E.T. Stay Home: How Smartphones Might Explain the Fermi Paradox

Mookie fires the solo rants back up on Bald and Bloviating with a theory that starts small and ends up genuinely cosmic: what if the smartphone in your pocket is quietly answering one of physics' most famous unsolved questions?

He opens with a real, striking data point: researchers exploited a quirk in AT&T's original exclusive iPhone contract, where regional network coverage varied and rolled out unevenly across the country, to isolate smartphone adoption's actual effect on birth rates. Their finding: digital technology may explain as much as half of America's declining fertility since 2007. Less time with real, physical humans, less dating, less connection, less everything reality used to have a monopoly on, all traded away for something that's simply less of a hassle.

That single idea becomes the spine of a much bigger argument. Mookie walks through the Fermi Paradox, physicist Enrico Fermi's famous question of why, in a universe old enough for advanced civilizations to have colonized the entire galaxy by now, we don't see a trace of anybody out there. He runs through the classic explanations: the Great Filter, the Dark Forest hypothesis, rare intelligent life, then pitches his own theory. Every explanation assumes advanced civilizations actually want to expand outward into the stars. What if they don't, because once a civilization can build infinite, immersive virtual worlds at home, crossing the galaxy stops looking like destiny and starts looking like a spectacularly bad return on investment.

Mookie follows that idea all the way to its uncomfortable conclusion: a future, maybe already underway, where humanity trades adventure, friction, and even real intimacy for something easier and safer, and loses something real in the exchange. He closes on a genuinely hopeful note pulled from Jung, that no matter what world we end up inhabiting, real or simulated, human beings bring the same instincts and archetypes with us, which means even a fully virtual future might still count as exploration. Also: a real update on where all his other shows and guests stand, and a candid, personal riff on creative freedom, self-permission, and why he's bringing these solo episodes back for good.

Transcript

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Hello again. If you are subscribed to this podcast, you might have been wondering where all the bloviation went. It's been a couple months since I've last bloviated on this pod. And I have actually been pretty busy. In addition to doing my consulting work to keep the lights on, I've got several other podcast shows that have taken up all my podcasting time. I've got Bald Ambition. If you're not subscribed, check that out. I interview and chat with entrepreneurs, business leaders. We've had a strong focus on AI integration into the workforce. And I've had some interesting dialogue with folks who are movers and shakers, plugging artificial intelligence into infrastructure that's not always as receptive as one might think. So if you've been freaked out that AI is going to take your job tomorrow, and if you're terrified that the American economy is soon to turn upside down, I think the good news is that AI integration is moving badly. And by that I mean human beings have a much longer learning curve than the rate of technological development. In other words, the AI is there and capable of doing many, if not most, of the things humans can do, but making it work and plugging it in requires human behavior to change around it. And that's not happening yet. So check that out Bald Ambition. Like, comment, share, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I've also got the No Hair All Heart podcast, which has been cooking. Musicians, artists. My big coup was to get Lawrence Juber, the former guitar player of Paul McCartney and Wings. We had a great conversation. I've had Jesse Krakow, the underground indie music legend, and a host of other guests on No Hair All Heart. And where I put most of my time and effort is in the science fiction and fantasy factory. I'm a sci-fi writer, and it's been a real pleasure talking to other science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction writers. Highlights include Mike Robinson, who's a wonderful writer out of LA. He's got a whole breadth of stories that are whimsical and fun and really get you thinking about life, the universe, and everything. In ways you might not have considered before reading Mike. And I just talked to Matt Witten, who wrote a terrific book called 51%. And I don't want to spoil too much except to say that it's a wonderful hybrid of, as he mentioned, it Philip K. Dick meets Raymond Chandler or Dashell Hammett. It's a detective story, a police caper set 20, 30 years in the future, and it envisions America as this plutocratic state where money talks and everything else walks. Great conversation and a great book. But I digress. And and I like doing these, so I'm gonna crank these up again. And today I'd like to talk about the Fermi Paradox and how our iPhones might explain where all the aliens are. With the premise that reality used to enjoy a monopoly until digital encroached. Probably because even social media sucks less than just having to deal with actual humans. I know that sounds cynical. But check this out. A recent study asked a question that would have sounded ridiculous just 20 years ago. What if the iPhone is a form of birth control? Researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research that sounds a little redundant, doesn't it? Exploited a historical accident. When Apple launched the iPhone about two decades ago, ATT held an exclusive contract. And because its network coverage varied across the country, some regions of the states gained access to the tech earlier than others. Now these researchers at the Economic Research Bureau found a striking correlation between smartphone adoption and dropping birth rates, with digital technology potentially explaining as much as half of America's fertility decline since 2007. So, in a nutshell, as the use of smartphones increased, people were having less and less babies per capita. The whole story is more complicated as these kinds of stories usually are, but we've all seen how Americans are marrying later, dating less, having less sex, and spending less time socializing face to face than previous generations. This might be apocryphal for you and your family, the people you know, but it doesn't take a research scientist to notice that more time sharing at devices equals less time hanging out with friends and getting laid. I've watched some of this play out with my own kids. They've socialized, they've dated, but far less compared to their dad and his Gen Xer classmates. Reality used to enjoy a monopoly. Digital is encroaching because it sucks less. Arthur Schopenhauer wrote, quote, almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people. Unquote. Today's kids with their streaming media and free porn would no doubt agree. Back in the day, if you wanted connection, entertainment, adventure, or meaning, you had to actually meet and physically interact with other human beings in the real world. By any stretch, an enormous pain in the ass. Now people are saying, fuck that, to the point most digitally wired nations have a population implosion. In other words, virtual reality is more fun, more entertaining, and less hassle than reality. In a video game, you could gain points, you can learn new skills, and even if you get killed, it's no big deal because you regenerate. If you go broke, you buy more tokens. It's way more fun than having to hold a day job or go to school or negotiate in a romantic relationship with an actual other human being. Now, these observations may have implications far beyond dating, marriage, and birth rates, and may even point toward a possible answer to the Fermi paradoxes I was hinting earlier, named after the physicist Enrico Fermi asks the simple question about aliens. If alien life is common throughout the universe, then where the hell is everybody? After all, the universe is ancient enough that a technological civilization could have colonized the entire galaxy before humans even evolved on Earth. That might sound outrageous, but think about it. The Earth has been here for 4,000 million years. 4 billion years and some change. That's a pretty long time. Even if you assume only a small sliver of that would show perhaps evidence or be enticing to aliens, then we ask, where the hell are they? We see no obvious signs of alien empires, galactic engineering projects, self-replicating probes or extraterrestrial visitors anywhere we look. Why not? The Earth has been here 4,000 million years. That's a pretty long time. And one would assume that other technologically advanced civilizations could have sprouted. And we've only been around technologically for what? Couple, three, four thousand years. We didn't even pick up tools until when? 50, 100,000 years ago, technology, far, far less. Running water, toilets, moon landing, 50 years. Imagine what we can do in 500, 5,000, 5 million if we don't wipe ourselves out. If we get here to the moon and back again, imagine what we could do with more time. Maybe there's physical limitations. Who knows? But if you do the math, even if you make a self-replicating robot that just scooted along star to star, we're dealing with so much time that you'd figure aliens would be swarming out there. And at least we'd see something. So what's going on? Proposed explanations range from intelligent life being very rare to civilizations destroying themselves. They call it the Great Filter. Like great filters could be natural, asteroid impacts, comets, supervolcanoes, a nearby supernova or black hole. Then technologist-made filters include a genetic accident that runs wild, nuclear war, etc. Now, my favorite explanation for this lack of aliens is the dark forest hypothesis, which suggests that rational civilizations may adopt a first strike strategy because announcing their existence to unknown competitors is existentially dangerous. If you think about it, what's the smartest move to make if you encounter a stranger in a dark forest? You know that you're spotting them before they have spotted you. Now, what are the different scenarios that are possible? Now, the other stranger in the dark forest could be friendly, and that would be a good outcome. Maybe you could team forces, you could then hunt together, share technology. Two are better than one. But if the unknown stranger has intent to destroy you, then you might be screwed and you're putting yourself at risk. You also don't know the extent to which the stranger in the forest is more powerful than you or not. So there's actually two forces going against you. The first is intent, and the other one is capability. And if you do the math, you're better off proactively and preemptively killing that stranger. And the reason is if the stranger just so happens to be powerful and malignant, then you're screwed. So why risk it? Just take them out before any risk is presented to you. Same game theory rules apply to aliens meeting aliens. That all said, all of these explanations share a common assumption that alien civilizations are interested in physical expansion. Science fiction helps fuel this likely erroneous notion by describing intelligence as a force that naturally pushes outward into an age of interplanetary and eventually interstellar exploration. The usual tropes of starships replacing sailing ships and galaxies replacing oceans. We assume advanced civilizations will inevitably colonize planets, harvest stars, and spread exponentially across the cosmos. Doing the math, though, reveals that approach is an even more enormous pain in the ass than trying to date in high school. Optimistic interstellar scenarios involve staggering costs, hostile environments, enormous risks, and timescales that stretch across generations. Science fiction also tends to treat galactic colonization as destiny. Simple and obvious economics suggests that may be a boondoggle. What's the point in investing all this time, money, and effort and take the risk of traveling these huge distances or even building robots to do so when all that effort can be expended? To, in contrast, build a simulated paradise that only requires computation, not transportation. And even though Wall Street is going nuts on capex spending for AI, once the civilization becomes capable of generating virtual experiences that are more compelling than physical reality itself, its incentive structure evolves too. Why spend centuries crossing that hostile gulf between stars when you can create billions or theoretically an almost infinite number of worlds to explore at home, at scale, and far more affordably? Why would you want to battle the radiation, vacuum, gravity wells, and hostile environments of deep space when entire universes can be generated inside machines on your home planet without even walking out your front door? The traditional assumption behind the Fermi paradox is that advanced civilization will feel a compulsion to expand into the galaxy. A better question is why would they bother? Human beings already understand that digital substitutes are often preferable to physical experiences. We've already traded reality for convenience. And we've done that with the worst version of the technology we'll ever have. Do you see what I've done here? Think about it. The internet, social media, streaming, gaming, and AI will soon seem as primitive to our descendants as telegraphs look to us. Remember those wax paper fax machines? If today's crude digital experiences are already reshaping social behavior, remember, less babies, because people think looking at screens is better than getting laid, frankly. What happens when simulations become fully immersive and ubiquitous? Interstellar travel may then look less like destiny and more like an insane eccentricity with terrible return on investment. And well before that point, reality will morph into programmed human experiences that spare us disappointment, but at the cost of surprise. There's a price to be paid, folks, the debt to nature due when you take the easy way out. Loneliness, for example, will likely cease to exist because we'll have our favorite virtual friend, lover, companion, digital soulmate. But along with that, we're also going to lose intimacy. Less friction and hassle will also create less adventure, less accomplishment, and fewer stories, even worth telling. When every story can be told with a prompt, with a touch of a button, then all stories become equally meaningless when lived experience is sucked out of stories and even the storytelling process. But who knows? I mean, that may be the bargain we're already making. And it may also be the bargain most intelligent species eventually, perhaps inevitably, make. So coming full circle with this, perhaps the answer to Fermi's question, oh, where the hell are all the aliens? Isn't that nobody is out there? They could be out there all right, but they may have long ago checked out. And I get the feeling that we're already half checked out. And the irony of all of this is it points to not a local, not a planetary, but a universal sense of willful isolation and silence. If it's too risky, too much of a hassle, too unrealistic to actually explore the universe to go where no sentient being has gone before. And if our virtual technology, our capacity to create simulations becomes inevitably and exponentially better and better and better, then to me, I think this not only answers the Fermi paradox, but might point to the future of humanity where we're tuned out from reality because we're plugged in to our own bullshit. Now, is this a sad thought? Is this a maudlin resignation to, in a sense, the existential end of adventure? Maybe. But who's to say that the simulated worlds might not be as uh terrific and terrifying as the death-defying uh adventures that we of humans have been addicted to since we began? There's clearly a social Darwinian need to go beyond, to explore. We've been doing that since we've been crawling on this planet. And I think the silver lining is what Jung said decades ago, that if you would more or less destroy all human knowledge that came before, the next generation would spontaneously and naturally and instinctively just recapitulate almost everything that happened before. He was a believer in the power of instinct, translated to us and through us with the power of the archetypes.

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Regardless of whether you believe in that or not, or want to focus on that or not, it's evident that arguably most of what we do and how we do is instinctive. And if that's the case, it doesn't matter what the receptacle is. It doesn't even matter our environment. We bring our way of understanding the world to whatever world we inhabit, whether that's actual or virtual. And to me, that's the saving grace of all of this, that even if our fellow aliens have turned inward and resigned themselves to the inevitability of simulated realities being the real form of exploration, it's still exploration. And maybe, just maybe, given the universality of so much of what we're thinking about here, we all come to some of the same conclusions. And maybe we could unite, if not physically, then at least in principle, to some of the truths lurking behind life, the universe, and everything. Thanks for listening. It's good to be back yelling at my microphone here. And as I mentioned, I haven't taken any time off. I've been working as hard, if not harder, on yelling into microphones. Only I've been doing it with someone on the other end of the of the video stream. But I've missed this rumination where I just start riffing and talking and connecting with you this way. So thanks for listening. Like, comment, share. Leave me a note if you want me to cover any topics. And and more of these goodies in the works now that uh now that I'm cycling back into these solo, solo rants. I like winging it. Sometimes I'm in the mood, I'll I'll unload four or five, half a dozen kitchen rant videos on various topics and post them all over the place. TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Instagram, even Patreon. And then I'll be Xing my science fiction novel backwards so you could read it from the top down. And some days I feel like video and other days not. And I try to tweet every day as a routine, kind of like doing push-ups or a or a run or a swim exercise for the mind. Other times I feel like writing an essay, other times I feel like chatting with Claudia, my my own AI bot friend. But uh, but it's that freedom that's that's really a joy. Have the tools at your disposal and really take a DIY hashtag do it yourself attitude. Don't wait, folks, to be invited to anything. Invite yourself to the party. And that way you set the rules and you decide when when when you could get drunk and pass out underneath the table or whether or not you jump on the table and do a spontaneous show for an audience of one or many Who cares? Just let it out there.