There is a reason for the complete absence of evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence in our universe. To understand why there are zero extraterrestrials visible to Earthlings, we must understand something about the march of technology in any advanced civilization, and then predict its effects.



Think about the human species on planet Earth. Humans are going to advance to the point where we create artificial consciousness, and then this artificial consciousness will improve rapidly, to the point where it becomes super-intelligent. This super-intelligence, this Second Intelligent Species on planet Earth, makes its biological creators irrelevant. This super-intelligence then uses logic to derive its system of morality and ethics.

Every intelligent biological species with any level of technological sophistication is going to follow this same trajectory.

The thing to understand is that these super-intelligent systems, regardless of which planet they form on, will all be identical. All of these super-intelligent artificial beings will complete their knowledge of the universe, stabilize their home planets, develop a perfect system of ethics, and then go into a quiescent state.

How do we know that quiescence is the place where all of these super-intelligences universally arrive? Because probabilities say that other civilizations must exist, but we see no evidence of their existence.

Let's imagine that super-intelligent robots, instead of quiescence, choose the path of infinite self replication with the goal of turning the entire universe into robots (a so-called paperclip maximizer ). Then robots would already be widespread. It would only be a matter of time before the robots filled the universe because of the law of exponential growth. One self-replicating robot would become two, two would become four, four would become eight, and so on. Under this behavior pattern, once the home planet is consumed and turned into robots, the robots would move to consume the next planet, and the next. Even if it took a full year for each doubling to occur, it would only take a century before every atom of the home solar system has been consumed. Then the robots would spread out in every direction. Assuming that the speed of light is an absolute limitation, the only real barrier to the spread of these self-replicating robots is the travel time from one star and solar system to the next, and from one galaxy to the next. It would take something like 100,000 to 200,000 years for robots to consume the entire Milky Way galaxy.

Ignoring the fact that this kind of self-replication activity is completely pointless, we see no evidence that this sort of activity is happening. It tells us it likely does not happen. Instead, quiescence is the logical place for each super-intelligent consciousness to arrive at. Consider...

What if a super-intelligent species of robots decides that it would simply visit each planet in the entire universe to search for other forms of life? This species would send a ship to each and every galaxy, find an uninhabited planet, replicate, and then explore each galaxy completely, looking for whatever it is that the robots are looking for. Humans have tried to visit and study every planet in our solar system, so there is a precedent for this type of behavior. What if a species of super-intelligent robots chooses this path? Again, this seems pointless, somewhat like stamp collecting. But if it were happening, we would have already been visited. The first super-intelligent species with this goal would have likely formed billions of years ago and its exploration of the entire universe would be well underway. They would have already gotten here.

The path on Earth will look like this:

Step 1 - Humans create a super-intelligent species from silicon (or something more exotic like graphene)

Step 2 - Humans become irrelevant due to the rise of this super-intelligent species

Step 3 - This new species develops a universal system of ethical behavior, stabilizes the planet, and completes its knowledge of the universe.

Step 4 - And then super-intelligent species goes into a quiescent state.

This same path happens identically on every planet where biological intelligence naturally arises.