We all know the answer to Fermi’s Paradox, but it’s our not accepting what we know that’s, in itself, “the Great Filter”.
Enrico Fermi asked: If life and big brains arise easily, why don’t we see signs of alien civilisations when we look at the stars with our big modern telescopes? But a better question, for any well-read evolutionist that is, might be this: why would a space-faring alien civilisation bother to reveal itself to us when, in so doing, it would be expected to provide an answer which we already know but are not ready to accept? The poor aliens would be hounded to no end, asked to complexify with many loopholes and delaying caveats this very simple answer, one that any successful technological civilisation out there would know, from its own experience, we must learn for ourselves! But this “simple answer”, that we know but can’t accept, and which one of our leading scientific visionaries has already named “The Prime Directive” (see, I told you we already know it) must be a requisite for the long-term survival of any technological intelligence on any world.
For it’s (almost) certain that any such tech-intelligence would have evolved on a non-technological “Natural World”, which must then be thought of as the first — in fact formative — “more primitive Intelligence” they learned to “not interfered with”. https://www.extremophilechoice.com/2024/02/27/once-you-see-it-you-cant-un-see-it-short-version/
The great Gene Roddenberry even had to present this truth-that-we-already-know as “science fiction”, because our visceral attachment to exploitation of this planet, and of each other, causes us to reject things like his Prime Directive as unrealistic (though “inconvenient” is the proper term), and he had to indulge our “institutional need” to dehumanise and exploit each other by inventing Klingons and Romulans.
Space is big. Really, Really Big! So I’m not saying space itself isn’t a sufficient filter to disallow other civilisations happily wandering “out there” — safely, by design; unchallenged, because space is so big and “territory” is… also self-made; and perhaps they’re “living” in great self-contained spinning wheels, though most likely “exploring” at speeds far below that of light — from encountering us; even if “encountering” only means listening in on our own light speed and very recent electromagnetic transmissions. What I’m saying is, such space-faring civilisations would have learned, of necessity, that allowing “others” to learn for themselves is the natural order of things. As is suffering the consequences when we don’t learn the survival value of such understandings as… Oh let’s say: the fundamental lack of “otherness” among beings with technologically extendable bodies. See: https://www.extremophilechoice.com/about-extremophile-choice/
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Still not convinced that the answer to the Fermi Paradox is so simple? And so Trekkie?
Ok, here’s the full (though still very condensed) E-Choice version:
Yes, we can say an animal with an ecological niche cooperates with others in many ways that justify our Big Picture of ecological “oneness”; but at its own level of niche-building, and niche maintaining, “otherness” is the way the game is played: If the animal doesn’t mate with a “racist” attitude the species itself will become diluted with genes that are more appropriate to another niche; if it doesn’t compete, even aggressively, with species having closely related strategies (a wolf will kill a fox without eating it), it could lose the “survival of fittest” game; and if it doesn’t hunt its natural prey it will starve and be weeded out of the “game”, just as its would-be kill will not be weeded out as a weaker member of its own species.
These advantages of “exploiting otherness” are still built very deep into the human genetic makeup as well, and they really can’t be eradicated fully because the “feelings” — as they are applied in new ways to a newly released “cultural evolution”, both physical and non-physical — will always be needed.
Genetic evolution and cultural evolution move by reapplication, not by total replacement; and my “twin evolutions” wording here is important, because the point being made is that cultural evolution is a recapitulation, or a “reinvention” if you will, of genetic evolution on a totally different “substrate”: thoughts and thought products instead of genes and gene products. So you see, any alien technologist looking at us from afar will know we have not internalised this distinction yet: we still apply our view of animal otherness to our fellow humans and we treat the otherness of their thoughts as if their bodies (and our “own” bodies, the Buddhists say) were permanently attached to said thoughts!
But thoughts “exploiting” other thoughts is how newly invented cultural evolution works, all the while people exploiting people is still very deeply, deeply engrained in us, both genetically and systemically. This is why we don’t “want” to know these truths. That’s all.
[But you can also see the “sensible science/dharma” version (i.e. without the Fermi-sci-fi “hook” to pull against our “not wanting to know”) here: https://www.extremophilechoice.com/2022/06/24/young-buddha-in-his-parents-house-part-1-illusion-is-a-birthright/]
