It’s Mind Blowing That Our Minds Can’t Be Blown

They're scientifically minded types; it's astonishing who say, "Perhaps we won't be able to understand the next set of laws of physics. Perhaps we won't be able to understand the aliens." It's nothing but the appeal to the supernatural. It's logically equivalent to saying, "God's out there, and you can't possibly understand what God is." God is this infinite, omniscient being that is beyond us.

You can believe that if you like. You can believe the simulation hypothesis; you can believe any one of these things. They're all metaphysical claims about a reality that we have no access to. Whether or not you want to introduce aliens, who will have ideas that we can't comprehend, it's all standing on the same footing. At least the god metaphysics you could say, "Okay, that's in a different universe that's outside of our laws of physics," but the aliens presumably would be under the same laws of physics. So, I don't even see what the basis for that is.

Any species that is smart enough to get off its home planet knows that the limiting factor is ideas. So, the thing that they should want the most from any other species they encounter is new ideas, and the trade that they should be making is the trade of ideas. There's this Malthusian philosophy in science fiction now called the Dark Forest Hypothesis, that every human species, like bacteria, is going to run out of room. No! The universe is infinite in size; it's expanding. The multiverse is even more infinite in size. We are at the beginning of infinity. We're not running out of resources.

Everybody's craving ideas. Smart alien civilizations trade ideas, and successful civilizations trade ideas because those ideas take things that were useless before and turn them into resources. Every alien civilization can trade ideas with every other civilization—ideas because they're all universal explainers. They're capable of maximal understanding. In fact, the mind-blowing thing here is that your mind cannot be blown. There's no idea out there that your mind cannot absorb, given the time and the effort.

So, if we encounter an alien species, we should probably rejoice. They probably don't want anything from our planet other than our ideas. The best way to trade ideas is to have a dynamic, abundant, thriving civilization. Because I grew up on road sci-fi, I used to be pessimistic about alien encounters. Oh yeah, if we encountered aliens, they'll just destroy us, like in "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." The Vogons thoughtlessly demolished the Earth to make room for a hyperspace bypass.

But the reality of it is that any species that finds us is going to immediately give us all the knowledge that they have, and they're going to be craving new knowledge that we have because they'll realize that that would allow them to light up the dark matter, the dark energy, the unused resources in the universe to have themselves thrive as well.