Maybe aliens are too stupid for space travel

A long Ramble on Time & Memory | The Z Blog

There’s some data to suggest we have become increasingly dumber since the 1800’s. This could simply be demographics. In 1800 the population of England was roughly 10 million, while all of Africa was 90 million. Britain now has 65 million people while Africa 1.2 billion. The population of the lowest IQ population has grown at twice the rate of one of the brightest. This trend is accelerating so the average IQ will drop with it.

But, the mass culture has something to with it too. There’s really no reason to remember a lot of things when they are easily looked up on-line or off your phone. Being smart today is about knowing where the information is located or how it is associated with other known information. Remembering stuff is just not very useful. History, after all, is just formal remembering so it makes sense  that history is dying as any sort of remembering is giving way to technology.

Then there’s the fact we are on the verge of a great automation of work that will make remembering the past even more pointless as the life of man becomes pointless. Children have no reason to dwell on the past or think of the future. Instead, they enjoy the day playing with their toys. Perhaps the growing amnesia in the West is just part of the slow infantalization of man. One day people will loom at the their surroundings and wonder how they got there and who made them. Perhaps even imagine the machines were made by gods.

And so Fermi's Paradox - Where are all the aliens? - is solved, first posed by physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950. It goes like this:

The universe is many billions of years old. Fermi calculated that an alien species smart enough to become spacefarers could reach any point in the galaxy in five million years. But we we have no scientific evidence that aliens beings have been here.

So, Fermi asked, where is everybody?

Well, Once they invented their equivalent of smartphones and the internet, in only three generations they were too stupid to build interstellar spacecraft. And no longer interested in it, anyway.

Various other answers have been posed in the 66 years since Fermi posed the question. One basically said that alien species that might have developed the technical capability simply got addicted to manufactured, virtual-reality pleasures.

They just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they’re too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don’t need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today. 

See here.

Update: "Human intelligence is declining according to Stanford geneticist"