Robin H. D. Corbet recently shared a preprint paper on Arxiv.org “A Less Terrifying Universe? Mundanity as an Explanation for the Fermi Paradox” that is getting a little press (if we can still call online dissemination “press”…). Corbet’s paper “examines…the lack of strong evidence for the presence of technology-using extraterrestrial civilizations (ETCs) in the Galaxy,” a lack explained by “the prospect that the Galaxy contains a modest number of civilizations…, where none have achieved technology levels sufficient to accomplish large-scale astro-engineering or lack the desire to do so.” In the course of his argument, Corbet exhibits a perversity of thought that the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is particularly useful for exposing, which suggests a more humbling implication of “the Great Silence” than SETI researchers seem able to face.
The perversities I refer to are found in the paper’s second section, “QUANTIFYING TECHNOLOGY LEVELS.” Corbet begins by summarizing the Kardashev scale, which classifies civilizations in terms of their “power utilization.” He then recognizes
[o]ther proposed scales [which] include Sagan’s, based on information storage and Barrow’s, based on how small a scale objects can be manipulated. Other characterizations might involve the maximum spacecraft velocity achieved or the intelligence level attained by computer systems….Yet another measure of technological development might be extension of an organism’s life span.
This section betrays some curious implications. However much the “Kardashev scale has limitations in that it only considers power utilization and no other facets of development” (my emphasis), those “other facets of development” Corbet lists are remarkably narrow. One might immediately object to this judgement, that these measures are intended to be pertinent only to a civilization’s being detectable. “Power utilization,” for example, is a factor in a civilization’s developing those technosignatures that would reveal them to our instruments, such as artificial electromagnetic signals or signs of astro-engineering, but “power utilization” along with those others—“information storage,” “the intelligence level attained by computer systems,” and even at “how small a scale objects can be manipulated”—all seem more to be what keeps Sam Altman up at night, i.e., the present concerns of “our” own so-called “advanced” societies. (Even the “extension of an organism’s life span” is the focus of some of Altman’s tech bros). Indeed, the concept of development itself implies a linear scale whereby civilizations can be measured as more-or-less developed, a line of thinking employed by the European colonizers of “the New World” to assert their own superiority and one which was weaponized during the Cold War as Development Politics. These proposed “scientific” measures of “development,” however much they are overtly formulated to help solve the central problem of SETI, at the same time betray the intellectual prejudices and social investments of the researchers, as active participants in the fields of the sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and members of the earth’s “advanced” societies. This unconscious conflation of civilization with technological development is readable even at the level of Corbet’s language, where, in this section, he writes ‘civilization’ nine times, more or less framed by the single repetition of ‘technological development’ at the beginning and end of the section.
These considerations lend an irony (to say the least) to Corbet’s writing that “the goal of [his] paper is to consider not especially exciting solutions to the Fermi paradox, based on the concept that the most mundane explanation(s), if physically feasible, is/are most likely to be correct. This follows from the Copernican mediocrity principle, where humanity does not occupy a special place in the Universe” (my emphasis). The measures of development Corbet posits contradict this mediocrity principle, for, not only are they not even, strictly, geo- or even anthropocentric, but are modeled on but one social inflection of Homo Sapiens, an inflection that itself comes to be only in the context of “civilization,” a “development” that occurs only within less than a twentieth of the time our species has inhabited the planet. That is, the very schemes of civilizational classification (even within the very narrow confines of SETI) assume as paradigmatic the social formation of the so-called “First World,” that “humanity,” in the guise of the “First World,” does occupy “a special place in the Universe,” namely, as exemplary of the kind of civilization SETI might eventually detect. The Great Silence might then be taken to declare, ironically, not so much that ETCs may not have “achieved technology levels sufficient” for SETI to detect them but to declaim all the louder that the “First World” is hardly a standard by which technological or civilizational development can be measured, being rather merely a momentary, singularly unique social organization of a small, self-important minority of but one species on earth. This revelation may not be terrifying or even necessarily humbling, but hopefully inspiring of some circumspection.
A number of stories in the past week or so registered a blip on our radar…
Uninteresting were those related to the Grusch affair. What’s remarkable, however, in the U.S. government’s interest in the implications of Grusch’s shopworn fantasies is how quickly elected officials who long resisted the evidence for anthropogenic global warming so quickly swallowed whole hog stories of crashed, recovered, and back-engineered UFOs and their pilots…
James Carrion is no more impressed than we here at the Skunkworks, writing that
Today, the whole world seems to be playing UAP limbo, where with every new revelation of crashed UAPs, reverse engineered craft, off-world objects, SAPs hiding from Congressional oversight, leaked UAP videos and other wild and unsubstantiated claims streaming out of every allegedly hyper-top-secret orifice – the evidence bar is lowered incrementally.
He goes on to mock in detail the frothy crest of this latest surge of interest in UFOs/UAP. Carrion’s canniest observation comes near the end of his blog post, “Welcome to the modern world, where the spectacle has become more important than the truth….” Here, he echoes, however consciously, the theses of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle and Jean Baudrillard’s forays into Hyperreality, topics addressed here, if in a more focussed manner…
Nigel Watson had done us all a great service by reviewing the recently published, interdisciplinary volume The Reliability of UFO Witness Testimony. Watson’s two-part review can be read here and here; the review includes a link to the free download of the the book.
For the most part, Ballester-Olmos’ and Heiden’s book falls outside the purview of our concerns here, focussed, as it is, on the question of the veracity (factual truth) of what witnesses recount. On reviewing the book’s voluminous contents, it is imaginable one more article could have been squeezed in as a “dangerous supplement” that would have unmasked the ideological function of technoscience at work in perceiving UAP as “technologically-advanced” alien spaceships, but that, I wager, would be a hard sell…
Luke Harrington offers a pointed critique of recent U.S. government interest in UAP, bringing much of the post-2017 hoopla down to earth in the process.
His thoroughgoing article “Cutting the Chaff: Overlooked Lessons of Military UAP Sightings for Joint Force and Interagency Coordination” observes how a lack of such coordination has led to misidentifications and the deaths of military personnel (e.g., Thomas Mantell’s chasing a Sky Hook balloon) and, consequently, how the recent response of various U.S. government and military agencies to UAP, “their uncritical securitization” of the issue, only aggravates this problem (not to mention that “Responding to the recent public and political frenzy over UFOs as if they were hostile incursions into American airspace elevates such objects to the public security agenda alongside a number of more important issues like terrorism, climate change, and the coronavirus pandemic”). This securitization “distracts from the importance of communication and coordination in joint force or interagency operating environments,” wastes “the military’s time and the taxpayer’s money by disrupting normal military operations,” “could lead to a further deterioration in Sino- or Russo-American relations or, in a worst-case scenario, even a new arms race,” and “undermines the military’s goal of creating a critically thinking force.”
To make his case (and it’s here that Harrington’s approach dovetails into that of those authors collected by Ballester-Olmos and Heiden), he examines the famous 2004 Nimitz Incident as an example of misidentification precipitated by the lack of interagency coordination he has his sights on in his article. Interested or curious readers are encouraged to read his analysis, which, in the end, implies that “a more logical explanation of the event [than, e.g., alien incursion] points to a complex confluence of unrelated, comprehensible, known causal factors, including a recently upgraded Aegis radar system and an inability to filter out naturally occurring phenomena like ice or meteors.”
Aside from other consequences of the UAP fascination in the military and government, Harrington fingers two that we have remarked here. First, by allocating “taxpayer money to superfluous UAP research programs
unscrupulous defense contractors could seize the opportunity to pilfer the national security budget. One American defense contractor that capitalized on a similar funding opportunity to study UFOs and wormholes used their $22 million contract to produce a 2009 report full of amateurish drawings, including one depicting Albert Einstein using a wormhole to meet the dinosaurs.
More “culturally”, the gullibility displayed by America’s military and elected representatives in this regard might serve “to materially undermine the American military much in the way the Nazi preoccupation with the occult served to undermine the German military-industrial complex at the end of World War II,” leading, possibly, to “a further infiltration of pseudoscience and conspiracy theory into the halls of American government, [which] poses personnel problems related to the use and potential abuse of security clearances.” Harrington’s insight here is one ufologists have remarked, most notably Jacques Vallée in his Revelations….
Daniel Uvanovic essays a provocative answer to the Fermi Paradox in his Big Think article “How the pursuit of pleasure could doom all intelligent life to a blissful extinction”. Uvanovic observes that “[d]espite biological links between procreation and emotional rewards, humans have devised ingenious methods to separate them,” for example, contraceptives, pets, and “virtual romantic relationships” (think of the film Her).
He goes on, first, to imagine an “Emode technology,” “that gives the user unparalleled control over their emotions. With an Emode, you can (1) experience the entire spectrum of human emotions; and (2) choose how you feel at any moment, irrespective of the circumstances you are in.” He then uses this thought experiment to illuminate existing forms of his imaginary technology, “any tool, method, or mechanism that a person uses to alter their emotional state. In contrast to the Emode ideal, a typical emode would operate within a limited spectrum of emotional states and possess a limited degree of effectiveness in eliciting said states,” such as television or sex toys, “everything from cocktails and pop songs to meditation and prayer.” He provisionally concludes at this point that “[o]ur emotions and our intellect, the two pillars of our humanity, ensure that emode technology is constantly evolving [my emphasis], and it seems likely that we can expect an abundance of increasingly potent emodes in the years ahead.”
He connects these hedonic possibilities possessed by populations in the so-called developed world (Europe, the Americas, and Asia) to these populations’ declining birthrates and proposes that once such development reaches global levels, “[a]s people continue to find fulfillment in non-reproductive pursuits, the choice to have children becomes less emotionally compelling,” and asks, “Is it possible that this dynamic could ultimately drive our species to extinction, an unintended consequence of our pursuit of happiness?”
From this point, the vector of his speculation is fairly clear. He presumes that “evolution by natural selection ultimately produces only sentient intelligence. This assumption stipulates that sentience, characterized by the capacity to experience positive and negative emotions, is a necessary aspect of any intelligence that possesses agency and can innovate technology.”
With these assumptions in place, we can trace the evolutionary arc of intelligent life: (1) a long period of evolution by natural selection, a process fueled by random mutations, repeated over countless reproductive cycles until a sentient species emerges with sufficient intelligence to develop technology; (2) a brief technological phase, during which the species advances its technology in pursuit of improved quality of life, diminishing its reproductive drive in the process; and (3) eventual extinction, typically through a gradual decline in population — a blissful fade-out.
However interesting Uvanovic’s ideas about “emode technology” and declining birth rates, readers even remotely acquainted with the line of thinking here at the Skunkworks will recognize the weaknesses of his speculation. Among many problematic assumptions, he conflates “intelligence” with the “thinking” (instrumental reason) characteristic of a tiny minority of one species on earth. Moreover, he fails to distinguish between the natural if aleatoric process of evolution and far more contingent, social story of the concrete appearance of the present First World order, fudging exactly why or how the evolution of “sufficient” intelligence leads an organism to develop technology. Indeed, Uvanovic’s unconscious conflation of the natural and social is evidenced by his writing about how “emode technology is constantly evolving”, noted above; that a metaphorical (?) use of the expression appears unremarked is precisely an index of this repressed identification of natural and cultural history in his thinking.
More tellingly, his first reducing “intelligence” to that of, e.g., an AI developer, leads to an irony in his conclusion: “It is intriguing to think of intelligent life — unlike plants and microbes — as an evolutionary dead end.” Once we surrender the anthropocentric hubris that equates “intelligence” with human instrumental reason, “intelligence” appears in most organisms on earth, including all those our intelligent, technological societies are driving into extinction, those “[animals,] plants, and microbes,” perhaps as a foretaste of our own self-destruction…
However, instead of presenting the “analytical argument” he had originally intended to, Mamedov delivered a more elusive, at times ironic, autobiographical talk, a paratactic narrative that wove personal experiences, love letters, and quotations into what critic Roland Barthes would have termed a “text”, something the reader needs play around with and labour to make sense of on their own. There is the suggestion of a red thread that appears and disappears of the dialectic of love and hate; “the impossible” orbited by his talk might imaginably be that of the possible love of the hateful, which brings to this reader’s mind, anyway, French philosopher Alain Badiou’s observation that “love is the minimal form of communism”…
We look forward to his presenting that analytical argument.
Skunkworks 