Is Social Media the Answer to the Fermi Paradox?

Welcome to the very first edition of Allegedly Brilliant. If you're receiving this it means I had your email on hand and I wasn't embarrassed enough to not add you to the mailing list. I've started this newsletter to exercise my intellectual muscles on a regular basis by writing a mini essay about whatever has been interesting to me recently. Then, as a thank you for reading, I'll attach a resource, article, video, etc that I found helpful or intellectually stimulating at the end of each email.

Though this may evolve into a topic-specific newsletter, it isn't going to start that way. I'd like to give myself the freedom to engage on whatever topic has been on my radar. Furthermore, I'd hope that each of you lean in with me toward this practice of engaging with more challenging ideas than what might regularly be presented to us in our regular day-to-days. I'd encourage you to respond back to me with your opinions & criticisms on what I write or send me a concept that's been occupying your thoughts recently.

Ok, without further delay here is the first edition (I promise future ones will be shorter):

Enrico Fermi was born in Rome in 1901 to an Italian railway official and elementary school teacher. He showed early signs of prodigy-ism, as many great scientific minds do. Enrico and his close friend, Enrico, together built gyroscopes to measure the acceleration of Earth's gravity while they were teens. He was "discovered" by a colleague of his father's and mentored on the subjects of physics and geometry, subsequently accelerating through his education and into profound scientific contribution. He developed Fermi-Dirac statistics, discovered Fermi's interaction, and developed the Fermi age equation. He subsequently received a Nobel Prize. Following the rise of Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy, Fermi left for the US and credentialed by his contributions to nuclear physics, was convinced by Oppenheimer to join the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos in 1944.

The story of the bomb is a well-known one in history and American popular culture, so I'll assume your knowledge on the subject and move to the posing of Fermi's Paradox in 1950, just 4 years before his death from stomach cancer. It was posed to a couple of his colleagues at Los Alamos and can be essentially distilled to: "Where is all the other intelligent life in the universe?" The requisite knowledge briefly is:

For a deeper dive into the Paradox and its popular theorized answers, I'd suggest the WBW post attached as something extra to this essay. The (unconvinced) contention that I would like to make falls into the category of answer which asserts that it is the nature of intelligent civilizations to kill themselves. Essentially, I'd like to posit that it is possible that social media, or some similar tool, has served as a filter which has killed intelligent civilizations before they can make contact with us.

We understand biologically that we are driven to make decisions on the basis (at least partially) of chemical release in the brain. This is the system that has driven us to find food, reproduce, create societies, etc. As we have organized into civilizations, we have channeled these biological drives by providing great rewards for those who contribute to society. The great inventor is able to patent, which in turn makes them rich and enables them to fulfill dopaminergic desires. The same is true of the great businessman through the same mechanism and of the great leader and the great social worker through (in addition to the same mechanism) socio-cultural recognition. However, as we have advanced, our societal issues with overindulgence of these desires have become apparent as we have advanced technologically to make securing these chemical hits easier. Substance abuse, overeating, etc can credibly be attributed to this phenomenon at a group level. Social media is the same.

Social media is a technologically-eased method of indulgence in dopamine hits that we were evolutionarily given to encourage the formation of societies. However, similar to overeating, technology has become so effective at securing these hits that the result of the chemical drive has flipped contrary to its biological intention. This is no surprise to anyone following the sociological news of the day: despite how easy it is for us to contact one another, we are lonelier. Social media, just as with other technological advancements that cater to our biological drives, provides a very shallow satisfaction. This is the same with fast food, which is engineered to taste delicious and make us briefly feel full, but provides very little in the way of true sustenance. In fact, to the contrary, it is engineered not to provide us with any enduring sustenance or sense of fullness because the desire is that we return to McDonalds (or whichever perpetrator) as soon as possible. The same can be said of pornography (sexual desire fulfilled without emotional fulfillment) or drug use (euphoria/happiness without the underpinnings to make that feeling endure), and could even be extended to a much lesser degree to caffeine (alertness without the underlying benefits of good sleep).

Why focus on social media? Because social dopamine hits have no physical backstop. There is no bloated state that prevents continued eating or overdose which prevents continued drug use. I'm sure each of you reading this can think of at least one point, possibly in the recent past, where you have emerged from a session of social media use disgusted by the amount of time that you have allowed to pass. This is very likely in the realm of a couple of hours for most of you. And you would likely be considered among the healthier users, as Gallup put the average figure for teens at 5hrs/day (Gallup). As you may have noticed, after you have a stint of social media usage you find it more difficult to complete productive tasks.

This is described as dopamine flooding (Psychology Today). Because we’ve given our brains low-effort dopamine hits, our brains have become desensitized (lazy) and we will find it harder to engage in activities that provide dopamine for higher-effort work. While a lot of literature on this subject focuses on pathological cases, this is true of every person. The level of effort your brain expects to expend in order to secure dopamine is set by the lowest effort activity you have engaged in since your last rest (sleep, meditation, etc.). But even past productivity, there is an equally serious threat that I alluded to earlier in this essay: loneliness.

While Fermi is credited with a breadth of scientific discoveries, it was never the man alone in a room who discovered it. He, like every great scientific mind throughout history, was surrounded and enabled by his contemporaries, including other great scientific minds, lab techs, friends, family, mentors, etc. The point here is that it is not just the individual, but the sum of the individual and their social connections, which create greatness. Ultimately it is this greatness in the realms of science, social order, business, and many other fields that have pushed our species forward. Greatness that, I would argue, could not have occurred without his close friend, Enrico, to explore science with from a young age. Or without his father's colleague, Adolfo Amidei, who mentored Fermi. Or without his wife, Laura Capon, his reason for leaving fascist Italy and moving to the US.

The scientific literature shows us that there has been a long-term decline in the number of close friendships a person maintains, which increases a person's feelings of loneliness (American Survey Center). Loneliness itself then acts as a blocker to social connection, increasing the fear of rejection and the likelihood of perceiving social threat (Bruckmann). As people turn to social media at a younger age, they enter a reinforcing cycle of increased feelings of loneliness, which in turn pushes them into further increased social media use as virtual interactions lack the emotional resonance (or Amygdalar activity) to fully replace real-world interaction, but provide enough dopamine to partially subdue feelings of loneliness (Meshi, Ellithrope) (Monninger, et. al).

As we become more concerned with ease of life and consumed by technology which appears to make social connection easy, we erode the social fabrics that enable our progression. Certainly, some will fall to the direct ails of social media, but far more insidious and unsuspecting will be our collective dulled perception of the seriousness of existential threats to humanity’s continued survival and our inability to organize to meet them. As we lack the social fabric to form groups that enable progress and are dulled by constant pseudo-social dopamine hits, social media serves as the precursor to self-extinction through inaction.

This is the section in essays I've read where the author will offer some solution rooted in moderation that they believe balances the harms and benefits. Non-committal, unopinionated horseshit. Though I'm sure I'll prove myself a hypocrite in the future, why write a whole essay just to fail to have a strong stance?

Social media is poison that tastes like nectar. It's as simple as that. You can make all sorts of justification for your continued use, but all evidence (and I suspect intuition) points to immediate cessation. I'm not saying it will happen that way (It took me about 6 months to kick all social media and I still haven't been able to completely eliminate YouTube), but if you aren't going to try then I think you're being willfully ignorant. If perhaps you find my argument unconvincing because you don't believe that you are destined for greatness, consider two things:

This is far too long for what I intended to be a short essay. If you read all the way through thank you. I hope you found it some bit interesting. If you did, please send me a short note back with your thoughts and maybe send it to someone else you think would enjoy. I’m not intending to write out of some egotistical belief that my opinion is scripture, but rather specifically to be challenged. And, as promised:

Wait But Why: The Fermi Paradox