Why No Aliens

A solution for the Fermi Paradox? Reality is irrelevant.

TL;DR: Aliens have such a vast virtual world, that they don’t care about the real, physical world anymore. Dont believe me? Look at humanity right now.

Our current biological layout will not scale much into the future. Brain capacity is limited, which means we are not able to get much smarter. It also runs inefficiently on food in a decaying biological body. The body cannot be adjusted easily, e.g. for zero gravity. Optimizations like in form of augmentations, implants, cybernetics, drugs, genetic modification and engineering will improve us. But at the end, we either:

• Create an AI which is smarter than us
• Or upload our mind into a computer, and therefore live our lifes in cyber space

The first option appears to be easier and quicker to reach, but lets go with the second option: improving humans until the whole brain can be digitalised and uploaded. Before thats gonna happen we will enhance it as much as possible; be it with drugs, DNA modification, implants, extensions or whatever. Being able to copy a consciousness is hard, but as its just chemical and electrical signals and state, there is nothing really prohibiting us from doing it physically.

After we uploaded our consciousness into a computer, we have complete control over the input of the brain, meaning we could have 100% realistic “movies”. Our whole life would be in a video game where everything is possible. Of course we are also able to change the source code of our brains, which we would rapidly change to unknown spheres, but lets ignore the consequences of this for now.

It also may be harder and harder to unravel the secrets of the universe. Low hanging fruits in science have long been discovered and researched, scientific exploration stagnates. For example for us currently, it is the Theory Of Everything, or also black matter and dark energy. While still lots of progress in being made, it may even be that we reach a kind of stagnation in our knowledge of the universe, e.g. in astronomy, and physics. Our universe may even be influenced from forces from outside of it, like it being just a corner of a higher dimensional world. The outside of the universe we will never be able to see or understand from the inside.

For Aliens living in a virtual world, the virtual world is the real world. The physical real world can only be experienced via a robot, whose sensors give a less precise view of it than artificially generated (e.g. for maximum pleasure). The main goal for the Aliens are to increase computing capacity, to make their world bigger, and/or to make them smarter. This is accomplished in the physical, real world by building robots, which build more robots, which first mine moons, then complete planets, to build CPU’s and solar panels around the sun, then other suns, until it is a K3 civilisation (use all stars in a galaxy to create energy). This will extend to collect all mass in our local supercluster, which can be thrown into blackholes, so there’s enough energy in black holes to survive of their Hawking radiation, after the stars go out in about 100-200 billion years.

Of course, being a virtualised entity also has several other advantages, like eternal life, not being affected by long travel times like a few million years (time can be speed up or down, basically bypassing the restrictions set by the speed of light), can use stars as energy directly (instead of first growing it into food) etc.

As the physical reality is less complex than their own, virtual world, it is not that interesting. The earthlings will be for aliens like ants are for us. Especially if life is, lets say, common. If life is very rare, maybe they will be somewhat interested, similar like we study ants or bacteria too.

Today in the 21 century, we already mostly live virtualized lives. Most of the day typing letters into screens, watching movies, chatting with friends, playing videogames together, following celebrities, complaining about politics… most people are not interested in reality / physics. People are interested in people, with themselves, with extensions of our world through our fantasy. If tomorrow we found alien bacteria on mars, how much of an impact will this have on an individual? May scroll by in the instagram feed, and then quickly forgotten again.

This future is extrapolated on our current technology and understanding of our universe. Things may change.