I suck at Photoshop

Firstly, I want to apologise. I know Medium is a platform for spamming your viral content, to promote your product or media or whatever. And I’m gonna do that as well, but my main goal is different. I had an epiphany last night I NEED to share.

I don’t want to lose you, dear reader, but I must start from afar. Have you ever gazed at the stars late at night, wondering how big the Universe actually is? Because, it is really, really vast. And old. 13.82 billion years old to be precise. So, for those 13.82 billion of years, somewhere in the vastness of space, on some silly rock orbiting a random star, some life forms different from us must have been formed, right? Surely out of the millions of possible alien civilisations, at least several should have came by at some point in time and poke us. But they haven’t, at least officially (looking at you Area 51). So where are they?

Maybe they did came, but had bad first impressions.

That’s the question Enrico Fermi asked to his colleague one day, and later became famous as the Fermi Paradox. I’ve written a short explanation about what the Fermi Paradox is and possible solutions to it in a quick ELI5 article. If you want the long, understandable version that got me hooked into this problem, I highly recommend Wait But Why version of it here. It is a bit lengthy, but it explains it in a language even dumbasses like me could understand.

Back at me. I was minding my own business last night, coming home after few beers, when it hit me. Why haven’t we seen any real proof of extra terrestrial life? Can we someday maybe find them ourselves? Nope, we won’t. And you wanna know why? Because we don’t have to, nor they want us to.

There are certain constants in our universe, laws that can not be broken or twisted. Travelling faster than the speed of light is one of them. There are theoretical devices, such as the Alcubierre Drive, but those are just sci-pop fantasies at the moment. What if, in reality, we can’t reach more than 60–70% of the speed of light, no matter how advanced we get? Our meat bags can take only so much G-force before exploding like piñatas. Maybe space travel IS limited.

What I am trying to say is we should consider the idea that the stars will remain forever unreachable. No galactic empire, no alien wars, no wormhole travel. Maybe space is just too big to be explored. It sounds depressing, but we must always consider it as a possibility.

So maybe other intelligent life forms did evolve at some point in time and they reached to the same conclusion. Just maybe, they came to realise, that the only logical solution, the only thing that actually makes sense as the new step in evolution is virtual reality.

“I am so new-age”

Don’t know about you, but whenever I imagine higher beings, I can only think of them as forms of light and sound, without any physical appearance. When you think of it, having a physical form can only limit you. You can die of asphyxiation, blood loss, too much <insert any liquid here> in your body, freezing, burning, chemical burning, practically anything. But if you don’t have anything to get stabbed, strangled, … etc, you are free to exist a lot more.

Look how much we have evolved for the last 200 years. In 1816, you had to travel by horse and ship for half a year, just to be able to stab an unbeliever in the guts some mere 5,000 km away. Today, all you have to do is navigate your drone from the other side of the globe and press the shoot button. Our world is transiting to globalisation, to connection and to being one. With the ever-growing Internet, you can see and hear people thousand of kilometres away from you in the instant. Just imagine what our society would look alike in the year 3,000.

Now, you may say “But Forrest, that’s bullshit. Nothing over the internet is real.” To quote Morpheus:

What is real? How do you define ‘real’? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.

So, any virtual reality, every transfer of information, every 1 and 0 can be accepted as ‘real’. Why should we try to master the laws and rules of our current reality, when we can create our own reality, with our own laws and rules?

Maybe that’s the only real logical solution. The only way to evolve technologically. Don’t try to conquer the macro, focus on the micro. We should just give the rest of the universe the finger, and go in WoW mode. And maybe every other alien civilisation reached to that conclusion. That’s why there are no signs of them, that’s why we think we are alone in the universe, that’s what we have to do. In your face, Fermi! As a disclaimer, there are several similar hypothesis, including one that we are already living in a simulation, but mine is somehow right..er.

How will we reach that stage? The Matrix already gave us the answer. In our final form, we may be just intelligent electrical signals exchanging information with one another, but I can’t think of any way to get rid of our bodies for good. That’s why we need the machines. You see, the Matrix has it all wrong. The machines won’t put us in EvolutionNet against our will. We will specifically instruct them to do so. Using our bodies as energy sources and blackening the sky still make sense in this context. If the planet doesn’t reflect sunlight, it will be a lot more harder for other lifeforms to find us.

As partially involved in the IT sector, I fully understand the importance of backups. The whole “don’t keep all of your eggs in the same basket” philosophy. That’s why we shouldn’t completely disregard any space travel. Making a few nearby colonies is a must to ensure our survival. But apart from moving to Mars, we shouldn’t lose time and resources for deep space travels. We should focus on technologies. Because …

The future is in A.I.