Hi Everyone, 

I have returned to a theme that just won’t let me go. I find myself thinking about this, and variations of it, very often. Several related thoughts. 

First, my growing conviction that the long path of human technological and cognitive development follows a certain path. It would be much far to say this path is universal, like some iron law in the cosmos. But I do think that it follows a natural and logical path within an informational universe. Perhaps as part of a convergence theory of cognition and technology. 

In 0ther words, once our distant ancestors began using tools to manipulate their world, they put themselves (and us) on a path that no one can abandon. The technology substitutes for biological evolution, and acts much faster than that. It creates dependencies that can not be left aside. You have to reorganize your society around maintaining those technologies. Environmental pressures then select for higher and more effective cognitive functioning, since that goes hand in hand with technology. It’s the most powerful feedback look I can imagine. 

It took like on Earth a very long time before there was a species that found such a loop, but once it did, we were off to the races. Step back a bit and view Earth from its deep history. Humanity seems to have sprung out of nowhere to capture and transform the planet. But it wasn’t nowhere. It’s just that we discovered the key of the informational universe: that information can be stored, utilized, and made ever more complex in ways that gave us power. I think of Penrose arguing that we didn’t invent mathematics, we discovered it. A structure was always there, and we eventually found a way to tap into it. That has turned out to be very powerful. Also causing extreme volatility and instability. 

Each step along the path of greater complexity forces us to adapt ourselves to the new systems we create. I repeat a phrase I brought into this site a few years ago: We Serve The System. We create new inventions. Those inventions are useful. We organize our society further in order to maintain and improve those inventions. We therefore *must* maintain those forms of social organization because we have become dependent on those inventions for our very survival. From fire to agriculture to metallurgy to electricity to computers and now to AI. Once we start using them, we are hooked. We essentially must continue the social relations necessary to maintain these systems. And these systems have their specific demands. We must serve the system. 

This connects to aliens. I don’t think they are immune to these pressures. I think these pressures are universal to life forms, wherever they arise in the cosmos. Maintaining certain forms of highly advanced technology must say certain things about the society that produced them and maintains them. 

So I ask: what kind of society might be necessary to produce and maintain an interstellar technology that uses flying saucers on another planet? What levels of complexity would be required and what social relations might be necessary. 

Also — could there ever be a time when pressures for innovation and technological transformation cease? A kind of final destination? A place where you can say, “we’ve made it. Now we can just kick back and live in utopia.” 

As you can guess, my position is certainly no. That we seem to be on a rapid transformation path that has no final destination. Which means more instability. Probably more wars. More cultural craziness on all sides. And the thing is, for us to reach the level of technological complexity that allows for interstellar travel, we would in all likelihood have to go through quite a bit more transformation. I really wonder if humanity can make it through. Perhaps, as I speculate in the video, that’s The Great Filter. It could be. 

But the evidence of UAP/UFO does seem to tell us that someone, somehow, figured out a way to get through that filter. The video concludes with an exploration of three specific encounters: the 1967 Herbert Shirmer abduction case, the 1976 Tehran encounter, and the 2004 Nimitz encounter. I sometimes hesitate to use abduction literature to speculate on aliens, not because i disbelieve them entirely, but because I think that many of them have elements that may not be remembered properly. They aren’t all fully reliable. But I don’t feel that way about all of them, and the Shirmer case is one of those that I find compelling. And there’s a lot in there to unpack. The Tehran and Nimitz encounters are more solid in that we have no doubt they occurred essentially as described. No alien communications there, but there is behavior. 

I don’t solve anything here. I can’t ever pretend to have definitive answers. But I don’t think we need to continue to go gaga at UFO behavior and treat it like kids look at fireworks. There is an intelligence operating these things, and even if they are miles ahead of us in certain ways, we can ponder what their behavior tells us, and perhaps see connections between us and them. 

There’s a big one. Not necessarily that they tweaked our genetics. More like, they see in us what they also are: a species that has tapped into the informational substrate of reality and has learned to exploit it. That’s a rare achievement for any life form, but we did it, just like them. 

I included more AI illustrations in this video. It’s not that difficult for me to do them, and I think most folks like them. 

I am very interested in your thoughts on this subject. Things I got right, things I missed or got wrong. 

Richard