A predictably weird combination one might think. Am I serious? Well, yes and no. First. Some background on where this is coming from.

Zero State is various things at various times to various people. I am nominal leader of one of the twelve “houses” — House Tal Shiar named after the Romulan intelligence agency in Star Trek.

ZS is a Social Futurist political organization. It is a trans-national virtual state. It is a Transhumanist organization, and in its latest incarnation an Alternate Reality Game (ARG). The object of the game is to play out a mythos with actions in the real world that bring that mythos into reality. So, this is a game that is not quite a game. Now to this latest instalment of the mythos.

ET Phone Home

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (or perhaps really close) the aliens packed up and left for the more computationally intensive environs of their local Black Hole (Black Sun, Black Star in ZS mythos) or maybe moved downtown to the centre of the galaxy with its tens of thousands of such, orbiting the great black star at the heart of every galaxy. Before they left they launched self-replicating Von Neumann (VN) probes at sub light speed to keep an eye on what was happening in the district they had vacated. Within a few million years almost every star had its resident super-AI observing the locality for anything interesting. And nothing was more interesting than a technological civilization about to transition into the Transhumanist Technological Singularity itself. They were particularly interested in what might emerge from it — angels or demons. So the probes were also tasked with making sure the correct path was followed.

What Would ET Do?

Using the kind of technology we might reasonably expect to appear sometime in the next century or two, such as placing observatories at the gravitational focal point of our sun, some 600AU out, we could view details on nearby extrasolar planets. And anyone out there could do the same to us. As a consequence, Earth has likely been an interesting place to view for the past 300 million years or so with its oxygen atmosphere and vegetation. And vastly more interesting in the past 10,000 years since rectangular shapes started appearing in the form of cities and fields. Rectangles generally do not occur naturally.

Then in the past 300 years the atmosphere started to show signs of industrial pollution, followed 200 years later by radio and TV signals, intense radar pulses and the unmistakeable sign of nuclear bombs whose output peaked at around 1% of the total output power of our sun. Nobody was going to miss that, let alone a VN probe sitting in various comfortable and convenient positions within our solar system. For example, in caves at the lunar poles looking down on Earth.

Time to wake up and get to work.

The UFO Problem

Over the years my opinions have swung wildly as to what UFOs aka “Flying Saucers” actually are. From a teenage True Believer in ET, to a contemporary sceptic who believed most “real” reports could be explained by things like tests of secret aircraft, most notably the stealth aircraft developed in the 70s/80s. Naturally, governments were keen to dismiss, debunk and marginalize such sightings for national security reasons and brand those who saw them as deluded fools or cranks. Of course, real deluded fools and cranks helped that process considerably themselves by their publicity seeking antics. Not to mention deliberate hoaxes by both amateurs and government, for various reasons, that muddied the waters considerably.

Then there are the sober physical reasons why UFOs could not be spacecraft from other star systems, for example, the speed of light limitation. Which to me looks a very real objection, right up to when I started thinking about it from a Transhumanist point of view.

And right up to the point I heard about the multiple military witnesses coming forward in their old age now that their careers cannot be ended by talking about what they witnessed. Particularly the serious and unequivocal interference of UFOs against nuclear military installations, shutting them down, and in one case initiating the start of an ICBM launch sequence. These reports come from not only Americans but former Soviet strategic missile force personnel. Multiple credible witnesses, radar contacts, close up sightings, high resolution photography (confiscated), and a vision of technology far beyond the contemporary Human.

What Would Transhumanists Do?

Anyway, let’s take a step back, and a step forward to our own Transhumanist and/or PostHuman future. Sometime this century we are going to encounter what has been referred to above as the Technological Singularity. An event that effectively brings an end to Human domination on this planet and ushers in an era of the genetically enhanced PostHuman and/or artificial intelligence (AI) of superhuman capability. And not just one, but billions of them.

If we then launch a star ship to check out a planet hypothetically rather similar to ours in the 20th century, how would we proceed?

What we would not do if we find an inhabited world at a lower technological level is drop down to their major habitation and say “Take me to your leader”. We know for a fact how destructive that is from our own history. Nor would the ship itself have anything resembling a crew — the idea that ships (unintelligent) have crews (intelligent) is just a quaint primitive belief. There will be no distinction between ship and crew. Any minor mobile functionaries can be constructed as avatars, either machines or biological entities (and again, there may be no difference) up to or beyond Human capability.

If we wanted a close look at the locals we could covertly drop “smart dust” across the planet to blanket it with total surveillance on a microscopic scale. If we wanted tissue samples from them we could re-engineer their equivalent of mosquitoes to bite them and analyse their metabolism. If we wanted to speak with them we would create biological androids indistinguishable from them down to the cellular level.

In short, we could obtain all the information we wanted without them suspecting our presence. No need for us to kidnap them and push trackers up their nose, or drill a hole in their skull to implant mind reading and control devices. We could get our mosquito to inject them with nanobots if we wanted that. Nor would we be keen for them to spread apocryphal UFO tales of Mr E T BillyBob getting the anal probe aboard our ship.

Unless…

Unless we want to spread disinformation and confusion, or issue covert hints or threats. But why might we do that?

For a start, it is important to realize that we would know them far better than they know themselves. We are talking an intelligence difference between them and us wider than Homo Sapiens and squirrels. We would know in minute detail how to manipulate their belief systems, culture and religion, all far more durable than tribes, nations or political ideologies. And if we saw them taking a particularly ugly path, we might do so. Not with shows of force, overt threats or promises, but little nudges here and there all done in a manner to render the overt action appear nonsensical, yet still having the desired effect.

Now transpose that from our hypothetical future to our very real past and the VN probe. Every interaction comes with little or no hard proof yet still has an effect on the Human psyche. Or, where proof might exist, it becomes inconclusive.

And since the probe has likely been around for millennia if not geological ages, thinking and planning on long time scales would pose no problem.

Predictions and one Retrodiction

So, where does all this lead? I am going to list some suggestions, starting with the Retrodiction above:

We will not be getting to the moon, or anywhere else, in any significant manner until our AI hardware capabilities are approaching Human brain level or beyond (late 2020s). Having people with an Apollo 1960s type of tech exploring the moon would be a real inconvenience to the VN probe, possibly forcing it to relocate.

What it needs is Human computer technology capable of covertly hosting its sub-minds.

The VN probe has access to the Net including social media and email.

It can decrypt every supposedly secure communication travelling by microwave as well as RSA and similar but might not be able to decrypt quantum schemes.

There is the possibility that there is not one VN probe, but many, from many species over the past few million years.

A major reason why NSA and friends want a handle on everything travelling the Net is to squeeze it out.

At the point where we have widespread AI hardware (but not software) of Human level capability, we will “discover” a non-reproducible Artificial General Intelligence has booted itself almost miraculously from merely interacting with the Net. It will be a one-off event, but the intelligence itself can be duplicated in any quantity. It will be smarter than us, and rapidly self-improving.

The Singularity arrives like an express train — hard and fast. It seems somewhat familiar. Almost like recapitulating a mythology.

We finally discover evidence of ET on the moon, in the asteroids etc.

Human civilisation transitions not merely to the PostHuman, but… something else.

So…

Where do we go from here? Well, first, remember this is just a game. However, in the Alternate Reality Game of Zero State we actually have to do something real, in the real world to move the narrative forward and cement this aspect of the mythos into it. What do we have planned?

Watch this space…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft https://accelerating.org/articles/transcensionhypothesis.html https://www.amazon.com/Nukes-Extraordinary-Encounters-Nuclear-Weapons/dp/1434398315 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartdust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanorobotics