DISCLAIMER:

Some of y’all are fittin’ to not take a liking to what I’m about to say about your favorite subject. And to that I say: Relax, homies! The following are just the thoughts that I have while I’m in my creative process. I am just trying to make a video game, after all. So I urge you to not take anything I’m saying here personal.

Science fiction writers like to come-up with big, fancy ideas. For example, we’re always supposed to be in unquestioning reverence of some highly advanced alien species. There is always this gross assumption that being that much more advanced than humanity somehow transcends aliens to a sort of godlike nobility. And yes, of course…I get what Arthur C. Clarke had to say about “any significantly advanced technology”. 

Sure, there are alien “bad guys” like the Klingons form Star Trek or the Hutt clan from Star Wars. I like toying with the idea that, no matter how advanced a civilization might get, they might not only reach new levels of enlightenment, but also; why not the presumably more “negative” stuff? Things like cultural Marxism, for example. And in doing so, such alien civilizations might inevitably go on to squander all the glorious accomplishments that defined them. The aforementioned Klingons, for example, were most certainly allegorical to the warring Huns of Earth, and more specifically, a nod to America’s continuing appetite for Sinophobia. And the Galactic Empire from Star Wars were almost certainly Fascist “space Nazis”. But even so, we are expected to respect their technological means wholesale as part and parcel to the premise of them being…well…just plain smarter and thereby presumably vastly more capable than us. 

But then, let’s look at the Fermi Paradox, postulated by Nuclear Physicist Enrico Fermi, which goes something like: Given the tens of billions of potentially habitable worlds out there, there is no convincing evidence of “intelligent life” outside our own Earth. 

Now, please understand that I am NOT here to debate anyone on the existence or non-existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. However, I would say that; until aliens decide to reveal themselves to us by dancing the Moonwalk at the Super Bowl half time show, then I think it’s fair to say that the burden of “convincing evidence” has not yet been met. And yes, that includes the US Navy’s officially de-classified reports of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena; unless for you, that is somehow more “convincing” than ET and Alf dancing the electric boogaloo at the 50 yard line during The Big Game. *shrugs*

That said, there are a number of potential solutions for the Fermi Paradox. In particular, I think that Science Fiction Author Liu Cixin’s Dark Forest Hypothesis makes for some excellent plausibility. The Dark Forest Paradox essentially postulates that the more advanced civilizations become, the more silent and paranoid they become. Given their own technological prowess, it’s safe for them to assume that another intelligent space-faring species might be just as advanced…if not more. So it might be best to keep silent, lest your civilization be purged to extinction by an apex race that has wiped-out most of the life it comes across out of sheer paranoid caution, and in doing so, keeps our skies eerily silent from alien triflings. 

Indeed, there is honestly no reason to believe that any significantly advanced civilization would adhere to our romantic notions of enlightenment through sheer intellectual prowess, i.e.; Star Trek’s venerable “Prime Directive” of non-interference with non-warp-capable civilizations, which for the Federation isn’t just a matter of protocol, but a matter of municipally enforceable LAW. To the contrary: Just really think about it for a moment and don’t get trapped in the quagmire of common convention. And in that light, I would argue that there are ZERO CONSEQUENCES for a significantly advanced alien intellect. Especially if they are a Type II civilization on Russian Astronomer Nikolai Kardashev’s scale, for example, and are readily capable of harvesting the net energy output of an entire star. They are not only able to breach the vast distances between solar systems, but also able to endure the harsh conditions that exist in interstellar space by way of the interstellar medium, which even Theoretical Physicist Miguel Alcubierre’s self-titled warp drive would not be immune to. 

In that case, for a Kardashev Type II alien race that is capable of interstellar travel; there is quite literally NOTHING we could do to prevent them from interfering with us, seeing as we don’t even register on that scale. Indeed; we aren’t even smart enough not to “shit where we eat”, e.g.; pollute the ever-loving crap out of our “God-given” paradise of Eden…the only one we have at our disposal currently, nestled with loving care perfectly in the Goldilocks zone of its host star. Mind you, for all practical purposes: Any benevolent enough race of alien ant farmers are effectively indistinguishable from an intelligent designer/ancestral simulation coder, aka “God Almighty”. But hey…what do we know? Who needs an ozone layer, anyway…#amirite? /sarcasm Heck…we can’t even stop killing each other over cosmically stupid ideas, like “my people have entirely superficial hereditary traits that are superior to your people”, and “I claim this arbitrary configuration of molecules at this relative coordinate in spacetime as uniquely my own”. So we built nuclear bombs that the physicists who made them weren’t even sure wouldn’t ignite our entire atmosphere like the Hindenburg or not. Just saying, my hominid… *shrugs*

“Fermi, of course, didn’t believe that this was possible, but just to relieve the tension at the Los Alamos [Trinity] test [on July 16, 1945], he said, ‘Now, let’s make a bet whether the atmosphere will be set on fire by this test.’ [laughter] And I think maybe a few people took that bet.”

Bethe, Teller, Trinity and the End of Earth

A leader of the Manhattan Project recalls a discussion of whether the Trinity test would ignite Earth’s atmosphere and destroy the planet

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/bethe-teller-trinity-and-the-end-of-earth/

And on that note, at the ending of Marvel’s first Avenger’s movie, that “Hiroshima moment” where Tony Stark’s Iron Man delivers a single nuclear warhead through a wormhole that supposedly ends a war between humanity and a civilization capable of stabilizing such a wormhole was completely and utterly BOGUS! *swats at the air* Instead, it would be more like how the aliens from the first Independence Day movie casually shrugged-off our most formidable nuclear attack. Our entire nuclear arsenal may as well be those cheap little paper snappers that you pop by throwing them at the ground. Remember: Extra-solar travelers have to contend with the harsh conditions that exists in interstellar space outside the protective sheath of their host star.  

Remember: Y’all were the ones who put alien civilizations on a pedestal in the first place. Well, you can’t have it both ways: As brilliant as Gene L. Coon was in conceptualizing Star Trek’s Prime Directive, you honestly can’t expect your veritably omnipotent extra-dimensional beings to abide by such a quaintly specific anthropomorphic notion. 

If we are measuring along the scale of intellectual prowess, then imagine we make one of our chimpanzee biological cousins upset in the zoo cage that we fashioned for him that we insist suits his requirements for “comfort” and “complacency”. His only recourse is to fling his feces at us. He has no concern for our space telescopes. No interest in our Antarctic neutrino detectors. No appreciation for our ability to detect gravitational waves, or our ability to turn our entire planet into an array of radio telescopes in order to snap a “photo” of a black hole’s shadow. 

Following that scale of intelligence, an angry human is an entirely different beast. In fact, our cognitive resources are so complex that, if we get angry, we may well as well destroy ourselves by way of nuclear conflict. That was MY LAND that you and your people tried to settle on, no doubt. 

Now let’s project that scale as far above us as we are above primates.

Why should we assume that such an intellect would pursue a life unquestionably dedicated to harmony, enlightenment, and Vulcan-like pure logic? We had access to all those things throughout our known history. But that didn’t stop the Romans from sacking their neighbors, did it? Remember…that was THEIR LAND they were fighting for!

I therefore submit the possibility that the more intelligent a being becomes, the greater spectrum of emotional aptitude they would have at their disposal, and the more infinitesimally subtle each narrow band of that spectrum would be. However, the overall scale would make our puddle of emotional awareness pale in comparison to a planet-wide network of oceans that a supreme intelligence would have access to. And while their capacity for joy might make them the ideological benevolent overseers that we like to imagine they might be, that also unfortunately means that their capacity for anger would be just as Mariana Trench deep as their joyful Mount Everest highs. And that means, if we just so happen to piss them off just for the innocent crime of…you know…simply existing…then instead of a fistful of feces flung at us, we may as well expect that they might casually tilt a conveniently nearby black hole on its axis in order to to aim its relativistic jet at us, and let its giant gamma ray bursts strip away our planet’s atmosphere and oceans while blowing out our sun like a cheap candle—of course, just to be “clinical” about it, and not risk contamination by coming within a few light years of our solar system. 

But also, along that same scale of intellectual prowess, who’s to say that any significantly advanced civilization is even remotely concerned with anything outside their own selfish interests? In my game, for example, there are two Type II civilizations that practice “stellar forming” like we imagine terraforming; going so far as to arrange their own bespoke artificial solar systems at-will. Given that scale of intellectual prowess, you might appreciate the fact that they have much bigger proverbial fish to fry than worry about the triflings of some other Type II civilization “neighbor” in another sector of the galaxy. Hence, there would be no need for a “Great War” or other such conflict between my narrative analogs for the Federation and the Cardassian Empire. They’re quite frankly not interested. They exist in a self-inflicted Fermi Paradox of their own design, except at interstellar proportions.

In fact, I would go on to wager that the Type II civilizations in my game are perhaps too smart for inter-species war. It could be that—having witnessing a primitive industrialized race capable of harvesting the natural resources of their host planet for internal combustion use nearly 100% of their net energy production for a pointless civil war that renders their entire atmosphere a toxic storm of acid and soot—a smugly advanced Type II civilization might realize that having the means to manufacture their own artificial stars would most certainly result in a much more efficient means by which to render themselves extinct. It would be peace through sobriety, not peace through nobility. 

Besides: Who has the time or interest to go about scouting the galaxy for “new life and new civilizations”? Feh! *makes shooing gesture* We’ve got the orbits of a pair of neutron stars to “tune” in order to keep our gravitational wave communications infrastructure running at peak operation. We have no interest in the affairs of some other star-faring civilization, and are otherwise content with our ability to cloak ourselves from discovery by interlopers by way of our own selfish apathy. 

So, sorry, Enrico…the aliens denizens of Blasternal aren’t particularly interested in Earth’s petty need for nuclear proliferation, much less figuring out how to make our cell phones to last on more than just a couple of days on a single charge. They decided there were more important things, like harvesting the net energy output of a supermassive black hole, for them to tend to…