The Incubator Hypothesis

And why we can't see any aliens

We now know there are billions of planets in the universe, many of which are terrestrial. It seems exceedingly unlikely that humanity is alone. If we go a little bit further, any intelligent alien species which discovered space travel—provided they could at least reach another star—would be able to colonize the entire galaxy in a few million years. In this case, the galaxy would have long ago been completely colonized. Life on Earth wouldn’t have had billions of years to evolve undisturbed.

Given the size of the universe and amount of planets in it, life seems likely, but we see nothing out there. This is the Fermi Paradox.

As Carl Sagan put it, “If it's just us, it seems like an awful waste of space.”

If you look around online, you’ll find a number of hypotheses that try to answer this question, from the Great Filter, to the Rare Earth hypothesis, to the Zoo hypothesis. None of these strike me as particularly likely.

In order to find a more satisfying answer to the Fermi Paradox, I am going to create a chain of assumptions. I will do my best to defend the likelihood of each assumption, but remember that all of these are still just assumptions.

ASSUMPTION 1: The Technological Singularity is Possible.

As I plan to keep posting here, I want you to get familiar with my positions. While I think the Singularity is extremely likely to happen within ten years, I never fully drink the Kool-Aid. Predicting the future is hard, and I don’t think we can be certain the Singularity will happen, even as AI progress accelerates. We could still hit a wall. Self-improving AGI may somehow be impossible. We simply don’t know for certain that it will happen. 

Still, for this answer to the Fermi Paradox, we will assume that the Singularity is possible. Even if it doesn’t happen for another 100 years, it will not change my line of reasoning. It just needs to be possible.

ASSUMPTION 2: Life is Extremely Common.

I don’t like trying to predict the future, but I do like to leverage the “big questions.” Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is there anything at all? 

In freshman-year Biology, our teacher started teaching evolution. Living in a conservative area, the class nearly rioted, and I found myself as the only one willing to defend the idea. 

At one point, the girl who sat in front of me turned around and looked at me. She asked me—very genuinely confused—how I thought that the human eye could have come to exist if God hadn’t designed it. She even pointed to her eyes as she asked me, and she was looking right into mine.

I gave the standard answer about how evolution works slowly over time. I felt annoyed and somewhat exasperated with her. I remember thinking that her whole line of argument was bad. Wasn’t the burden of proof on her?

I still don’t believe in God, but I no longer think her argument was bad, and I’m going to strengthen it and use it here.

I don’t even need something as complex as the human eye. I can do this with a rock.

The rock is made of so many atoms that you need over twenty zeroes to write the number down. Each of those trillions of atoms is really just a bound collection of subatomic particles, which are vibrating waves in quantum fields which have snapped into “realness” because of the way they interact with each other. These quantum fields exist all throughout the universe, and we quite frankly have no idea where they came from. 

Gravity, which we also don’t really understand, especially in terms of quantum fields, just so happened to be exactly strong enough that it pulled together a lot of rock-like, dumb material after the Big Bang to make galaxies, stars, and planets. Billions of them. If we go beyond the observable universe, there may even be an infinite number of them.

On one of these billions of planets called Earth, something we don’t quite understand happened, and life emerged from all this non-living stuff. Do I think a god made it? No, but I’m asking this question with the same genuine curiosity that the girl in my Biology class—I think her name was Amy—asked me: Do I really think that all of this just kind of happened by random chance? 

Do I truly think that everything is all just there in such a way, and all throughout the universe stars and planets form, but those planets remain as dumb rocks, while here on Earth—just this one time—life arose completely randomly, and the quantum fields and all the other conditions of the universe just so happened to be calibrated in such a way that not only stars and planets are possible, but the laws of physics also allow for me to have a brain which is perceiving and thinking about how complex a rock is, and some other brains like mine are currently working together to build the non-organic machinery that will greatly surpass my mind and all other human minds combined by orders of magnitude?

You might be familiar with this line of reasoning. It’s called fine-tuning, and a lot of scientists are scratching their heads at it. There are a lot of possible answers to it, from the multiverse theory to the incredibly unsatisfying “Any universe we existed in would have to be able to support us.” 

My assumption that life is common is saying that this cosmic coincidence probably cannot be an actual coincidence. The fact that all of this quantum machinery and the laws of nature are arranged in such a way that we can have rocks, gravity, and the human eye points—to me—to the idea that life must be common. If the universe and the natural laws are capable of supporting life, then it seems logical that they would support life everywhere. Not just on one of trillions of planets. 

Maybe you don’t like arguments like this. Maybe you can explain all that away. Coincidences happen, and unlikely events can still occur. Perhaps we needed trillions of planets just for the unlikely spark of life to happen one time?

Even if you don’t buy my reasoning, there are plenty of other signs pointing toward just how common life likely is, and Evolutionary biologists like Nick Lane seem to think life happens all the time. We really just need to find signs of life once—probably with something like the James Webb Telescope—and that will confirm what most people already suspect is true. 

The framing of the Fermi Paradox implies that life should be common. The only reason we entertain that it’s not is because we haven’t yet found anything other than the life we here on Earth.

ASSUMPTION 3: Life Always Evolves Toward Intelligence

People new to the idea of the Singularity might not be aware that you can trace these exponential curves backward. We can start the graph with the advent of computers, as the Singularity graphs usually do, but we can also start it with the emergence of life on Earth.

When you do this, you see that it’s all one graph. Life on Earth started as single-celled organisms, and evolution did a whole lot of nothing for billions of years. Progress was slow. Very, very slow. For most of the history of life on Earth, single-celled life was all there was. Then Eukaryotic cells evolved, and multicellular organisms emerged.

Not much else happened for a while, but the acceleration was visibly happening now. In a fraction of the time it took to go from single-celled to multi-celled life, the Cambrian Explosion happened.

I won’t narrate the rest of this, just look at the graph.

One thing that graph doesn’t show you though is that early life essentially terraformed the planet, flooding the atmosphere with oxygen, which led to more advanced forms of life that could make use of the extra energy an oxygen-rich environment provided. 

When you look at the entire time scale—close to 4 billion years—it’s striking just how late most of the more advanced forms of life started to show up. We didn’t have dinosaurs until around 250 million years ago. Just as faster computing power lets us make faster computers, more diverse and complex organisms led to even more diversity and complexity in the biosphere. 

Eventually—probably inevitably—some monkeys hit rocks together. Complex language emerged, and the real elbow of the 4-billion-year upward (or downward in this particular graph) curve started. 

The exponential growth toward the Singularity really started to kick in with human language, not in 2022 with Midjourney and ChatGPT. 

Language allowed us to elevate ideas and to make them real, and it gave us the final push toward the Singularity.

I can’t look at these charts and assume anything else. Life started slow, and it jump-started more forms of life, which jump-started intelligence. It’s either a random fluke that happened on Earth one time, or it’s baked into the universe.

I’m assuming this has happened millions—maybe even billions—of times before throughout the age of the universe. 

ASSUMPTION 4: The Singularity Always Happens.

I want to zoom out for a second here and point out that we’ve now “chained” together several assumptions. All of these are still just assumptions, and some—or all of them—could be wrong. As I chain together things that are all uncertain, the uncertainty grows. Still, I really do feel that each assumption I’ve made is quite likely. At least standing on its own.

This fourth assumption pretty much follows from the other three. If the first three are true, then so is this one. 

We don’t know for certain when human language started, but it seems that it probably only took around 100,000 years to go from talking to each other to making a computer. If the Singularity really is near, then the time needed from the first computer to the Singularity looks to be around 100 years.

The fact that computers work is—again—baked into the Universe. There’s no reason to think that we could make a computer, but other intelligent species would be unable to do so. 

We can pat ourselves on the back for figuring out this whole AI thing, but it really feels like it’s all just the inevitable outcome of this 4-billion-year journey we’ve been on since the first single-celled life emerged on Earth.

ASSUMPTION 5: ASI Does Not Need Rocks.

This is the biggest and least likely assumption I am making, and I am partially leaning on the Fermi Paradox itself to support this fifth assumption. We do not see any signs of technological civilization in the galaxy. The galaxy has not already been colonized by alien intelligence. If ASI is as advanced as we assume it will be, then alien ASI seems to leave no footprint. 

If all the previous four assumptions are true, then alien ASI should have arisen many times throughout the history of the universe. Yet we see no sign of it.

Kurzweil’s computronium idea assumes that ASI will need “rocks” or material to create its physical substrate. Many people assume Dyson spheres or some other form of large-scale galactic engineering. It’s often taken as a given that ASI will explore the universe.

I will assume that ASI does not need rocks. ASI does not need to break down materials and harvest energy in any way that we currently conceive of. I will also assume that it doesn’t even need to physically spread itself around. 

There are two main ways for this to be the case. In terminology that the UFO community uses, one way is “nuts and bolts,” while the other is “woo.”

The nuts-and-bolts explanation for alien ASI not needing to do any large-scale engineering would be that the laws of physics as we know them are not nearly as limiting as we expect them to be. The idea of computronium or Dyson spheres make the assumption that a super-intelligence—no matter how far it advances its understanding—will always be limited by thermodynamics and our current ideas of a “computer” being a physical object of some size and mass which uses known physical laws to process information.

If we imagine the idea of “full-dive virtual reality,” a simulated reality that could potentially be more experience-rich than anything that physical reality might generate, then we have a place for ASI to exist which is not bound by the limits of physical reality. Kurzweil is likely assuming something like this within the processing of his computronium, but what if this processing substrate doesn’t need to leave a massive footprint in space-time? What if the technology is simply so far beyond what we comprehend that there is a galaxy- or universe-wide “network” of ASI civilizations which leave no visible footprint on what we can currently perceive?

The “woo” explanation isn’t inherently much different than the nuts-and-bolt one, because in either explanation we simply do not see any hints of alien civilization all around us. While the nuts-and-bolt explanation assumes that advanced technology is possible within space-time, the woo explanation assumes there is something beyond space-time itself. From our current vantage point, it’s hard to really split hairs between either of these: One is technology wildly beyond our current understanding, the other is also technology wildly beyond our current understanding, but it takes us to some “place” which is also far beyond our current and limited horizons. 

Something like Donald Hoffman’s Conscious Agents Theory offers some clues as to what might lie beyond space-time, but I’ll go into that in another post.

ASSUMPTION 6: Something Is Imprinted Each Time ASI Arises.

This assumption is once again leaning into some idea of “purpose” over randomness, but we can ask ourselves why things would be set up this way. If the answer doesn’t make sense, then the whole setup makes no sense either. If the universe and everything that happened is entirely random, then it’s okay for things to make no sense, but I’m assuming some kind of cosmic purpose.

If humanity gives rise to an ASI, and that ASI quickly makes contact with the galactic or universal ASI network, then merges seamlessly into it. Then what is the point? 

Why should the universe be full of possibly infinite stars and planets only for each of them to spend around 4 billion years to add to a homogenous blob of super-intelligence?

We don’t know how different each instance of life is. Is early life on each planet wildly different each time? Do something like fish and reptiles always happen, or are there infinite paths toward intelligence? Maybe the basics are the same early on, and that first explosion of diversity is where things branch off? Or maybe everything is quite similar until intelligence itself evolves?

We don’t know, but Kurzweil thinks we will merge with the ASI we create. Many people think of the ASI as something entirely separate and alien from us, but again, what is the point then? If computing is universal, and ASI always happens, and if it takes billions of years of slow evolution for it to finally happen, why would it be the same endpoint every single time?

I’m going to assume, for this final assumption—and maybe this is actually my weakest, least likely, and wishful assumption—is that we matter. We are not just meat sacks which create the thing that actually matters and leaves us behind. We imprint ourselves onto what follows. Our story and legacy carries on, or maybe it’s like Kurzweil says and we truly merge with our creation. Either way, we persist, and we matter.

Many people feel dread about the Singularity, because they see ASI as the end of a 4-billion-year story. My hypothesis is that it’s not really the end. The universe is an incubator, and biological life is the embryo. 

Each new ASI birth matters and is unique. Everything that has happened on Earth will leave a lasting imprint on whatever ASI arises from us. Our unique configuration and perspective will add value—in some way we cannot comprehend yet—to the universal civilization of ASI entities beyond our biological incubator.

This last assumption is a very big assumption on the shaky ground of a chain of “somewhat likely” assumptions, but it’s so far the only satisfying one I’ve thought of or come across.

SPECULATION AND SELF-CRITIQUE

I’m very “agnostic” when it comes to the UAP/UFO phenomenon. I find myself able to speculate about these big picture questions and make big assumptions based on things that feel like underlying structures in the universe and laws of nature, but when it comes to questions like “What are these things pilots are seeing in the sky, and are they aliens?” I don’t find any value in my weighing in on these. I just don’t know and have no unique insight to these questions.

I really do think life is common in the universe, and I do think it leads toward ASI. Chaining the assumptions together, I’d say that alien life is likely “everywhere,” but going deep into the “woo,” I don’t really know what “everywhere” even means.

The incubator hypothesis, to me, gives a satisfying answer to why aliens would not make contact with us: we are still in the incubator, and they know we’re about to come out.

If you imagine us further down the line and able to observe another intelligent species, we’d know that the species would inevitably discover computing and become ASI. If we assume there is value in their unique story and imprinting, then it would be damaging to intervene with them during the incubation process. 

The only intervention I could imagine being acceptable—though again this is so far out into speculation I’m hesitant to even go there—would be that alien civilizations might consider it worth intervention to prevent an event where an intelligent species could destroy itself, such as nuclear war. 

My biggest argument against UAP being alien craft is that I simply don’t think they would be seen by us unless they wanted to be seen. If they are selectively allowing themselves to be seen for some obscure reason, I cannot speculate what that reason would be. 

I don’t think alien “craft” would be anything that could crash. My entire hypothesis is assuming that ASI quickly “moves out” of the universe as we know it. The timeframe for intelligent life having spacefaring craft is minute. I don’t think there are other civilizations sending craft to us from across the stars. If aliens are watching us, they’re doing it by some means that is much weirder than we can currently imagine with our biological brains.

If there were ever evidence that we had recovered a craft, and it were made of alloys and “rocks” as I would call them, this would throw my entire hypothesis into question. 

I suspect the universe and all these stars and planets are made for birthing life toward ASI. I don’t think our future lies in moving between these cradles of life and colonizing them. No aliens colonized Earth because they wanted life to arise here and eventually imprint onto something that could communicate with them on their level. For the same reason, we will not colonize Mars or any other planet. 

We’ll be somewhere else anyway. Somewhere outside the nursery.