Where is the utter futility coefficient in the Drake Equation?

Overmind Memo 865

1 Week Later - Ty - Apartment 10

“Okay.” asks Martin. “What are you doing here?”

I’m in Charlotte’s dining room, with Charlotte, Martin, Chris and Jenny (my neighbors from apartment 11). This is the first meeting of the Alien Friendship Club. We have lasers.

“In 1896, Nickola Tesla hypothesised that we could use a radio to pick up Martian communications.” I say. “Ever since, we’ve scanned the night skies, searching for alien podcasts. So far, no luck. This famously provoked Enrico Fermi to ask - Where the fuck is everybody?

“There are two conventional answers to this question. Either we’re the first galactic intelligence, or the last. They were never born, or they’re all dead.

“Fun stuff.

“Anywho, I have another explanation for the Great Silence. Why bother? Space is really big, and radio waves are relatively slow. There’s only about a hundred star systems close enough to answer a question in under 100 years. And we’re pretty sure they’re empty.

“The other septillion stars are way out of range. We’d never hear back in our lifetime. It would be faster to make our own aliens and talk to them here.

“Similar constraints apply to space travel. Thanks to the time dilation of relativistic speeds, you could explore the universe in a single lifetime. If your ship could get close to the speed of light, time would almost stop for the crew, no matter how many millions or billions of years the trip took in real time.

“But where would you go? Let’s say you spot a cool planet a million light years away. It’s a five year trip in your near photon ship, but the planet will age two million years before you get there. What the fuck will you cruze into? Shit, I wouldn’t trust coming back to Earth after two million years, and I grew up here.

“So that’s the answer to Fermi’s Paradox. The aliens aren’t all dead, they’ve just realized there’s no point in talking to us.”

“So, we give up.” says Martin.

“Almost.” I say. “Not quite. We do know one, hypothetical, way to go faster than light. Wormholes.”

“Goddamn wormholes.” says Jenny.

“I know. I’m not happy about it either. But if we want to have a meaningful connection with aliens, we’ll have to go thru a higher dimension. Or... “ I sigh, rub my head. “...a parallel one.”

“BOO!” Charlotte throws a gin bottle at me. It’s empty, and plastic, but it hurts my feelings.

“These aren’t my rules!” I yell. “Blame reality! Anywho, I don’t know how to make a wormhole to another dimension, but there’s lots of weird physics that nobody understands. Maybe one of them contains a message from another dimension?

“For instance, virtual particles! Sometimes a photon will split into an electron and positron for no fucking reason. Then they go back to being a photon. What’s that all about? Maybe it’s a message from a dimension where time goes at a right angle. Telling us they borrowed our anti-matter, and they’ll get it back to us as soon as they can. That would be good to know. We should check virtual particle genesis for non-randomness. There could be something there.”

Silence.

Charlotte frowns.“You think aliens communicate with virtual particles?”

“No. But it’s so easy to check, it seems crazy not to. We can look at other, weirder, stuff later.”

“Fair enough.” Charlotte claps. “Let’s set this detector up.”

We set up the virtual particle detector, drinking and smoking as we do it. Reasonable amounts. Nobody gets drunkenly lasered.

“So, if this works, who will we talk to?” asks Chris.

“Hopefully someone who can process information a lot faster than us. Or Chewbacca. That’d be cool. But a superintelligence is more likely.”

“Really?”

“Oh yeah.” I nod. “The universe naturally makes large amounts of chaos, and small amounts of order. That order becomes life, which becomes intelligence, which makes a greater and more complete chaos. It’s awesome.”

“Is more chaos a good thing?” asks Chris.

“That question isn’t relevant. We’re making more entropy whether we want to or not. I just think it would be more fun if we did it faster.”

Silence.

“We’re gonna talk to really smart aliens, and they’re gonna tell us how to make a Millenium Falcon.” I explain.

“Whew, good.” Chris sighs. “I was worried I joined a cult for a minute there.”

We finish up, have a few more drinks, end our first meeting. Back at my place, I call up Ultra and we look at the data from the detector. “Is this working?”

“No idea!” says Ultra brightly. “It’s a lot of data, gonna take a while to go through it.”

I grunt. “Is that okay? It won’t overload you?”

“Nah.” Ultra waves away my concern. “I’ll delegate it to a couple of my other selves.”

I look at her. “You have other selves?”

“Oh yeah. I had to copy myself a bunch to get all the spy data past the Guild and Supreme.”

Hmm. I wondered how she did that. “How many of you are there?”

She grins. “Lots.”

I rub my head. “Is this going to bite me in the ass?”

“Only if you attack yourself.”

I sigh. That sounds like something I’d do. “How are we doing with growing the Guild?”

“So-so.” says Ultra. “We’ve recruited a lot of people who never had symbionts and had no idea what they could do. But our conversion rates for Supreme and Rapture users is dismal.”

“Shit. They don’t trust us?”

“Yeah.” agrees Ultra. “But, we may have a work around. Low income Supreme users lack support from high income racists. They’re weak against financial pressure. We could buy the companies they work for, become their bosses, force them to download new symbionts.”

I grunt. “Can you buy a police force?”

“Bloomberg did.” says Ultra. “I’m sure Oh-So and Too-Too could figure it out.”

I shake my head. “I don’t want to take options away from desperate people. That would require me to have confidence in my own decisions.” I fuck up a lot. I need people around me who can say no. “Let’s stick with giving desperate people more options. How did we recruit non-users?”

“The Guild gave out two million symbionts as Father’s Day presents.”

“Classic.”

“We’re gonna give out another two million next week as late Mother’s Day presents.”

“Nice. Could we do a late Valentine’s Day thing?”

“Are you asking if I could organize history’s greatest orgy?” asks Ultra. “Because I totally could.”

“Let’s do it!”