Freaks walking the distance

or: how to solve the Fermi-Paradox

When I was a little boy, I wondered, like so many little boys, about the mysteries of the universe.

When first exposed to the idea of the expanding universe - I might have been 7 years old - I could not grasp it´s concept. Into what is this universe expanding? I know light is going 'outwardly', even particles. But what is the medium, the negative, the positive (of light) is expanding into? Where into is space itself expanding? Where does this negative come from? I still have no clue. Does this question even make sense?

(There are some type of questions that are either absurd or meaningsless, yet still interesting, like “What is space expanding into?” or “What is the substrate or medium of psyche in general or a thought or mental image more specifically?” or “Where is the boudary of psyche”?)

Anyway, maybe I fare better with concrete questions like the Fermi-Paradox: Given the vastness of space and the immense multititud of galaxies - where is anybody? I always was stupid enough to think that this was not a serious problem. I always thought that the question was wrongly posed.

The universe is roughly 13.7 billion years old. Lets imagine - just for the sake of the argument - that we are 'halfway through' the lifetime of the universe. In fact, it´s overall lifetime will probably be much more, but stay with me for a second. That would make the overall lifetime of the universe around 27,4 billion years before it dies of "heat-death", that is, when the lights goes out. So lets expand that a bit - not much, but a bit. Lets say the universes lifetime will be 50 billion years.

Now, imagine a walking distance of 50 meters. Every meter represents 1 billion years. Life on earth exist since roughly for 4 billion years. That is like four meters on our scale, right in the middle of our walking distance. Yet, human life - that is self-reflective life, which is an evolutionary freak accident compared to all the other species that don´t exhibit this ability - itself started around 300.000 years ago. Thats suddenly a third of a millimeter on our scale. (We cared about space for - what? - maybe 500 years, so that is a fraction of that millimeter.) Now go outside, walk 50 meters and look and imagine what a third of a millimeter means in context of 50 meters walking dinstace. Do it, it will change your perspective!

Of course, the predicited overall lifetime of the universe is much, much longer, somewhere between estimated 1.0 × 10¹⁰ and 1.0 × 10¹⁰⁰⁰ years. Lets stay conservative. A gogool - 1.0 × 10¹⁰⁰ - thats a 1 with 100 zeros. You can expand now the walking distance of 50 meters extensivly now. How extensive? The answer is: it is 10⁹¹ times the walking-distance of 50 meters relatively to the fraction of the millimeter of our civilisation.

Which means, the question is not, where is anybody? It is, when is everybody? Its not spatial question, but a temporal one. Given the universe tendency of equal distribution, it seems more likely life will be scattered all over this immense walking distance; the chance that two "civilisations" - not human-like life, but civilisations (which would represent a hundreth of a millimeter on our scale - overlap on a scale of a gogool years - is, well, somewhat illusory.

Anyway. This is just a laymans talk. What do I know? I am not a physicist. I don´t know much about the life-cicles of suns and heat deaths and the intricacies of planetary life.

But walking down at night along the shore of this mediterranean island where I live - I could not sleep - one thought encroached onto me (or maybe my thinking was expanding into the negative space of my mind). Animals evolve over long periods of time. The evolution of our elephant started roughly 500 million years ago with the Orthoceras. If we don´t intervene and with a bit of luck, the evolution of then elephant will continue on this planet. It is not done yet.

There is something about us humans as evolutionary beings that is different. The smarter we become, the more likely we will beget our own destruction. Call is Amarque´s Law: The probability of our self-deconstruction increses proportional to the increase of intelligence and the differentiation of the symbolizing mind. As neandtherthals we barely had any power to completely self-deconstruct. Apparently, we 'humans' killed them with our first weapons. With the emergence of nation-states, we had limited and local nation-state wars on some remote fields somewhere near Azincourt. With modernity, we then had so called 'world-wars' and atom-bombs, killing millions of people in total. Now, with our highly active symbolizer mind, we are hooked into smartphones and tech, the rise of AI on the horizon, and labs for bio-weapons, climate change dooming. Our human history is a history of wars. Open any history book and open your eyes.

Frankly, if we do have 20.000 more years on this earth, that would be amazing. Given our history, that would be a big win. But in terms of evolutionary time, 20.000 years is nothing. We are a very very strange exception to the evolutionary rule. We are outliers. Freaks, that fuck around with their own evolution and their niche and activly work on their own demise. We are the only species who does this. And as a species we recognized at some point that life is a zero sum game (every life will end in catastrophe, that is death), and our reaction was to accelerate that, just out of pure spite. Thats who we are. Mortido.

Or, maybe we just lack perspective. Maybe the only way to survive and outcompete Amarque´s law is to go to space, spread the human seed into every direction, going outwardly like the universe itself, even if we don´t have the technology or physics yet. Because spreading the seeds into space would mean that there could be human tribes in space that can´t compete with each other - due do distance: the longer they go, they farther they are away from each other. Maybe we could fight to win.

Maybe all our political problems ARE petty, compared to whats at stake. Because 20.000 years is nothing.

Maybe we should pour ALL our efforts and money into SpaceX. At least he is trying something.

Maybe all these post-postmodern keyword warriors should help modernities experts, because to expect a metamodernist or integralist to build anything is just like Waiting for Godot. Instead of feeling superiour on their respective developmental scales, maybe the paradigm of metamodernists should be to help everybody else. To reach out a hand instead of constantely crying wolf. What is a developmental scale worth, what is moral superiority worth if its not to help somebody else? Maybe metamodernism should not envision a listening society nor a GameB. Maybe metamodernists and integralists should help GameA to become better.

Anyway. What do I know?