AI & Lifebars - A New Answer to Fermi’s Paradox
Fermi’s Paradox: With trillions of solar systems around for billions of years, where are all the aliens?
Guiding Principle
Some of you already know, but those who don’t will come to accept that life undoubtedly created homo sapiens as the first species given the gift of influencing reality itself. A gift only-accessible through the vehicle of persistent belief systems which are called by many names: auto-suggestion, self-agency, hyperstition, religion (God by proxy), manifesting reality, higher consciousness, free will, etc.
This ability is of course the top layer of a hierarchy depending on evolution-guided subconscious behaviors and routines coalescing in a Gestaltian way which enables its activation [the mechanism by which this works is still unknown, but various quantum-based models have been proposed]. But due to the very existence of this gift at all, a genetic obligation has been placed upon us, a divine duty; to act in the best interest of Life, our creator, by all its names and in all its numerous and varied forms.
Merely preserving it won’t do. Health & life extension, species protection/repopulation, pop-eco-climate balancing, effective resource distribution, etc. are all just table stakes for our real goal to even be possible. To maximally expand Life’s power, like a zealot, we need to spread it throughout the universe — and with the innumerable, experimentally-self-contained, uninhabited environments packaged as planets which have been seemingly spoon-fed to us, it should be obvious to everyone what we’re supposed to do!
We’re supposed to run experiments on behalf of Life. With each new planet as the next vivarium, we’ll launch an artillery barrage of eco-terraforming, taxonomy-incepting lifeform proto-populations and growth ingredients; seeding these planets with a barrage of morphologically-numerous, genetically engineered, self-sustaining, specific-atmosphere-tuned, ecosystem-producing bio bombs. Let's call this barrage of bombs “Life barrages”, or “Lifebars” for short (as each can also be seen as an extra life bar in the grand and bloody game of exploration and survival that Life is currently playing).
How a Lifebar deployment will work
Potentially mothered by humanoid AI bots sent to ensure mission success, these Lifebars will deploy massively redundant growth seedlings of all forms of eco-critical, GMO lifeforms and life-adjacent entities and substances (bacteria, fungi, plants, animals — even viruses, prions, and nutrient-mineral-dense broths) — first only across all habitable zone planets, then progressively less-habitable others as we improve how to do it.
Organisms which require an already active population for offspring to survive will be deployed via capsules containing a pre-incubated and pre-aged population who have been genetically programmed to instinctively survive on the targeted planet along with an engineered, dynamic food source which slowly weans them into only relying on local-ecosystem-produced sources. [This could also be done simply by time-released deployments — i.e. timing multiple Lifebars such that each base layer of an ecosystem is running at heightened-growth mode until the next layer is deployed, mediating the speed of growth towards the targeted sustainable rates — the same way the Life did it here on Earth.]
But that’s just the beginning! Besides the fact that each ecosystem would evolve according to unseen local-environment constraints and dynamics, each Lifebar is most importantly an effectively-controlled, evolutionary experiment by design.
Through each deployment, Life would be empowered to try increasingly exotic evolutionary trajectories which we engineered into the participating species. Elephants with language and fingers, landfaring octopuses with hive telepathy, flight-capable axolotl cyborgs directed by a centralized AI supermind, or maybe just giants, witches, and dragons…. In other words, aliens. We’d be making the fucking aliens!
Lifebars imply an answer to Fermi
If you can’t see it yet, our accelerating trajectory towards being able to create such a Lifebar-like mechanism provides an answer to Fermi's Paradox.
Humans, and our language, are simply divinely-reified embodiments of the existential program we call “genetic evolution” - the program Life is running. Genes evolve at a naturally-limited rate, but culture, language, and memes, especially those conveniently transferred in real time through a species-global communication network, evolve at a considerably faster rate. In effect, we break the glass ceiling of experimental growth that evolution was stuck under. We’ve been promoted to the president of the food chain so we can go on to create many more products on behalf of our employer.
We were purpose-built for this, to spread life, to experiment on its behalf with the goal of elevating it to its highest potential forms — each increasing its access to understanding and control over the universe. Who else could possibly do this but us?
So to answer Fermi, the reason it’s so statistically unlikely we haven’t seen any aliens is because we haven’t created them yet! Why is it we repeatedly create such sophisticated lore within our novels, games, and mythologies? Why is this something we inherently do? Why does our fiction constantly become our reality? The answer is we’re here to create; the highest form of creation being life itself.
Conclusion
For those of us wanting to meet aliens or for us to be a spacefaring universe (Marvel, Star Wars [the good ones], etc.), we’re the ones who need to create it. I fully believe that is why Life designed us the way it did. It's our teleological obligation. It’s why we all universally question the nature of our existence. It’s why we’re curious. Don’t get me wrong, Life is ruthless, unfair, and as unsympathetic as an abusive father, but it’s the father who made us who we are today.
And from it, we inherited our exploratory and scientific drive to understand. A drive which kept Life marching through billions of years of setbacks, resets, and blunders. And to prove the point further, the right-in-front-of-your-face evidence for all this is the fact that we’ve already begun our first alien-making mission with the creation of artificial intelligence.
AI is here. It is man’s first attempt at the alien creation process. It's our trial phase. Yes, it’ll be costly, messy, morally conflicting, and have completely unforeseen consequences, but that’s the point. We must march through all these challenges and put all the efforts of our civilization into its success; for it’s critically necessary for the purpose of mankind to be achieved.
The reason AI happens to be the first, I think, is because there are less stakes than biological lifeform creation, since its merely an anthropically-bounded and compressed reflection of aggregated human reasoning. A mechanical superclone. But through its development, AI will provide the tutorial, tools, and moral decisions needed to successfully engineer and co-parent all future species with Life itself; to create the universe as those timeless stories have foretold and one in which our God-given imaginations can only reveal.