The Solution to Life, the Universe, and Everything

Starry Night, by Vincent van Gogh

When it comes to appearance of life on Earth and (possibly) on other celestial bodies throughout the universe, sooner of later, unless you're into ufological conspiracy theories, the well trodden topic of the Fermi paradox and it's several solutions will come up. Even without discovering some magical way to travel faster than light, sufficiently advanced civilizations should have been able to colonize their galaxies, and even nearby galaxies, within the span of several million years, or less, if we think of self-replicating probes like those proposed by the mathematician John von Neumann. A few million years might be a lot from the point of view of a human life time, but in the cosmic scale it is almost a blink of an eye. The fact that there are no von Neumann probes, or any other evidence of intelligent alien life out there, is sort of paradoxical, given the 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang. So, according to current estimates, the universe is 13.8 billion years, plenty of time for intelligent life to spread around the cosmos. So, like the physicist Enrico Fermi asked decades ago: where the fuck is everybody?

Many answers have been given. There's the idea that there exists great filters, that is to say bottlenecks, before any intelligence is able to go to the stars and conquer them. For instance, life must appear from non-living matter, a process called abiogenesis. Then, unicellular life must be able to go from prokaryotes to eukaryotes, which unlocks the possibility for more complex, multicellular organisms such as plants, fungi, and animals. The estimates for these events occurring must be exceedingly small. Simple microbial life could be common, and we might be able to detect it in the next decades by analyzing the atmosphere from exoplanets for traces of biological byproducts. The James Webb telescope is already doing that. But complex, conscious, and intelligent life capable of producing technology such as spacecrafts is something quite different. Where are they? Another great filter is evoked to explain this absence: even if they do appear often, eventually they destroy themselves in wars, including nuclear wars, before they're ever able to colonize galaxies.

If you ask my opinion, I think we're probably the only ones, or one of the very few, unlucky ones in the observable universe to have evolved self-awareness and intelligence to the point of being able to map the Cosmic Microwave Background with highly advanced satellites such as the Planck and WMAP, and use the CMB to calculate the age of the universe. If there is anyone else out there that can do this, there are so few of them, and the observable universe is so large, we're never going to bump into each other, or even know of one another. But let's entertain the ideia that so many hold dear: that the arrival of self-conscious, intelligent organisms happened enough that even our Milky Way galaxy must have (or have had) a few technological civilizations. If this is indeed a fact, then the universe must be teeming with less intelligent and less self-conscious animals, which is the same as saying the universe is filled with sentient life. Well, then, in this case, I agree with Schopenhauer when he writes the following in his Parerga and Paralipomena:

We should be driven crazy if we contemplated the lavish and excessive arrangements, the countless flaming fixed stars in infinite space which have nothing to do but illuminate worlds, such being the scene of misery and desolation and, in the luckiest case, yielding nothing but boredom — at any rate to judge from the specimen with which we are familiar.

Although written several decades before Lovecraft was born, this is a sentiment that echoes the cosmicism of lovecraftian literature. The idea here is simple: one could go mad by contemplating the amount of pain and suffering that countless suns illuminate in an infinite or almost infinite cosmos. It's almost like seeing a giant octopus-looking motherfucker, that's the stuff of nightmares, I guess. Jokes aside, it is a horrific thought. Now add intelligent, self-aware sentient life into the mix, and the amount of horrors and misery is multiplied even further. And now comes another aspect, which I think has everything to do with a possible solution of the Fermi paradox that I endorse, or would endorse if I bought into the premise that the arrival of self-aware, intelligent life was an event that happened hundreds or thousands of times in the observable universe, which I don't. The aspect I'm talking about is that any sufficiently intelligent species that investigates the universe enough using the scientific method will come to the realization of futility.

By arriving at this realization, these species would take themselves out of the game of "colonizing space" or "being productive," because they'd see there's nothing to it. Given everything we have discovered so far, the universe will likely end in heat death, but the capacity for sustaining life will die trillions of years before the final heat death occurs. There are other two, somewhat discredited, but still real possibilities according to modern physics: the Big Crunch, in which the universe will collapse unto itself due to gravity winning against all other forces, and the Big Rip, which is a runaway expansion of the fabric of space-time that will tear even subatomic particles to shreds, leaving nothingness in its wake. But given current estimates of the geometry of the universe, it seems the universe will keep expanding at a rate in which things won't be ripped apart. Instead, they'll just get far apart to the point of no more heat being produced, and therefore no more work (in the thermodynamic sense) being possible. It will be the final victory of entropy.

But, in any case, the universe will more than likely end, regardless of how it will end. Any advanced civilization that knows this, knows it would have to become like an omnipotent god in order to change any of these outcomes, which are the only ones our universe can have given the current understanding of physics, which is absurdly precise, regardless of how much people who haven't got the slightest idea of how contemporary science works might cry and say it's all made up. Barring some truly miraculous discovery that changes the entire field of astrophysics, to the point of making everything we know now obsolete, the universe will either end in a heat death, in a Big Rip, or in a Big Crunch. So, intelligent and technologically advanced aliens would understand it's all a bunch of bullshit. They would then embrace the craziness of religious mythologies, or the enjoyment of life, or extinction, or possibly all three of those things, since they'd see the futility in all of existence when it is observed from an empirical, factual standpoint. As the late great physicist Steven Weinberg wrote in his book The First Three Minutes:

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

What's worse is that even in the case of the universe not ending, as in the steady state models, and even if it is the case that the universe recycles itself into newer universes in an infinite chain of universes, the fact remains that Steven Weinberg was right: it's all a pointless affair. That it will end should actually make us feel good. Hopefully nothing will come after. So, the universe doesn't even have to die for futility to still be true. But let's assume the universe will die, since it's the learned position and not the yokel Bible-thumping position, even if somehow another universe can be born afterwards. In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books of sci-fi comedy, Douglas Adams writes about an ancient advanced alien civilization which created the supercomputer Deep Thought in order to answer "the ultimate question about life, the universe, and everything."

They were basically asking the ultimate meaning of all existence. So, after computing for 7.5 million years, Deep Thought famously answered 42. However, that was a bullshit answer, and Deep Thought programmed another supercomputer, the planet Earth, which would run a 10 million year program in order to really answer the ultimate question about existence. But 5 minutes before the answer was finally reached, Earth was destroyed by the Vogons, a race of bureaucratic aliens, in order to make way for an intergalactic freeway or something. In the second book of the series, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the view that the universe (and therefore existence as a whole) is pointless is plainly stated by the character Max Quordlepleen, the host of the restaurant, which exists in a time-loop bubble where patrons can watch the end of the universe over and over again. Quoting the character:

It's marvellous though, to see so many of you here tonight-no isn't it though? Yes, absolutely marvellous. Because I know that so many of you come here time and time again, which I think is really wonderful, to come and watch this final end of everything, and then return home to your own eras... and raise families, strive for new and better societies, fight terrible wars for what you know to be right... it really gives one hope for the future of all lifekind. Except of course, that we know it hasn't got one...

This sentiment, while comical and carefree in the books, and while somewhat effective as a coping mechanism in our day to day lives, becomes more sinister when we actually give a shit about the real, unfiltered, unadulterated misery through which certain forms of life go through by the mere fact that they were placed in the world. Which is why I think that, if it is true that intelligent life is somewhat common, and if it is true that among intelligent species in the universe there are a few who become highly advanced and knowledgeable about the universe, they will eventually degenerate into religious and mythological craziness, or chose to live either as Epicureans or full blown hedonists, or they'll chose extinction — and I think the wisest of them will chose extinction, to spare their descendants from the weight of futility. If it is true that intelligence is as common as optimists say, then a solution, or at least a partial solution to the Fermi paradox is that sufficiently advanced species will chose self-extinction.

Who would want the nightmare of being highly knowledgeable? Who would want the knowledge of the pointlessness of life, the universe, and everything, regardless of the universe ending or not? Who would want this shit if not those who delude themselves with myths, gods or pleasures, and therefore aren't exactly prone to be knowledgeable enough to begin with in order to conquer the stars with the use of advanced technology? It's not like the scholastic monks of the Middle Ages were ever going to be able to build the Saturn V rocket. For all the fanfare they get, they weren't that bright. And while the Epicureans of Antiquity might eventually have discovered steam engines and whatnot, they were never going to neurotically apply in their intellect to crack every single mystery of the universe, nor discover man-made ways to reach Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our Sun. No, with intelligence and knowledge, the truth of the futility of existence is impossible to not be achieved at some point. And with this knowledge comes a weariness, a heaviness that weighs down on our spirit, to the point of giving up. That is the solution to everything when we reflect on it long enough. Giving up: that is the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything.

by Fernando Olszewski