reason is simply the logic of the Fermi paradox, we know there is likely at least hundreds of thousands of intelligent life forms in the galaxy alone, probably more like millions or billions.
So if they are here, they probably don't want any contact with anyone or very few people. I don't think politicians and rich people would be of interest to them. It's also possible that they are so far beyond us in development that communication or acknowledgement of existence isn't even something they care to establish. I mean what good does it do an ant to know humans exist? Mostly just makes them long for things they are not going to get from us. Even though we could give ants everything they want, we just don't feel the desire for whatever reason. Maybe they judge us by our own level of empathy? They treat us like we treat lower animals?
This still doesn't line up well with the apparent chaos of reality, however, if they had a secret agenda, it becomes more possible, just also not all that likely. There isn't anything on the planet that would ever be of value to them except maybe the fruits of human knowledge of culture.
What we are witnessing is the near-complete isolation of the soul from the truth of everything. We are at the densest stage of evolution, stuck in material bodies and unable to look beyond them. What we see today is the perfect manifestation of it. We will (live) die with so much understanding of it.