An addendum on Hanson’s grabby aliens

 Originally published on Language and Philosophy, July 12, 2022

An addendum on Hanson’s grabby aliens:

If we were to assume that all of human futures are determined by those elements of human nature that have persisted through history, we might conclude that we will continue to expand our influence on nature, organize it, harness it etc. This seems to be the assumption Hanson makes in predicting that aliens with advanced technology will be grabby — they will succeed by Darwinian selection over their environment, dominating it, organizing it, harnessing it just as we have in our Darwinian selection here. Darwinian libertarianism is Hanson’s idee fixe which he applies to everything. But as David Deutsch likes to say, not without some (though not entire) justification, we can’t predict the technology of the future. More important, technological advances have been the great game changers in human history. They are changes in our relationship with our environment, and in our selection. Reliance on physical environment, like reliance on slaves, will last only as long as no technology replaces it as fossil fuels and machines have been replacing slavery. Besides, humans, unlike most organisms, do not have as our essential environment something in non human nature. The essential environment of humans is other humans, and that relationship is mediated through language, a symbol system denoting information, not bits of physical nature.

A social species depends on cooperation more than competition. Consider that language is itself a form of cooperation and it is by far a away the most important, pervasively transformative technology we’ve ever acquired, to such an extent that it compensates for shocking downsides among which is our credulousness. For an informationally dependent social species it would be natural for the future technology to develop as informational and representational, not physical hardware. The future is likely to be one of seeking information in symbolic and non symbolic forms and organizing those with efficient means that don’t require disturbing anything at all. It seems pretty easy to predict that the future would be knowing, seeing, understanding, and not doing, moving, destroying or transforming anything but ourselves. Why travel with our burdensome bodies that require replenishment and produce waste, when we can travel through information, — like virtual reality but far more sophisticated and comprehensive. Hardware is just cumbersome, a clumsy start to a universe that began with physics instead of symbols. And lucky too, since without physical things there’d be little to symbolize, no one to symbolize and no one to understand them. 

You can see this move towards information already in the metaverse. Virtual reality already has advantages over physical travel, and we’re only at the beginning of its development. Several months after scoping out the streetview of a city I hadn’t actually visited — observing carefully the bus stops and the people waiting there, the stores and restaurants and the people sitting at the street cafes, the view from the city’s heights, the waterfront scenery — in talking on the phone to a resident there I mistakenly recalled that I’d been there. I could not for the life of me tell whether I’d actually been there or not, the memories were so vivid, normal and memory-lifelike.

That’s the easiest explanation for the Fermi paradox. Aliens will not travel and will generate little effort. Information is lightweight and efficient. We can’t find them because they’re all at home quietly sitting on the couch experiencing information pure. If they want to exercise, if they’re still stuck in bodies, they can bring out their retro tech and ride a bike.