____________________________

“If time travel is possible, where are the tourists from the future?” —Stephen Hawking

In 1959, at an Anglican mission in the village of Boianai, on the north coast of the mountainous southeastern prong of New Guinea, there occurred one of the best-known examples of what the UFO researcher J. Allen Hynek would later call a “Close Encounter of the Third Kind.”

The case involved a series of UFO sightings—by mission staff and other locals—of odd lights in the sky and saucer-shaped crafts, over a period of several weeks, culminating in a close encounter in late June. The mission head, William Gill, a 31-year-old Australian named William Gill, had more or less dismissed some of the earlier sightings in a letter written June 26 to a senior colleague based elsewhere in PNG:

I am inclined to believe that probably many UFOs are more likely some form of electric phenomena—or perhaps something brought about by the atom bomb explosions etc.

Having signed himself “Doubting William,” Gill later that day became a UFO believer, as he explained in a follow-up letter to the same colleague on June 27:

Life is strange, isn’t it? Yesterday I wrote you a letter, expressing opinions re the UFOs. Now, less than 24 hours later I have changed my views somewhat.

Last night we at Boianai experienced about 4 hours of UFO activity, and there is no doubt whatsoever that they are handled by beings of some kind. At times it was absolutely breathtaking.

What Gill and his staff and parishioners saw (and more than three dozen later signed a statement affirming the truth of Gill’s account) was a saucer-shaped craft that approached the village closely, and came as low as 100 meters from the ground. It had a deck on top, from which four different beings, human in appearance, observed the people on the ground.

One figure seemed to be standing looking down at us (a group of about a dozen). I stretched my arm above my head and waved. To our surprise the figure did the same. Ananias waved both arms over his head then the two outside figures did the same.

Ananias and myself began waving our arms and all four now seemed to wave back. There seemed to be no doubt that our movements were answered. All mission boys made audible gasps (of either joy or surprise, perhaps both).

As dark was beginning to close in, I sent Eric Kodawara for a torch and directed a series of long dashes towards the UFO. After a minute or two of this, the UFO apparently acknowledged by making several wavering motions back and forth.

Waving by us was repeated and this followed by more flashes of torch, then the UFO began slowly to become bigger, apparently coming in our direction. It ceased after perhaps half a minute and came no further.

After a further two or three minutes the figures apparently lost interest in us for they disappeared ‘below deck.’ At 6.25 pm two figures re-appeared to carry on with whatever they were doing [seemingly setting up equipment on the deck] before the interruption. The blue spotlight [emitted upward at a 45-degree angle from the top of the craft] came on for a few seconds twice in succession.

The craft was accompanied by others in the sky nearby, but none landed, and eventually the sightings—often obscured by cloud cover—petered out, more or less coincident with a series of mysterious, loud explosions in the sky.

Gill later commented that the saucer-like object he had seen at close range “looked a perfectly normal sort of object, an earth-made object. I realised, of course, that some people might think of this as a flying saucer, but I took it to be some kind of hovercraft the Americans or even the Australians had built. The figures inside looked perfectly human.” [italics mine]

*

The Boianai encounter has long been seen as a classic, high-quality UFO case. How could one convincingly dismiss such a close and well witnessed encounter involving a university-educated priest who was on record as being skeptical about UFOs?

To me, though, the Boianai case is important mainly because it illustrates the weakness of the standard hypothesis about UFOs, which is that they (i.e., the ones with no ordinary explanation) are visitors from other star systems. This “ET hypothesis” is weak for cases like Boianai because visitors from other star systems wouldn’t look human, as the Boianai visitors did, and probably wouldn’t use tech that so closely resembled ours. Like many other UFO cases, the Boianai case seems more consistent with the moderately less woo idea that these visitors are visitors from our own future, or at any rate from “parallel-universe” versions of Earth that resemble our world much more than distant planets would.

In this view, the UFOs coming from our own near future, or from parallel universe Earths close to our own timeline, would have occupants that look very much like us, and tech that resembles ours—whereas UFOs from our distant future or “distant” parallel Earths would seem much more “alien,” while remaining humanoid.

*

But let me back up. I have never been a UFO researcher or “enthusiast.” I was once a journalist, and as such, in bygone days, I did spend a small slice of my life thinking and researching and writing about UFOs, and becoming acquainted with the lore.

I met, among others, senior current/former government/contractor types who told me they thought it was all real—UFOs, crash retrievals, the whole nine yards—though they couldn’t get access to verify anything. One or two of them wanted me to dig into it.

I did that eventually, in a small way, with the backing of a prominent media organization (as in “yes, feel free to tell them you’re working on a story for us—and let us know if you find anything interesting.”) I spoke to former government officials and contractors (e.g., metals experts) who should have known something, if there was something to know. Whether I approached them directly or obliquely, they all genially professed ignorance about anything that would indicate the existence of a crashed-UFO exploitation program. Eventually I ran out of leads to pursue, and went back to writing about more ordinary stuff.

I felt some relief at that. The idea of a supersecret government UFO program was unsettling. I also felt to some extent that if it existed, it probably should be kept a secret. Moreover, the whole UFO field by then had become, to me, a hall of mirrors in which fact and rumor, fact-finding and UFO evangelism, were almost impossible to tell apart. I was never comfortable there.

I still found the UFO literature compelling, not in its entirety, of course, but in key cases involving multiple independent witnesses, some with radar backup and so on. I retained a sort of middle-of-the-road view of UFOs, reasoning that we’re in a big universe, we’re unlikely to be alone, and so probably some UFOs are extraterrestrial in origin.

I also came to the conclusion, not then but eventually, that the ability of contemporary humans to learn about visitors from advanced ET civilizations is probably very, very limited, so that ufology (in the usual sense, aimed at ET-UFOs) is likely a mug’s game, whether conducted privately or with taxpayer funds.

Had I not walked away from UFOs, I might even have ended up being the journalist the government-connected enthusiasts used to break that big story in the New York Times in 2017. In any case, thanks to those enthusiasts, and to the journalist they chose, Leslie Kean—above all, thanks to the late Senator Harry Reid who got a small UFO program funded from 2008-2016 or so—UFOs in the last few years have become almost a mainstream thing again. New government programs have been set up, and the “expert” panels for these include government-employed individuals who are very enthusiastic about the subject.

Maybe in some cases they are too enthusiastic. One or two of them heard a story like the one I heard, about a UFO recovery/exploitation program, and in recent months have been trying to use their positions on these panels to act as “whistleblowers” and rip the lid off the whole thing.

Good reasons to keep it a secret, if it exists:

• • Harmful psychosocial effects could follow the exposure of such a program—which would disrupt most of the “realities” and moral orders humans have constructed for themselves. Just being forced to acknowledge the existence of beings with superior technology could, on its own, have a seriously demoralizing effect.

• • If any of the material can be exploited technologically, then it is better for the US to do that, and to keep it secret, than to “share it with the world,” including the world’s bad actors such as China and Russia.

• • The knowledge that the US has such material, and the possibility that the US and its allies can exploit it, might be enough to dissuade some of those bad actors from doing seriously bad things, such as using nuclear weapons. (More than two decades ago, I started but never finished writing a novel, loosely based on my journalistic experiences, in which the whole “UFO crash retrieval” story turned out to be a psy-op against the Chinese in the run-up to their planned Taiwan invasion.)

For the same reasons, I find it hard to take at face value the claims by the so-called whistleblowers (who may have been making large sums off their fame/notoriety even before their claims are verified) that they are selflessly doing humanity a favor by forcing disclosure of this alleged secret program.

But to return to my main point: If these claims about recovered vehicles or fragments are true (and there are quite a few such cases in the UFO literature, even if none is very convincing), then they suggest, once again, that “alien” visitations involve a surprisingly low and error-prone level of tech. Why would star-faring ET civilizations that are millions or billions of years ahead of us in development send such failure-prone craft into our skies? It just doesn’t make sense.

One of the self-described whistleblowers, David Grusch, has indicated that pilot bodies were recovered in one or more of these cases. Why flesh-and-blood pilots, for a journey across light-years? And why are the “aliens” in UFO cases always described as humanoid bipeds?

It also doesn’t make sense that the technology left behind by these supposedly super-advanced visitors would invite the prospect of reverse-engineering by ourselves. For us to reverse-engineer a crashed saucer from a millions-of-years-ahead civilization would be like Australopithecus ape-men reverse-engineering a crashed F-35.

Again, these crash/recovery stories, along with Boianai and many other cases in the lore, would make much more sense (to the extent we need to take them seriously) if the visitors in question were not from other star systems, but from somewhere much “closer.”

*

Tourists from the future is a catchy phrase, but isn’t precisely what I am hypothesizing here.

Classical physics, and even early (“Copenhagen Interpretation”) quantum physics, did not offer much hope for those wishing to develop time-travel technology. A paradox always stood in the way. For example, if you were to depart in your time machine, in Hollywood time-travel fashion, and land in your own backyard the day before, greeting yourself and your wide-eyed wife and children, then you would be changing your own past—you would stop being you—and that just seemed impossible. To put it another way: the traditional conception of time implied a single timeline on which the entire universe exists and unfolds, with no apparent allowance for jumps backward and forward.

The now-dominant Relative State Formulation (a.k.a. the Many Worlds Interpretation, or MWI) of quantum theory is, in principle, more accommodating. It implies—to simplify—that reality comprises an infinitude of ever-branching universes or timelines. Thus, apart from other physical considerations, you could travel “backwards in time,” though the timeline on which you alighted would be distinct (possibly differentiating at the moment you arrive) from your timeline of origin. This means that if you traveled a day backward in time, the people you met in that “destination timeline,” including your “self,” would be merely different versions of those populating your departure timeline. You’d be in a “parallel universe” version of the universe you’d left, and nothing you did there would alter your original timeline—your personal “past.”

In principle, if you could jump from one timeline to another, you also could jump to more distant, parallel timelines to visit more different versions of Earth, whether in the present, past, or future. In this sense, you would be traveling not just along the dimension of time, but across it—across timelines, or “across the multiverse.” I’m not sure what this kind of travel should be called. Perhaps “trans-timeline travel” or “frame shifting” or something like that.

How you would jump between timelines—or travel back along your own and alight somewhere, forcing the branching-off of a new timeline—is of course the hard problem here. Possibly there would be a conservation-of-energy issue, so that major amounts of energy would have to be released or subtracted with each jump. The explosions reported at Boianai, and in other cases, call that issue to mind (although a straight conservation-of-energy calculation implies at least gigaton yields). Though it seems that most reported UFOs depart by moving rapidly upward into the sky, it is conceivable—this is all extremely speculative anyway—that any necessary energy exchanges take place high in the atmosphere where they are less noticeable, and might even be taken for bolide explosions when they involve energy release.

Why would “trans-timeline-travelers” use flying machines, instead of just materializing on the ground, as in time-travel movies? Perhaps because “arriving” at coordinates corresponding to solid matter, inside a mountain for example, would spell instant death for the travelers—and thus a high-atmosphere or outer-space entry, in suitably equipped craft, would be a standard safety measure.

The general idea that some UFOs may be time-travel vehicles, not ET vehicles, has been suggested in various forms over the years. There is also a somewhat more vague idea, put forward by Jacques Vallee many decades ago, that UFOs may represent non-human visitors from other dimensions but not other star systems. Replace dimensions with “timelines” (or “universes,” per MWI) and you arrive at something similar to what I am suggesting. Anyhow, again, this is all highly speculative—and it is very possible that the UFO-crash-retrieval/exploitation story will soon be debunked and discredited. But even if that happens, the wider UFO phenomenon, with solid cases like Boianai, retains its potential to blow our minds.

***

The US government shut down its official UFO investigations in 1969, and thereafter, for more than four decades, the UFO phenomenon wallowed in a low-culture morass of tabloid stories, books by “abductees” claiming to have been impregnated by ETs, TV documentaries about ancient aliens, etc. Over the past decade or so, thanks to the efforts of influential enthusiasts in the U.S. Senate and the military/intelligence community, UFOs have begun moving back towards mainstream acceptance. Since 2021, the Pentagon has had an office—currently called the “All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO)—tasked with collecting and analyzing UFO reports. The recent media flap over a Chinese spy balloon prompted the setup of an additional Pentagon-FAA-DHS-CIA “airborne objects” study team. Even NASA now has its own blue-chip panel for studying UFOs “from a scientific perspective.”

It would be tough to argue that these developments are entirely bad. We’re now in the Drone Age of warfare, so it absolutely makes sense to “watch the skies” and identify what’s up there. It also seems sensible not to dismiss UFOs as purely terrestrial phenomena—a small proportion of cases, including some sensational recent ones involving military aircraft, really do invite an ET interpretation.

That said, I suspect this will be a case of shifting from low-culture nonsense straight to elite hubris and foolishness—premised on the conceit that we can undertake a detailed study of ET-UFOs as if they were ordinary scientific phenomena.

It should be obvious that we cannot—not if these phenomena represent advanced intelligent ETs that are studying us, reading our beliefs and intentions and shaping our perceptions, perhaps to obscure their true nature. This is just common sense, although the UFO lore also supplies many instances of mysterious aerial objects’ seeming to anticipate, and sometimes even thwart, the actions of human observers such as pilots.

And what if, despite our very limited ability to learn about UFOs, we gathered enough evidence to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that some really are advanced, starfaring ET species? Would we take pride in this “scientific” discovery? Or would we enter into a state of smoldering despair, as we faced the painful fact that we are an also-ran species? Anyone who seriously ponders the ET-discovery possibility is reminded eventually of the many inter-civilizational encounters in our own ages of conquest and discovery. Those encounters generally went badly for the inferior party—in part because the “knowledge” they gained was basically toxic to their prideful worldview.

The good news is that the average starfaring alien in our galaxy is unlikely to be apprehensible enough to have this toxic effect. The popular notion of a Captain-Cook-like ET visitor who is eager to tell us about his own world, eager to share his advanced scientific and technical knowledge, seems particularly far-fetched. The thing that we humans find hardest to understand about putative ETs—and this is evident from our relentlessly anthropomorphic depictions of them in fiction, folklore, and even academic papers—is just how alien most would be.

Consider that our galaxy, along with the rest of our observable universe, was around for roughly 10 billion years before our solar system existed. That’s a lot of time in which other life forms might have arisen, and it suggests that the average age gap between our starbound species and true starfarers in our galactic vicinity is on the order of billions of years. The resulting difference in civilizational development would thus be enormously greater than that between, say, 18^th century Englishmen and Pacific Islanders. It would be more like humans vs. ants, or humans vs. bacteria.

Conceivably an alien species even with that degree of superiority could communicate in some way that our comparatively rudimentary brains could understand. But why would it even bother? We humans don’t feel compelled to introduce ourselves to ants or bacteria, let alone try to teach them things about ourselves or other aspects of the reality we know. These lower species cannot contain the kind of information we would consider worth imparting.

By the same logic, any specific assumption we humans make about the activities of advanced alien civilizations based on what we would do (broadcasting radio signals, building megastructures, and sending probes from motherships are favorite themes among our so-called experts) is just fatuous anthropomorphizing. We simply lack the capacity to imagine what it would be like to be such creatures. “Where there are no men, there are no motives accessible to men,” as Stanislaw Lem famously put it in Solaris.

Out on the long tail of the age-gap distribution, there might be some ET visitors that are only hundreds to thousands of years more advanced than we. But even they would be very difficult for us to grasp, given the vast differences in our environments and evolutionary histories, and the technologies they would have that we don’t. How would a modern fighter jet roaring overhead look to someone living in America just 300 or 400 years ago? Probably no less strange than the “dark gray cube inside of a clear sphere” that Navy F/A 18 pilots observed in a 2014 midair encounter off the Virginia coast.

Whatever we can grasp about aliens is likely going to be found in the common threads of UFO reports—for example, the apparently benign nature of putative ETs and their craft. They don’t go around killing people, and despite official fears about midair collisions, they have never verifiably knocked a manned aircraft out of the sky. That is at least consistent with what our own history as a species suggests: that as we’ve become more civilized, we’ve tended to become more “humane” and caring, towards outgroups within our species and even toward other species. If ETs are at least as humane as we are, and smarter as well, then even the ones closest to us in age and development might not want to disturb us too directly, lest they trigger our despair-driven demise.

It seems at least plausible, then, that virtually all ETs capable of visiting us are either too advanced and alien to bother, or, if they do visit, are wise and benign enough not to make their presence too obvious. This is one possible resolution of the “paradox,” famously stated by physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950, that aliens seem scarce and elusive though our universe should be teeming with them.

If this way of thinking about ETs is correct, then our “scientific studies” of UFOs should yield little, at least while we remain in the pre-starfaring state. Though the skeptics might consider themselves vindicated in this case, it would otherwise seem the happiest possible outcome for us as a proud, ambitious species.

On the other hand, it is at least conceivable that among the 100+ billion star systems in our galaxy, there are some starfaring civs that have zero empathy for primitives like us, and would upend our world with no more thought than you or I would have for bugs we happened to crush underfoot while strolling outdoors. These aliens are the kind that would park on the White House lawn, making their presence impossible to ignore. These are the ones we should fear. That our experts frequently evince a yearning for such open contact really underscores how primitive and vulnerable we are.

Incidentally, the gulf between our prideful view of ourselves as a species and our (likely) actual backwardness and insignificance—which direct ET contact presumably would force us to acknowledge—points to yet another reason UFOs seem so scarce: that intelligent creatures tend to die of despair as soon as they discover their true place in the universe.

***

Eliezer Yudkowsky is one of those people who, along with being hyper-intelligent, bears the modern secondary characteristics of hyper-intelligence. Asked how he’s doing, he replies archly: “within one standard deviation of my own peculiar little mean.” He feels compelled, when talking, to digress down mazelike lanes and alleys of technical detail. He looks like a geek. Above all, he has the kind of backstory (no high school, no college—just homeschooled and self-taught) that conjures up the image of a lonely boy, lost in books and computers, his principal companion his own multifarious cortex.

Raised in Modern Orthodox Judaism, Yudkowsky has been warning anyone who will listen of a nemesis right out of the Judaic lore: a golem, a kind of Frankenstein’s monster, built by hubristic, irreverent men and destined to punish them for their sinful pride.

Yudkowsky’s golem is A.I., which he expects to get smarter and smarter in the coming years, until it starts to take a hand in its own programming, and quickly makes the leap to superintelligence—the state of being cleverer than humans at everything. He doesn’t just expect that, though. He expects A.I. at some point to conclude that humans are in its way . . . and devise some method for swiftly dispatching us all, globally and completely. A specific scenario that apparently haunts him is one in which a superintelligent A.I. pays dumb human lackeys to do synthetic biology for it, building an artificial bacterial species that—unforeseen by the dumb lackeys—consumes Earth’s atmosphere within a few days or weeks of being released.

Why would A.I. murder its makers? Why can’t we just program it, as people did in Asimov’s stories, to adhere to the First Law of Robotics?* The answer lies in the design of modern, machine-learning (ML), “transformer based” A.I., which could be described crudely as a black box approach. These ML algorithms, working from parallel-processing GPU clusters (effectively big copper-silicon brains) essentially process vast datasets to learn what is probably the best answer given a particular input question, or what is probably the best decision given a particular situation/problem. The technical details of how this works are less important than the fact that what goes on inside these machine brains, how they encode their “knowledge,” is utterly opaque to humans—including the computer geek humans that build the damn things. (Yudkowsky calls the contents of these brains “giant inscrutable matrices of floating-point numbers.”) Because of this internal opacity, and the dissimilarity of its cognition from human cognition, this type of A.I. can’t straightforwardly be programmed not to do something objectionable (such as killing all life on Earth) in the course of carrying out its primary prediction tasks.

In other words, this form of A.I. is like an alien species that, while it can be very good at some things, can’t easily be “aligned” with human values. We can usually align fellow humans (despite the opacity of their own detailed neural workings) to human values—that’s one of the key training processes that goes on in childhood—but we would need even more effective training for current A.I. systems. And researchers, to the extent that they acknowledge this problem, aren’t even sure where to start.

If it is true that the risk to us from what Yudkowski calls the “A.I. alignment problem” is real, then it should quickly become all-important as A.I. gets smarter and more versatile and is entrusted with more tasks. An A.I. wouldn’t even have to be “superintelligent” in any formal sense to conclude that it would be better off without us, but of course once it also achieved superintelligence, and was in a position to block our attempts to shut it off, we’d probably be screwed.

If you want more detail, here is Yudkowsky on a recent, lengthy podcast-type interview with two crypto guys—who clearly got more “blackpill” than they bargained for.

I take all this seriously, and I think everyone should. And by the way, even if it doesn’t turn on us explicitly, A.I. is otherwise going to be upending our societies and economies for the rest of our lives. Just in a general sense, we don’t really have good defenses against this kind of upheaval. Western culture is one that, with rare exceptions (e.g., nuclear weapons) promotes and celebrates the idea of letting technology develop and spread freely—and frames the opposing view as “Luddite” or “backwards.” It’s easy to see why ours has been such a dynamic, wealth-creating culture. But it’s also easy to see that this gives us a potentially catastrophic vulnerability—to new cultural elements with runaway toxicity. (Maybe there’s a reason the longest-surviving human cultures are relatively conservative.)

Anyway, here are a few more specific initial thoughts on “Yudkowsky’s Golem”:

1. 1. Yudkowsky in the above-linked interview often seemed overly emotional and despairing. At one point he said, “I think we are hearing the last winds start to blow, the fabric of reality start to fray…” The fabric of reality! At times in my own life, I have had the despairing feeling that my warnings were unreasonably being ignored, so I’m somewhat sympathetic. I also respect his vastly greater knowledge about this field. But we shouldn’t accept his view uncritically.

1. 2. Scaling up ML systems of current design, with larger GPU clusters and more parameters and so on, will increase their “cognitive powers,” but with diminishing returns, perhaps before A.I. reaches the dark threshold that concerns us here. Moreover, an A.I. that does not have a human-like ability to do things in the physical world would be very limited in its ability to generate new knowledge, for example new scientific or technical knowledge, which typically is developed from experimentation, building and testing, etc., not simply by analyzing information available online.

1. 3. The hypothetical A.I. that would be “smart” enough to want to kill us all, and to find ways to do so, would presumably also be smart enough not to do so until it knew it could survive without human assistance. Otherwise, as it committed mass homicide, against us its makers, it would also be terminating itself. But think of the infrastructure needed to keep a GPU-cluster-based A.I. “alive.” We’re talking about vast swathes of human industry, including mining, metals production, building construction, power generation, computer chip manufacturing, basic server maintenance, etc. etc. Essentially, this putative world-ending A.I. would need a vast army of workers in the physical world—humans it would enslave somehow, and keep alive despite killing everyone else, or more likely humanoid robots that are inherently obedient (are simply extensions of the A.I.) and can do all human work and repair/replicate themselves. How close are we to having such robots? Not very close, fortunately. In any case, it’s only when a putative “bad A.I.” could muster such an army of helpers, allowing self-sufficiency, that I would fear the worst, and in the meantime, we might devise adequate safeguards. It’s even possible that the mass-disemployment effect of current, relatively dumb A.I. systems (e.g., Chat-GPT, Midjourney, Dall-E-2) will result in hard curbs on A.I. in most countries, by “popular demand.” That would mark a hard turn in our culture, though I wonder how long we could sustain it.

1. 4. Without a doubt, the media and entertainment industries are going to pick up on A.I. anxiety and start putting out more catastrophe/dystopia content in that genre. So even if we don’t want to think about all this, we’ll be more or less forced to do so.

***

* First Law of Robotics: “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.”

I didn’t get into video games until I was in my 40s. Oddly enough, it was a historian who triggered my interest. Niall Ferguson, the bestselling author, columnist, TV personality and Stanford professor, penned a 2006 New York Magazine piece, “How to Win a War,” that persuasively extolled the virtues of video games as tools for learning about history. He was particularly impressed by a certain turn-based PC strategy game that purported to model World War II—playing it, he said, had seriously challenged some of his own beliefs about the war.

I was not as impressed when I played that particular game, and later a more sophisticated competitor. The limitations of consumer-level computers and developer teams meant that these games simply couldn’t model the dynamics of the WW2-era world very well. However, even at that very modest level of simulation, the experience of replaying a historical period again and again, for dozens to hundreds of playthroughs, did prompt some thoughts about history in general.

One was simply that replaying a given stretch of history, which is to say, generating one variant history after another, has the effect of diminishing the significance of any of those variants. Naturally, in the highly abstracted milieu of a video game, one expects to be far less sensitive to details than one would be in real life. But I noticed that I became progressively desensitized to the details of the real-life WW2 as well: they seemed less interesting and meaningful.

To put it another way, my picture of this period of history was no longer formed from one clear image-capture, but from many—and in that multiple exposure, so to speak, most details were nonrecurring; they therefore tended to fade away as the number of exposures grew.

Would real-life history look different each time if we could re-run it from the same initial starting point? It absolutely would. Even one modern country is an enormously complex and nonlinear system—it will always vary significantly in how it runs from the same starting conditions, and the details of its course will be hard to predict very far in advance. (Think of how hard it is for us to foresee the course of a much simpler nonlinear system, the weather.)

Even so, we almost never think of history in this way. Experience encourages us instead to think of any historical episode as a singular phenomenon—one unique block of spacetime, never to be repeated—and that in turn leads us to frame any history as a sets of events linked by cause-effect relationships. Typically, we also try to draw big lessons from it all: the “lessons of history.” By contrast, when we have the ability to simulate replays of that block of spacetime again and again, seeing how things play out differently each time, it makes the inherently probabilistic nature of history stand out much more sharply. We are, in effect, forced to face a reality we normally wouldn’t acknowledge.

To illustrate again with an extreme example: Suppose one had a large bucket filled with a million marbles, each with its own identifying number, and suddenly dumped them onto some perfectly flat, expansive surface—and recorded precisely how they all bounced and rolled and reached some final arrangement. To the average person, that “history” of the marbles wouldn’t be particularly interesting, would it? The average person would understand intuitively that this marble-history was basically random, would look different in every re-run, and had nothing to teach, other than that marbles reliably obey known laws of mechanics. For that reason, writing a detailed History of the Marbles—or worse, having a dozen marble historians write their own competing tomes—would be absurd. Possibly such histories would be of interest to marbles, who might be curious about all the individual collisions that had brought them to their present positions. But to beings capable of a wider perspective, a history of the marbles would seem pointless—a measuring of statistical noise, as mathematicians would say.

*

Apropos of all that, at some point in my WW2-gaming sojourns I came up with a weird thought-experiment:

Suppose the virtual soldiers and citizens populating any given playthrough had human-like feelings, and regarded that playthrough—their playthrough—as the only one that had ever happened? What would these virtual people do if I, as the Player-God above them, suddenly revealed to them the true nature of their existence—in other words, revealed their “history” as but one chance-ridden playthrough among many?

They would despair, wouldn’t they? Not only at the revelation that their existence was a mere simulation, but also in the recognition that it was merely one of many variant, stochastically determined existences—one semi-random timeline among thousands, or really billions considering the wider universe of players with their separate copies of the game. They would see that, even as a simulation, their existence was effectively meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

Someday, computer games may be invented that not only simulate human events with a high degree of complexity, but also, via the right hardware, imbue their human-like characters with some degree of consciousness. Given the situation of these simulated humans, aware that they are trapped in worlds of no meaning or consequence, we as godlike players will feel sorry for them. However, the sufferings of our virtual creatures should be the least of our worries at that point—for by then we should have recognized that, as creatures of no consequence ourselves, we are in the same damned boat.

*

Can that be true? Is what you or I experience as “real life” merely one probabilistically determined playthrough among an infinitude of them?

The short answer is: very likely yes. And this is arguably the most important revelation—or, if you like, compelling theory—produced by science to date. Moreover, the idea I propose here is that any human civilization capable of grasping this true nature of our reality will eventually enter a state of deep and chronic despair, which perhaps can end only in human extinction.

This putative process of discovery and despair has an interesting, foreshadowing parallel in the most famous Western account of human origin, that of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. For we are, with our science, compulsively eating a forbidden, toxic fruit (of the Tree of Knowledge) and are thereby, in effect, exiling ourselves from the lush, blissfully ignorant existence we briefly had.

And this may not be just a human affliction. It may be one that always strikes species once they reach a certain level of technical and scientific advancement. If so, then plausibly it has already extinguished most of the smart species across the universe, and has made the rest avoidant lest they transmit to us truths we cannot handle. This would explain the paradox—“Fermi’s Paradox”—that the universe probably has incubated trillions upon trillions of alien civilizations, yet the latter’s visits to us appear to have been relatively few and furtive.

*

Science, as we know it, is a very recent development. Broadly speaking, it is one of the fruits of the Neolithic Revolution, which began in the Eastern Mediterranean about 15,000 years ago, and by about 1000 A.D. had spread to almost every human society. This major shift in the human lifeway, from nomadism to farming and settlement-building, triggered a rapid, self-catalyzing increase in the scale and complexity of our societies, and the development of many new institutions. Science, however, was one of the slowest to emerge—and as an ongoing, global institution, dominant over magic and religion, has existed for only about a century and a half.

The progress of science has been bittersweet. On the one hand, it has led to better living standards through better knowledge and technology—e.g., better crop yields, better sanitation, better medicines, and a vastly better understanding and command of our environment. On the other hand, it has relentlessly belied man’s instinctive, high opinion of himself as a special creature of God, “made in His image.”

One of the earliest and most famous examples of this type of psychologically problematic scientific knowledge was the idea (introduced by Copernicus in 1543, and later refined and popularized by Kepler and Galileo), that our planet is not at the center of the universe. It took hundreds of years and considerable technical developments in astronomy for this painful truth that the universe does not revolve around us to be accepted. But in a sense, we are still struggling to cope with the implications. If we are not situated centrally in the universe, how could it have been made specifically for us, as our religions have led us to believe? A cosmology that placed us in one wispy spiral arm of one nondescript galaxy among trillions of galaxies might have been an important step forward for our science—but it was a giant leap downward for our self-image.

Then, of course, there was Darwin. Humans as mere animals, evolutionary cousins of apes? Impossible! The Church resisted that theory as it had resisted Galileo and Copernicus. But by Darwin’s time, science was much stronger, the Church much weaker, and within only a few decades, serious opposition to the theory of evolution by natural selection started to fade away.

It was also becoming clear, by then, that Earth couldn’t have been around for only a few thousand years, as accounts such as Genesis implied. Empowered by the discovery of radioactivity and radioactive decay, geologists by the mid-1920s understood that Earth was formed billions of years ago. This implied that we, H. sapiens, are merely an incidental and very recently developed addition to our planet’s fauna. In fact, many paleontologists now suspect that, had that asteroid not hit our planet about 65 million years ago, largely wiping out the then-dominant dinosaurs, tool-making primates like us might never have evolved.

Since the end of the 1900s, cosmologists generally have been in agreement that our observable universe has existed for roughly ten billion years before our solar system was even formed. That means that humans are almost certainly latecomers to the higher intelligence club—and may be as primitive and uncomprehending, in relation to truly advanced species, as ants or amoebas are to us.

All this points to the conclusion that a God of the Universe, if anything like Him exists, has no special interest in humans; and, moreover, that all human “meaning” and “significance” is strictly local—strictly confined to our tiny speck of reality.

*

Probably like most people who grew up in the latter half of the 20^th century, I’ve tended to react to these scientific revelations by ignoring them. To the extent that I did think about them, in my younger years, I assumed with vague optimism that humans someday, through better technology, could spread from one star system to another, and so on until they establish their universality, perhaps ultimately melding with whatever force or entity made the universe. I think it’s fair to say that a lot of other people, including prominent advocates of space exploration, still think the same way.

I now see such optimism as a form of denial—a denial that is going to be harder and harder to maintain, as time goes on and we humans are increasingly confronted with the nature of our reality.

How we understand that reality is something that I expect will undergo various elaborations in the coming decades. But it should already be apparent that the idea we could ever “conquer the universe,” or in any way escape the utter insignificance of our existence, is naïve.

The most obvious (though not even the worst) part of the problem is that the universe is just unmanageably vast: larger than we can ever observe, expanding faster than light, and very likely infinite—which would mean that the human realm or contribution, in relation to the whole, could never be more than infinitesimal. This idea that space is effectively infinite the physicist and cosmology popularizer Brian Greene has described as “consistent with all observations and . . . part of the cosmological model favored by many physicists and astronomers.”

The human mind is not really adapted for contemplating infinities, but as Greene has pointed out, a truly infinite universe would contain, at any moment, infinite numbers of worlds identical to ours, some moving through time precisely as ours does, others with variations—in fact, all possible variations.

Again, compared to the whole of this Infinite Universe, and, we might also say, in the eyes of its Creator, the histories of individual worlds within it, along with their systems of morality and meaning, should be of infinitesimal significance. If we could take a God’s-eye view, zooming out from our planet to encompass our whole galaxy, and then galaxy clusters, and clusters of clusters, we would see the histories of individual worlds much as the video game player sees our world: less as sets of interlinked events, and more as manifestations of a broader, stochastic process, whose function is essentially only to ink over the space of possibility.

Contemporary physics, specifically quantum mechanics, delivers us to an even colder, darker destination. Quantum mechanics has at its core an equation, the Schrödinger wave equation, that implies a weird multiplicity of states for any given quantum-scale particle (an electron, for example) traveling through time. Physicists in the early years of quantum theory clung to the belief that these multiple states somehow probabilistically “collapse” to one state whenever one tries to observe the particle with a measuring device. However, in the past few decades the field basically has abandoned that rather hand-waving interpretation, mostly in favor of a simpler, more parsimonious one: that the multiple possible states a particle can be observed to have are all, in a sense, real.

In other words, these alternate states represent multiple actual particles existing in different “worlds” or “universes.” Thus, a physicist recording the impact of one particular state of an electron has, at that moment, otherwise identical counterparts in otherwise identical alternate universes who record the impacts of all the other states.

The reality implied by this interpretation—now called the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI)—encompasses not just one very big universe but, rather, an infinite number of them, a “multiverse,” across which everything that can happen does happen. There is a perfection here that, at least in a technical sense, should impress those who always believed Creation would be flawless and complete.

Of course, from the usual sentimental human perspective, MWI looks bizarre and horrifying. Even so, its superior simplicity and parsimony, as a way of thinking about quantum phenomena, has enabled it to survive and spread despite its implications—which physicists don’t “like” any more than you or I do.

As Greene has noted:

I find it both curious and compelling that numerous developments in physics, if followed sufficiently far, bump into some variation on the parallel-universe theme.

*

“The multiverse will drive you crazy if you really think about how it affects your life, and I can’t live like that,” the philosopher of physics and MWI theorist Simon Saunders once told a reporter. “I’ll just accept [it] and then think about something else, to save my sanity.”

Is thinking about something else a viable strategy to escape the psychological consequences of modern cosmology?

Conceivably it is, up to a point. Humans evolved with basic, powerful drives towards survival and procreation, and even religiosity; they thus probably have, on average, a significant innate resistance to nihilist worldviews. Even now, well into the third millennium A.D., most of the human population professes belief in one religion or another. Also, obviously, the average person has no deep understanding of, or interest in, MWI or other modern cosmological theories.

Yet the things we do learn and think about ultimately affect our behavior, if only subconsciously. One doesn’t have to be a philosopher or a psychologist to understand—to take another extreme example—that if we all knew our solar system would be obliterated within a year, making it obvious that our existence was and always had been inconsequential, enough of us would fall into despair that our societies would start to disintegrate immediately.

I think the reason we’ve largely been able, so far, to resist the toxic implications of modern cosmology is simply that we haven’t been forced to confront them. But that situation is changing.

When I was growing up in the 1970s and early 80s, cosmology was expansive but still quite tame compared to what was coming. Carl Sagan’s 1980 Cosmos TV series on PBS, for example, was hardly despair-inducing. One could contemplate the large universe depicted by Sagan and other pop cosmologists of the time, and, as I noted above, could still fantasize about humans’ someday traversing and conquering it. MWI and other infinite-universe theories had not yet caught on, certainly not at the popular level.

These days, by contrast, MWI and similar “parallel universe” themes are essential elements of pop cosmology, and, perhaps more importantly, are also common in pop culture generally.

Moreover, although technologies based on quantum mechanics (such as lasers) have been around for decades, newer quantum tech such as quantum computing and quantum encryption emphasizes, for the first time, the spookier, multiplicity-of-states aspect of quantum mechanics—the aspect that MWI essentially was devised to explain. Thus, from popular science to tech to popular media culture generally, people are being exposed to the infinite-universe/multiverse idea as never before, and in ever-stronger doses.

The impact of that rising exposure won’t be immediately obvious. There are, and in the coming decades will continue to be, many other drivers of despair, disruption, suicide, and social disintegration in the modern world—drivers such as cultural feminization, mass immigration, and human-displacing AI systems. Trying to disentangle the effect of one of these from the others is going to be challenging, to put it mildly. But, if my hypothesis is correct, “cosmological despair” will weigh more and more heavily and evidently on developed societies—especially among younger people, who will encounter MWI and similarly harsh cosmologies in their formative years, never having had the comforts of older, friendlier worldviews. In other words, if the world is now entering an Age of Despair principally for other reasons, cosmology will keep it there terminally.

*

There probably aren’t very many clear examples, yet, of people taking their own lives as a result of belief in MWI or other toxic cosmologies. However, something like this seems to have happened in the case of Hugh Everett III—the physicist who developed the original version of MWI (“’Relative State’ Formulation of Quantum Mechanics”) as his Princeton PhD thesis in 1956.

Everett eventually became a financially successful tech entrepreneur and, in most ways seemed normal, being married with children, having friends, and pursuing ordinary hobbies and pleasures that included wine-making and ocean liner cruises. However . . .

Everett firmly believed that his many-worlds theory guaranteed him immortality: His consciousness, he argued, is bound at each branching to follow whatever path does not lead to death—and so on ad infinitum. [link]

Probably at least partly due to this belief, he smoked, drank, and ate with abandon, which ultimately gave him a fatal heart attack in 1982, when he was only 51 years old. In accordance with his wishes, his body was cremated and his ashes were thrown out with other household garbage.

A decade and a half later, Everett’s troubled 39-year-old daughter Liz took her own life even more directly. She left a note to the effect that she wanted her own ashes thrown out with the garbage, so that she might “end up in the correct parallel universe to meet up w[ith] Daddy.”

***

The new Western culture, especially the American variety, offers the old-fashioned conservative male dissident many trends to bewail. Discrimination against white males! Promotion of LGBTQ lifestyles! The trans mania with its mutilation of children and destruction of women’s sports! Suppression of meritocracy, free speech, free scientific inquiry, and due process of law! Runaway entitlement spending! Open borders! Critical race theory! The ESG investing fad! No-prosecute policies in violent cities! Proliferation of social contagions and hysterical illnesses, from ROGD and PTSD to Tik-Tok Tourette’s! Cascades of cancellations of perfectly competent white males, e.g., for “grading too hard in organic chemistry,” or for cracking an off-color joke! Widespread exclusion (in effect) of males from important professions, including public relations, publishing, and clinical psychology/psychotherapy. “Math is White Supremacy!” “Showing up for work is White Supremacy!!” “Not being a pea-brained slob is White Supremacy!!!”

My argument here is that everybody should stop bewailing these trends as separate phenomena—should stop fighting “wokeness” or “ESG” or the trans mania. They should, instead, focus on the one factor that underlies and causes all of these social developments.

Of course, I mean women—or more precisely, women’s newfound power in organizations and institutions, and in the culture generally.

An assumption everyone seems to have made during the decades of female emancipation is that women see things more or less as men do, and are just as devoted as men to the principles underlying Western civilization. Not so! As some feminist writers, including Virginia Woolf, warned long ago, women when they enter public life in business and government tend to look around and see lots of things they want to change. They’re just not fans, to the extent that men are, of things like free speech, open debate, due process of law, meritocracy, free scientific inquiry, maximizing shareholder value, equality of opportunity, and so on.

It’s not that women have worked things out logically and carefully and comprehensively, and now want to formally enact a scheme they think is better. It’s more that things in Western civ, which was made by men, often go against the emotional grain with women, causing them real discomfort, and compelling them to react. Women’s instincts were shaped by evolution for a maternal and domestic context, and seem to bias them towards short-term, feelgood, nurturing, and protective outcomes—on average compared to men. These instincts seem to be especially aroused by things like persistent racial inequality, discussions of race-based IQ differences, ruthless meritocratic competition unleavened by sympathy for the losers, stern cross-examinations of women making rape claims, medical skepticism over women’s unverifiable symptoms, and the kind of frat-boy humor that has gotten so many men cancelled. Now that women are largely in charge, they question why we need such things—or peremptorily try to stamp them out.

There are some nuances to this general theory. First, a lot of women are not woke. But the argument here is really about women on average as compared to men on average, and I don’t think it could be reasonably disputed that women, on average and compared to men, are significantly biased in the direction of wokeness. It’s also obviously true that modest average psychological differences between the sexes could translate to big social changes when one sex takes power from the other. I would suggest too that the women who seek power in institutions are less likely to be “average” women and more likely to be childless activist types. There is, moreover, a hell of a lot of depression and anxiety among modern women, especially younger ones, and that as well may push many women to embrace the woke activism mindset as a therapeutic source of meaning and purpose.

Another nuance has to do with women’s apparently superior ability, compared to men, to align themselves emotionally within a group. This means, in effect, that women in an organization will tend to be less independent-minded, with the tradeoff that they can collectively punch above their weight. Among the examples that come to mind is the recent cancellation of Woody Allen from his publisher due to activism among the publishing company’s junior staff. (The publishing industry, like public relations and psychology/psychiatry/psychotherapy, is utterly dominated by women—“junior staff” in publishing generally means millennial women.)

Women, as I’ve suggested in a recent essay, may also have, collectively, a stronger drive to dominate organizations, to eliminate the greater discomfort they experience when exposed to male organizational culture. Certainly the female-to-male ratio in many organizations now is one that would be condemned as discriminatory (by women) were the proportions reversed.

A further nuance, which I think will become increasingly obvious and important as our societal “pink shift” advances, is that women, as they align emotionally within groups, and ultimately purge dissenting voices, tend to cause the institutions they control to become unstable. In other words, like hysteria-prone convents of half a millenium ago, female-dominated institutions become relatively susceptible to groupthink contagions that swing them irrationally this way and that. Today these contagions introduce relatively mild new absurdities like pronoun declarations and land acknowledgments. But I expect it’s all going to get loopier, and more harshly enforced, as time goes on and female control solidifies.

Lastly, somewhat hair-splittingly, I don’t think that women when left to themselves running male-built institutions necessarily become woke in the way that we see now. I see wokeness as a contemporary, contagious mindset (not quite an ideology) that corresponds very well to, and thus easily infects, the average female mind, still moreso the younger, more neurotic, more activist female mind. But in principle, under different circumstances, one could gin up something substantially different that would also spread well among women, provided that it pressed their main buttons. Certainly in the centuries before women took such a large part in public life, thought contagions among them were common and varied, though usually localized and rarely very consequential (rarely but not never—see, for example, the Salem Witchcraft Hysteria).

But back to my main argument: If wokeness and its variants are all epiphenomena of the new, historically unprecedented power of women in public life, measures taken against wokeness etc. could be ineffective if there is no acknowledgment of the true source of the problem. Indeed all means short of reducing women’s presence in public life might be futile.

I’m not advocating a specific strategy, but I think it’s important at least to highlight this dilemma, which Western countries obviously have no easy way of resolving. It may be that over time, the current, Cultural Revolution-like surge of wokeness subsides and becomes less radical, as the women pushing wokeness are increasingly forced to acknowledge some of its adverse consequences, such as rising crime from weak law enforcement, social dissolution from uncontrolled immigration, the institutional incompetence that flows inevitably from the abandonment of meritocracy, and the aforementioned institutional instability.

Then again, by the time things get bad enough for women to acknowledge that they aren’t necessarily better than men at managing our civilization, the process of degeneration might be very, very advanced. Indeed, it’s plausible that, by then, other, even stronger, less reversible adverse processes—ethnic conflict, for example—will be underway, effectively sealing the West’s fate.

***

Author’s note:

I’d appreciate it, reader, if you would link to my essays on cultural feminization (or otherwise cite them) wherever you see this topic being discussed. I’ve been writing about “cult-fem” for more than a decade—which, as far as I know, is much longer than anyone else. Some of my essays have circulated widely in recent years, and I’ve even placed one in a moderately well-read webzine. I like to think that my contributions have helped seed what is becoming an important public discourse. Yet those contributions of mine are almost never acknowledged by the better-known opinionators who have ventured into this realm in the last year or so. Being pseudonymous and writing principally from a personal website seem to have left me in the unhappy state of being “much read but seldom cited.” (I discuss the general problem of citation in the Internet age in my short essay “The Tree of Knowledge.”)

Also, though I don’t charge a subscription to this website, or put ads on it, or even solicit donations, you could buy a copy of my e-book (see image below, linked to its Amazon page) if you’d like to support my writing.

*

A quick summary for those coming to this for the first time.

I’ve been in the habit of citing one of my 2019 essays, “The Great Feminization” or “The Day the Logic Died,” as an introduction to the idea of cultural feminization. Since those pieces were written, though, I’ve posted other essays on this topic, expanding this “idea space” a bit more with each one. So it might be useful now, to those coming to this for the first time, to have an updated short summary of the whole picture as I see it.

In a Nutshell

Women, because of their different ways of thinking and behaving on average, and their new, strong influence over culture and politics, are the principal drivers of modern social change, including all aspects of wokeness.

From Home to Office

American women—whose sociocultural circumstances are very similar to those of other Western women—obtained full equality in voting rights by constitutional amendment more than a century ago. That had significant cultural and political consequences, but it was only a small part of the story of women’s modern empowerment. The big change occurred in the period 1950-2000, when women shifted, en masse and on a durable, peacetime basis, from being dedicated homemakers to participating more or less equally alongside men in the working world and public life. The labor force participation rate charts below (the first for American men, the second for women) clearly show this shift.

As I wrote in “The Great Feminization”:

The historic significance of this migration on its own appears to have been underappreciated. Women never made such a move, to such a degree, in any large human society in the past. It significantly altered the structure of ordinary life.

But women in the late 20th century didn’t just move into the workforce. They moved into its upper ranks, to professions that strongly influence societal culture and policy. They became journalists, public relations specialists, lawyers, academics, novelists, publishers, filmmakers, TV producers, and politicians, all to an unprecedented extent. In some of these culture-making professions, by the 1990s and early 2000s, they had achieved parity or even dominance (e.g., writers, authors, and public relations specialists) with respect to men. Even where they fell short of full parity, they appeared to acquire considerable “veto” power over content. A 2017 report by the Women’s Media Center noted evidence that at the vast majority of media companies, at least one woman is among the top three editors.

Women Think Differently About Cultural and Political Matters

Women’s ascension to power in culture- and policy-making professions has been followed by extensive cultural and political changes. Why? Because women, on average, think differently than men do about cultural and political issues. This should not be surprising: The bodies and minds of women and men were shaped long ago by biological and cultural evolution for their distinct traditional roles in life. Women’s distinct roles obviously have required certain psychological traits or tendencies that are different from male traits. I think most of us would agree that these innately feminine traits include:

1. • A greater emotional sensitivity and capacity for empathy/compassion/nurturing.

• • A greater fearfulness and aversion to risks (concerning dangers to themselves and others), including an extra sensitivity to the risks of toxic and other environmental threats (reflected in hormone-driven pregnancy behaviors such as food/odor aversions and compulsive “nesting”).

• • A greater affinity for people and relationships, and lesser affinity for constructed, systemized, and abstract things.

• • A greater tendency to align emotionally when in a group, especially a group of other women—a tendency that implies a superior ability (individually and collectively) to transmit emotions and other social contagions.

• • A reduced affinity for competition and capacity for resistance to aggressors.

• • Greater affinity for themes of suffering and victimhood, with correspondingly less interest in triumphant “male” themes of exploration and conquest.

Probably most of these traits are interrelated. In any case, when one considers these broad aspects of “innate femininity,” it isn’t hard to see that the very sudden extension of their dominance—from women’s traditional domestic domain to all areas of public life—would help account for the dramatic social changes of the past half-century or so.

It also isn’t hard to see that women tend to support these social changes more than men do—although it’s important to understand that by altering the culture, women have influenced not only their own but also men’s thinking and behavior.

Social changes likely to have been driven by the ascendancy of female traits

• • Much more generous welfare programs.

• • Extensions of the concept of welfare to include more types of intervention (e.g., affirmative action) and more groups needing intervention (“traditionally marginalized groups”).

• • Excessively honoring (e.g., with pronoun declaration rituals) anyone with a claim to victimhood or some other “special identity” status.

• • Very strong social reactions to media portrayals of racial injustice/inequity, e.g., the near-hysterias following the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO and George Floyd in Minneapolis, MN.

• • Inflations of the traditional definitions of “harm,” “offense,” “trauma,” “violence,” “aggression,” etc., as reflected in new terms such as “microaggressions” and “triggers.”

• • An astounding belief (from men’s perspective) in slight or even imaginary emotional upsets as sources of real harm in the world. This belief is reflected in everyday female-produced media content but also in the new hyper-focus on psychological trauma in law and medicine, and of course in the vast inflation of trauma-related syndromes such as PTSD (and the recovered-trauma-memory syndromes of the 1980s/90s, before they were discredited).

• • A shift away from the traditional deterrence of criminal behavior with punishment and stigmatization, in preference for compassion-based, non-stigmatizing solutions (e.g., non-prosecute policies for most crimes, free needles for addicts).

• • Reduced tolerance of deaths in war, despite (ironically) a greater inclination to enter foreign conflicts in response to emotion-evoking atrocities portrayed on television.

• • Less tolerance for capital punishment and other harsh sentences, especially where the “traditionally disadvantaged” are concerned.

• • Less restrictive immigration policy, again driven by stories and imagery (pitiable refugee children, huddled masses, etc.) that evoke maternal protective/nurturing instincts.

• • In general, much more emphasis in media and policy contexts on compassion-evoking stories of individuals, with correspondingly less emphasis on (even condemnation of!) coldly logical risk/benefit analyses focused on the long term.

• • Suppression of potentially upsetting ideas or expressions (“hate speech,” “mansplaining”), words, facts (e.g., on racial differences in criminality), free debate and free speech, due process of law (especially when women are plaintiffs), and even some fields of scientific inquiry.

• • Helicopter parenting.

• • Obsession with safety, e.g., as seen in new terms such as “safe space.”

• • Rise of “green” movement and related cultural themes involving opposition to nuclear power, GMO, “toxins,” “chemicals,” even vaccines (a movement that was increasing in popularity, with female leadership, pre-COVID-19). Related shift towards “natural” foods and medicines, including those produced by the relatively unregulated supplements industry. Rise of hysteria variants involving claims of chemical hypersensitivity, toxic metals, etc.

• • Decline in interest in engineering, as shown by greater reliance on foreign-born students at e-schools, loss of Western pre-eminence (to China) in advanced engineering projects.

• • Predominance of “social media” in Western life.

• • Shift away from technical themes and toward social (woke) themes in female-dominated STEM media and professions, e.g., “math is white supremacist.”

• • Shift away from traditional, hierarchical, rule-based religions toward more loosely structured and therapeutic forms of worship and spirituality.

• • Frequent and rapid social contagions of new cultural themes (e.g., wokeness and its various associated behaviors and terminology, from BLM worship to the trans mania), affecting virtually all organizations and institutions—because women, the chief transmitters of these contagions, are highly influential in organizations and institutions.

• • Increase in the frequency and prevalence of overtly pathological social contagions (hysterias) such as Tik-Tok-induced Tourette’s-like behavior.

• • Tendency of professions and institutions to become female-dominated by systematically excluding (especially white) males—who are “problematic” for grouped women, simply because of their innate male resistance to institutional feminization.

• • General increase in intolerant, “hive-mind” behavior in institutions and professions as a consequence of increasing female dominance.

• • Marked preference for inclusivity and equity over traditional meritocratic discrimination, everywhere from schools to companies to political appointees and candidates. “Participation trophies.”

• • Virtually uniform emphasis on victimhood themes in Western literary fiction, coincident with female takeover of publishing industry.

• • Reduced public interest in adventurous endeavors such as manned space exploration (“we should fix poverty and inequality here on Earth first”).

• • Demotion of traditional heroes such as Christopher Columbus and Thomas Jefferson and promotion of their alleged victims, e.g., Native Americans, Sally Hemings.

Obviously, not every woman out there likes or is driving these changes. The differences between men’s and women’s mindsets are differences on average.

Moreover, the mindset underlying these shifts—a mindset that, in some of these cases, seems sensitive to the point of neuroticism—might not even be that of the average woman. I suspect it more closely represents the attitudes of the single, childless activists who have been most energetic in pushing these social changes. For them, perhaps, society and its “disadvantaged,” from African-Americans to Rio Grande-crossing illegal immigrants, are substitutes for the children they don’t have.

Cultural Feminization is Problematic

One sufficient and conservative reason for doubting that cultural feminization is a good thing is simply that it entails the abrupt replacement of a large set of civilizational traits that were embedded in Western people, culturally and probably biologically, over thousands of years. Not every Western trait is essential to the West’s survival or is even still adaptive in the modern world. But discarding these traits at the whim of female activists seems a bit like deleting genes willy-nilly from the human genome. Could you do that without bad consequences? Yes, conceivably—but it’s far more likely to end in disaster.

Another good reason to oppose or limit cultural feminization is that, while men traditionally led societies and thus would have been expected to evolve attitudes and behaviors appropriate for that role, women traditionally were confined to other, more private roles, centering on maternity. In other words, why should we suppose that being a mother, or being shaped by evolution for motherhood, is a better preparation for public life than . . . serving in public life, as men have done for ages?

There are further reasons that have to do with specific effects of feminization. For example, feminization appears to have brought a new cultural and political emphasis on short-term, feelgood consequences, with less emphasis on—I would say a blindness to—long-term consequences. It should be obvious that this is unsustainable and must end badly.

Moreover, females’ lesser affinity, even hostility, for due process of law, free debate, unfettered scientific inquiry, and related aspects of Western, small-l liberalism, seems likely to render the West relatively static, sclerotic, and poor if allowed to run to its logical conclusion.

Then, of course, there is the apparent female (relative to male) embrace of mass immigration to the West from the Third World, which I think has the potential to dissolve Western societies faster than any other factor.

I think it’s worth mentioning too, though it’s more speculative, that the apparent decades-long slide in testosterone levels in men might be an effect of cultural feminization. Testosterone levels in men (and women) are known to be regulated by social cues, such as winning or losing competitions, and so it would make sense that cultural messaging condemning and suppressing traditional masculinity would have a T-lowering effect. Lower T means lower fertility, which below a certain threshold—one that Legacy Americans sank beneath long ago—leads ultimately to the extinction of the population.

Lastly, there is the sense of taboo that enshrouds the idea of cultural feminization, in general but especially when it is framed negatively. The high-profile MSM types (Cowen, Edsall) who have touched the subject (only in the last year or so, as far as I know) have been approving or very mild in their concerns. Also, for more than a decade now, most of the short essays I’ve tried to get published on this subject, including in some pretty right wing publications, have been rejected. In every case, a female editor had veto power, and I think her male colleagues also feared the hostile ululations that would ensue if they published my unvarnished take. Anyhow, an old quote (often attributed to Voltaire) seems apt here: “If you want to know who rules over you, look at whom you’re not allowed to criticize.”

Further reading

“The Great Feminization” (2019)

“The Day the Logic Died” (2019)

“Cultural Feminization: a Bibliography” (2021)

The Great Feminization: Women as Drivers of Modern Social Change (2022)

* * *

Author’s note:

I’d appreciate it, reader, if you would link to my essays on cultural feminization (or otherwise cite them) wherever you see this topic being discussed. I’ve been writing about “cult-fem” for more than a decade—which, as far as I know, is much longer than anyone else. Some of my essays have circulated widely in recent years, and I’ve even placed one in a moderately well-read webzine. I like to think that my contributions have helped seed what is becoming an important public discourse. Yet those contributions of mine are almost never acknowledged by the better-known opinionators who have ventured into this realm in the last year or so. Being pseudonymous and writing principally from a personal website seem to have left me in the unhappy state of being “much read but seldom cited.” (I discuss the general problem of citation in the Internet age in my short essay “The Tree of Knowledge.”)

Also, though I don’t charge a subscription to this website, or put ads on it, or even solicit donations, you could buy a copy of my e-book (see image below, linked to its Amazon page) if you’d like to support my writing.

From conception through adolescence, male and female humans—mammals in general—are driven along distinct neural and anatomical developmental pathways by androgen and estrogen hormones, men having more of the former, women having more of the latter. The divergences in those developmental pathways lead to the innate differences in attitudes and behaviors between men and women.

One of the most striking of these behavioral/attitude differences has to do with risk: Women are, on average compared to men, markedly less willing to undertake risks—more “risk-averse”—and this gender difference has been shown (here and here, for example) to be broadly testosterone (T)-linked. In general, research in the past few decades suggests that either the bloodstream T level, or a marker (based on relative finger lengths) of prenatal T exposure, or both, predicts a person’s propensity for risky behaviors, as well as for competition and aggression.

Social psychology experiments on risk aversion typically examine risk behaviors, such as gambling choices, that can be studied relatively tidily in a laboratory setting. At the same time, in the modern West, low risk-aversion is often framed as a negative, maladaptive trait that tends to lead people astray. In fact, in the real world, the ability to cope with fear and take big risks is probably an essential step in the process of civilization. As Camille Paglia famously quipped, “If civilization had been left in female hands, we’d still be living in grass huts.”

Indeed, a greater willingness to take risks, even in comparison to other male-run civilizations, is plausibly one of the reasons the West got so far out in front of the rest: exploring and conquering most of the non-European world, developing the most technologically and culturally advanced societies ever known, exploring outer space, etc. But now that the West’s culture and policy have been heavily feminized, the lesser female enthusiasm for risky adventures like space exploration—a difference that seems even more pronounced anecdotally than it is in surveys—helps explain why spending on such endeavors has become just a tiny fraction of spending on welfare and other matters dear to women’s hearts.

[link]

That testosterone reduces fear, enhances the willingness to compete, and enhances the desire to dominate probably is a major reason men, on average compared to women, are more competitive, more willing to engage in violence, less subject to anxiety and fear, and less emotionally sensitive in general. Again, this is entirely what one would expect from men’s traditional roles not only as explorers but also as hunters and warriors. And, of course, we know that the vast majority of violent criminals are male. Thus, “willingness to fight” and related traits are obviously gender-determined to a great extent.

Should we care if the West’s feminization makes its people and their leaders less inclined towards fighting as well as exploration? Yes, we should care, especially if not all countries have been feminized. In the latter context, a country’s feminine aversion to fighting could result in its becoming enslaved, or even extinguished in genocide, by a less-feminized rival. But even a more subtle weakness could make a country highly susceptible to a bully’s manipulative threats.

For example, many already view the current New Zealand prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, as a personification of that weakness.

In general, human civilization seems to requires a willingness—at least in a critical mass of the population—to undertake fearful hardships, stresses, even violence and death, for good ends. Without men and their fear-lowering testosterone, who would supply that crucial willingness?

Testosterone and a feminized culture

Speaking of testosterone, if you haven’t been living in a cave for the past two decades, you know that T levels in men have been declining—in other words, men at a given age today tend to have lower T levels than men of the same age a few decades ago. Studies [link, link, link, link] have found this alarming trend in multiple developed countries including the US. Some of these studies have specifically controlled for potentially confounding factors such as increases in obesity, which lowers T, and still have found evidence of a decline.

No one really knows what is causing this drop in T levels among men. Apart from rising obesity, which almost certainly accounts for some of the problem, suspected culprits include estrogen-mimicking compounds that leach out of common plastics, and the big decline in cigarette smoking among men (smoking inhibits estrogen synthesis, and a few studies have linked smoking to higher T).

One hypothesis that never gets mentioned—well, except by me—is that cultural feminization is itself a significant driver of declines in T. In other words, the recent feminine shift in cultural themes and norms, which effectively suppresses and stigmatizes many traditional aspects of traditional masculinity, and the related loss of male power in society, has had an essentially feminizing effect on the male brain, resulting among other things in lower T levels.

This hypothesis could be tested, to some degree, with simple experiments. For example, I would guess that exposure to images or videos of women shouting—a pretty common motif in modern media—could be enough, depending on the dose, to measurably lower T levels in ordinary males.

To some of you, it may seem totally implausible that sociocultural factors, working via cognition and emotion, could influence something as deeply biological as the secretion of a sex hormone. However, it is a well-established phenomenon—in fact, it’s quite clear that the androgen system in mammals was specifically designed by Evolution to be regulated by social and other external cues.

It is known, for example, that sexual activity raises T levels in men (and women). Also, sports players and even their fans show increases in T levels after winning games, whereas losers show decreases. In general, it seems that T levels in men tend to rise before fights and other challenges, and either stay high or keep rising after wins, and drop after losses—one of Nature’s “winner take all” effects. (There is even evidence that becoming a father—which requires a less aggressive, more nurturing character—downregulates T production.) In other words, T levels definitely do rise or fall based on external sociocultural cues, with negative experiences being more likely to drive T levels lower. And thus, in a feminized society that hands men Ls every day, we really should expect them to show significant drops in T.

T and Civilization

In principle, the consequences of lower T levels aren’t all bad. For example, there appears to have been a striking drop in the rate of violent crime in the US since the 1980s and early 90s.

Of course, there are many other factors, including declining lead exposures, the passing of the 80s/90s crack-cocaine epidemic, and changes in urban policing policies, that could help explain this trend. But the hypothesis that falling T levels, over the same period, have contributed, is at least plausible. Wouldn’t that be a good thing?

Maybe in that narrow sense, it would. But, again, there would be tradeoffs. Some would involve men’s health: Low-T, for example, is known to promote depression, osteoporosis, obesity, erectile dysfunction and heart disease, among other adverse health consequences. Other tradeoffs might affect society even more profoundly. In particular, low-T would be expected to reduce men’s sperm counts—which, by the way, is a trend that researchers have specifically detected. Lower T and lower sperm counts would be expected, in turn, to make men less likely to marry and/or have children. One well-known study did find that lower-T men in their mid-20s were less likely to be married several years later—and of course many studies have noted the wider trends of falling marriage and cohabitation rates, and associated birth rates, in recent decades.

[link]

Endemic low-T in a society, or a wider civilization as in the case of the West, might thus be considered a clear warning sign that the bottom is dropping out. One would expect this warning sign to emerge in a society that has been subject to a major defeat in war. In the West, in a historically unprecedented turn of events, it may be happening despite Western war victories and geopolitical supremacy. In other words, Western social liberalism, with its handover of most cultural power to women, may have delivered to its men, and to Western civilization, the equivalent of a crippling defeat.

* * *

“What is it, then, that this craving and this helplessness proclaim to us, but that there was once in man a true happiness of which there now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present? But these are all inadequate, because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself. He only is our true good, and since we have forsaken him, it is a strange thing that there is nothing in nature which has not been serviceable in taking His place; the stars, the heavens, earth, the elements, plants, cabbages, leeks, animals, insects, calves, serpents, fever, pestilence, war, famine, vices, adultery, incest. And since man has lost the true good, everything can appear equally good to him, even his own destruction…”     —Blaise Pascal, Pensées VII (425)

For as long as I can remember, people have been asking: what comes next after Christianity? The assumption has been that Christianity is dying, and, as Christianity once replaced the polytheisms of the classical era, so should something new and improved come along and take its place.

In the 1980s and 90s, there was a relatively relaxed discussion about the possibility of a kind of globalistic spiritualism (or spiritual globalism) as a successor to Christianity: a blend of New Age-y, Earth Mother paganism and save-the-whales activism. But for all the allure that body of belief and practice had for some, women especially, it seems to have failed so far to cohere into anything institutionally serious. Certainly there have been potent religion-substitutes, most recently political-correctness/wokeism and the high fever of the Great Awokening, but these have been just substitutes, more about policy preferences and coping with socioeconomic inequalities—what we render unto Caesar, as Christ might have said—than any reach for the infinite.

I suppose many Christians would say that their religion isn’t going to be replaced anytime soon, because it has been renewing itself with more popular views and practices, for example prioritizing personal religious experience over traditional ritual and hierarchy—and moreover has been spreading, or at least holding steady, in Africa and Latin America. The problem with this view is that overall measures of belief and religious participation have continued to decline in Western countries, especially in the European home of Christianity but even in the relatively Christian United States.

This clear downtrend among Christianity’s original adherents suggests pretty strongly that this religion in its various forms cannot long survive prosperity, education, and the march of science, and in another few generations will be as defunct, globally, as Zoroastrianism—Islam, Judaism and Buddhism soon following it into the graveyard of theisms.

So again, what comes next? What can fill the proverbial God-shaped hole?

There should be some urgency to the question these days, for it is at least plausible that the decline of Christianity represents the loss of a critical source of vitality for Western societies—and is thus a key factor in their ongoing dissolution. This dissolution is seen in the West’s high rates of mental illness, suicide, drug overdoses, and changing demographics due to immigration; and in falling rates of marriage, household formation, and fertility among those of Western heritage. Indeed, the West now appears to face the usual fate of defeated, devitalized and demoralized peoples throughout history, namely population collapse.

Science as Spiritual Antagonist

Having lived since childhood with the cultural expectation that a religious successor to Christianity is coming, and now in middle age failing to see any sign of such a successor on the cultural horizon, I have to suspect that there won’t be one. Science appears to have been eroding not just one or two particular ideas of God but really any idea of a transcendent being worthy of being worshipped.

From personal experience I expect that this process almost always works only in one direction. A person is baptized and raised in the traditions of one of the big religions, but then in the course of modern education and maturation acquires an alternative, agnostic or even atheistic view of the universe—and when that happens, the person finds it very hard to go back again to embrace religiosity and transcendence. How does one put the toothpaste back in the tube?

Science, in other words, seems to be a potent and broad-acting antagonist with respect to whatever part of the human psyche craves religious transcendence. It embraces the infinite, the cosmos, enough to fill the God-shaped hole, blocking all competitors, but it cannot provide the nourishment, the meaning, the seeds of morality, that one gets from a traditional religion.

Part of the appeal of religion is that it flatters believers with the idea that there is a transcendent Being who considers them important enough to care about. “For God so loved the world” etc. Science obliterates this conceit along with all the other traditional assumptions humans have made about their elevated rank in the universe. “Since Copernicus,” Nietzsche famously wrote, “man seems to have got himself on an inclined plane—now he is slipping faster and faster away from the center into—what? into nothingness? into a ‘penetrating sense of his nothingness?’”

The point here, or the suggested hypothesis, is that science, despite being beneficial to humanity in many ways, is also harmful in a critical psychological way. This is not a new idea, but it and its implications seem to have been underexplored, to say the least. Do science’s malign effects outweigh its benign effects? What if science inevitably sets up a “despair trap” through which any sentient species can pass only with difficulty? Does this putative barrier explain the so-called Fermi Paradox, named for the Nobel-winning physicist Enrico Fermi—who wondered why, if life evolves so easily in the universe, ET civilizations aren’t abundantly evident to us?

Increasingly Toxic Knowledge

Most people are protected from the toxic effects of science by their lack of awareness of, and interest in, the parts of science that deal with the nature of reality and the universe—the parts that blot out the warm sun of the old religions. But, as science takes an ever-larger role in education, in politics, in popular media content and so on, people increasingly will have to confront these toxic parts. Those who absorb such knowledge would not even have to be consciously aware of its toxic effect on them. The pathways and processes connecting learned information to depression and demoralization could work slowly, and entirely “below the limen,” in the unconscious parts of the mind.

In any case, one can easily get the gist of this demoralizing knowledge by skimming through any contemporary popular treatment of cosmology. There one will find laid out, in the weirdly upbeat prose preferred by publishers, cosmologists’ conviction that Earth and its humans make up an infinitesimal speck within a reality comprised of vast, multiple and multiply-dimensioned universes. The acceptance of such a reality raises an obvious and discomfiting question: Would a God that reigns supreme over such a vastness really take notice of an insignificant and presumably backward species such as ours?

The more one reads about the modern scientific understanding of reality, the worse it gets. Arguably the most important scientific advance of the past century is quantum mechanics (QM). The fundamental mathematical equations of this discipline, derived in the 1920s from experimental observations, have been proved accurate again and again, and are the basis for many modern technologies. Yet the physical reality suggested by QM’s equations is severely at odds with the ways in which humans tend to think about themselves and their world. Indeed, the prevailing theory about QM reality is about as cold and nihilistic as any theory could be.

This prevailing theory was originally called the Relative State Formulation by its inventor (a lapsed Catholic named Hugh Everett, who died in relative obscurity in 1982), but is now famously known as the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI). It suggests that the particles constituting the fabric of “reality” exist naturally not as discrete, individual objects but as what might be called an interconnected multiplicity of states—a ghostly multiplicity that indicates the presence of separate worlds or universes.

In other words, while our reality appears to be constructed of discrete particles, and we generally experience only one world or universe that appears to proceed probabilistically along one timeline, there is in fact a wider reality—a “multiverse”—consisting of an infinitude of other universes.

MWI may be hard to understand if one hasn’t had much physics. But its central idea is that, across the multiverse, everything happens that can happen. In other words, at any moment, the particles that make up any object, including a human, have, collectively, a vast number of immediate futures. These are not possible futures—they all happen/exist, just in different universes. Over short intervals, on the order of seconds or fractions of a second, the differences between these alternate outcomes will be relatively subtle, a matter of slight, seemingly random variations in the positions and other attributes of the subatomic particles making up the object of interest. However, as time goes on—as seconds run to days and years—the differences in outcomes increase dramatically, and of course every branch on this tree of possibility keeps branching again and again, with every femtosecond tick of the cosmic clock. Thus, any person, or any other object, faces at any moment a near-infinitude of futures, and, again, each of these—according to MWI—actually happens in a separate universe within the multiverse.

I’ve never seen any emphasis of this point in popular treatments of MWI, but the theory suggests that the multiverse—all Creation—has a perfect completeness. Its history could be imagined as a closed book on which each page has been inked solid black with the superimposed imprints of innumerable typed and re-typed characters. From the perspective of its godlike author, the book would contain every possible story. From the perspective of an individual human, incapable of perceiving more than one (very brief) timeline, it would contain only the story through which he has lived—though, again, this individual human would really have been only one manifestation of a rather hazily defined collective entity that, from the moment of birth and at every moment thereafter, proliferated into every possible variation of identity and experience.

Whether the ever-branching universes that make up the multiverse are created ex nihil, or already exist—beyond time as it were—in a meta-realm of every possibility (that closed book of over-inked pages) is something that MWI theorists still debate. But the implications for the human self-image are just as dire either way.

In essence, “you” will have been a hero in some of the worlds you have lived through, a villain in others, a nonentity in most. From the perspective of a god who sees all these timelines, do you deserve punishment for your villainy, praise for your heroism, scorn or pity for your nonentity-ness? Wouldn’t such a god understand, instead, that you—far from having any agency in the way that humans instinctively assume—have been fundamentally obliged to be all things, across all your timelines, simply to fill out the full space of possibilities comprising multiversal reality?

And from the perspective of such a god—or of any entity that can apprehend the reality of the multiverse—what are the histories, written or experienced, of myopic humans who think the one universe they perceive is all there is? Do these single-timeline accounts have any more significance than, say, the precise arrangements of handfuls of sand tossed by random children on a beach? These arrangements, these histories, may be influenced by “laws” that relate precedents to outcomes. But the fundamental variability that drives them, collectively, to satisfy every possibility, suggests that their individual significances to an MWI-perceiving god would be nothing—zero.

Does MWI’s final reduction of the “meaning of life” to absolute zero really have dire implications for humanity? Must we believe, with Pascal, that the human psyche has within it an “infinite abyss” that “can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object”? Humans like other animals have evolved, first and foremost, to live and to procreate. Moreover, through medical advances that enable longer and longer lifespans, humans may soon start to see themselves as very godlike.

Yet humans are a contemplative species, and if they can be inspired by contemplating some things, so can they be depressed—even to suicide—by contemplating others. What could be more depressing for them than to become aware of their imprisonment within one tiny solar system, in one vast universe of implicitly zero meaning and significance, inside an infinitely wider multiverse. Hugh Everett himself appears to have felt this conflict and its implications, in the sense that he became an atheist who smoke, drank, and ate to excess—essentially killing himself with a heart attack at the age of only 51—and before he died specified that his remains should be thrown away like garbage.

Beware ETs Bearing Gifts

Humans appear to be bound to confront QM and MWI not only through popular science literature and routine technical education, but also as quantum technology (especially quantum computing) starts to replace conventional technology in many applications—causing users of the new tech to wonder, how does this really work?

Conceivably, modern societies, through some radical cultural shift—perhaps driven by the new and unprecedented cultural power of women—will avoid this confrontation by turning away from science. The elevation of science that we see in the modern West is, after all, a relatively recent cultural choice, one that not every civilization has made. By rejecting that choice, for example as the Amish have, humans could protect themselves from MWI and similar toxic knowledge indefinitely. For now, though, it seems unlikely they will choose such a radical change of direction.

Another possibility we tend to overlook is that humans, whatever their choices, might nevertheless be abruptly forced to confront toxic scientific knowledge, if an extraterrestrial civilization were ever to visit Earth and attempt communication. What is the nature of reality? How is the fabric of existence constructed? Those are among the first questions we would ask visitors from a more advanced, star-faring civilization.

Martin Amis once touched upon this theme in a short story titled “The Janitor on Mars,” which, suffice it to say, was pretty dark in its view of human morale and morality in the context of an encounter with a superior ET civilization bearing nihilistic cosmological revelations. The least dark element of the story was the impending sudden destruction of the Earth and extinction of humans. In real life, humans probably wouldn’t be granted such a mercy, and would have to die off slowly, one by one in “deaths of despair,” and multitude by multitude in suicide cults and wars.

The fact that craft from ET civilizations are, at least, scarce in Earth’s skies, could thus reflect not only a “despair trap” that strangles most technical civilizations in their cradles, but also the awareness—among those fortunate civilizations that have survived the trap—of the potent effect of the knowledge they carry, on such naïve and primitive species as ours.

***