technology – Pain In The Bud

The Strange Experience Of Others Insisting Your Writing Is AI

Those of us with even a modicum of writing talent are suddenly bumping up against hostile readers who insist we’re purveyors of AI slop. The people we have to thank for this new experience? The purveyors of AI slop.

Fresh off reading a fiction novel and highly amused by the author’s tendency to go on bizarre tangents, I wrote a few hundred satirical words mimicking his style and shared it to a subreddit.

I expected like-minded people to respond. Hopefully they’d find it amusing. At the very least, it should spark a conversation.

Instead I checked back the next day to find my post hidden by downvotes.

The top comment: “AI slop, f— off loser.”

The second-highest rated comment was simply “ChatGPT.”

I should have cut my losses and moved on, but it bothered me that something I wrote could be so easily and thoughtlessly dismissed as the product of AI. So I responded explaining that I had in fact written the post, slapping it together during some downtime because I thought fellow readers might get a kick out of it.

I have many deficiencies as a writer which frustrate me to no end, but I do have a modest talent for literary mimicry that I’ve deployed at various times to make observations about novelists like George R.R. Martin, popular essayists like Mitch Albom, and people like Donald Trump, whose speech patterns are practically emblazoned in neon.

No, the commenters told me. You didn’t write that post, you used ChatGPT, you are a loser, and you need to f— right off with your AI slop.

Apparently it is now inconceivable that human beings with even moderate talent exist, that anyone would spend 15 minutes jotting down a satirical take on a popular book or TV show, or put any effort into anything at all when we can cognitively offload everything.

It just happened to me again twice in recent weeks, bringing the total to probably half a dozen times since January. It doesn’t happen here because readers know me, and the blog has been around for seven years. If I’ve been using a large language model to write this blog, then I must have a time machine that allowed me to access the tech at least two years before its first crude incarnations were tested in-house at OpenAI.

Plus there’s no other idiot out there who writes absurd stories glorifying his pet cat for fictional adventures like running a criminal catnip empire. It’s not as if there’s a line of people trying to emulate what we do here, nor is there profit in it. It’s a labor of love not just because I love cats, but also because I love my cat. He’s changed my life for the better and I enjoy writing about his antics.

There is also a strong argument for not caring. Social media and general forums are not lacking for miserable cynics and people who work through their real life frustrations by vomiting bile in every direction.

I don’t need to justify myself to every cynic and malcontent, nor do I want to take on the burden of proving a negative.

The real-life impact of AI on the news and publishing industries

Unfortunately it’s becoming more difficult to ignore because it’s beginning to impact more than just online dialog.

Generative AI has put the editors of genre magazines and periodicals on their back feet. Editors, already overworked, find themselves trying to navigate “a swamp of slop.” Some have shut down general submissions entirely. Others have adopted convoluted processes or require known writers to vouch for the submitter, as if they’re applying for membership in an exclusive social club.

Generative AI is also destroying what’s left of the news industry, and the damage is now so widespread that it isn’t only impacting people who used to crank out simple daily stories. When entire publications fold and companies like Gannett turn formerly excellent broadsheets into little more than AI-generated shells for advertising inserts, investigative journalism jobs disappear and government employees at the municipal, county and state level operate without anyone keeping watch.

I think about some of the stories I wrote: A series about an unusually high number of suicides on particular bridges in New York that led to major changes in safety features on those bridges. A comprehensive account of extensive fraud in the state jail system. An investigation into New York-based charities guilty of outright corruption or abysmal program spending, run by people who paid themselves well and held glitzy charity galas, but actually raised very little or nothing for the causes they claimed to represent. An interview with the traumatized dad of a mass shooter who kept blaming himself and asking “Where did I go wrong as a father?”

And the story I’m most proud of, an 11th-hour rush job about an abducted girl, an article I scrambled to get done by the print deadline and submitted just minutes before pagination files were sent to pre-press. The story ran in one of our sister papers in New Jersey, leading to a reader recognizing the kidnapper the same day it was published. The reader called police, who found the man with the young girl he’d abducted.

I helped save a kid from a horrific, life-altering trauma! I don’t say that to toot my own horn, but to emphasize the value of real journalism, of human beings prioritizing a story and making every effort to get it done and published when there are real stakes. The story wasn’t anything special, it didn’t stretch my abilities or win any awards, but it impacted the lives of a real family for the better.

A machine could not have taken a call from a panicked mother, reassured her every effort would be made to get the story out, driven to the detective bureau after hours to verify the details, found out where the abductor had roots, and made sure the story ran in the newspaper covering the area where the abductor likely fled with his victim.

That kind of journalism cannot be replaced by AI or bloggers. It takes training, strong news judgment, the ability to navigate bureaucratic circles of hell, and lots of patience in dealing with people who consider reporters irredeemable bottom-feeders.

At least as it stands now, generative AI can’t replace a thoughtful interviewer, a true investigative reporter, or honest analysis of important stories. An investigative reporter can use AI to help scour thousands of documents for a needle in a haystack or to search for hidden patterns, but that is an example of incorporating the tech into a workflow, using it to make drudge work easier, not using it to replace a human. Human consciousness and judgment is still the guiding force behind the effort.

Still, I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me that this is happening as often as it has been recently. We may be living in an age of algorithmic AI, of simulated intelligence instead of AGI and true machine cognition, but this is not what I envisioned while imagining the ways AI could impact society.

It’s also frustrating that my writing is now automatically dismissed as “slop” because it doesn’t have some arbitrary lack of polish to it, or because people are cynical in general.

My writing is the closest thing to my consciousness, to my mind, to me.

Obviously I format and attempt to copy edit my own posts. A replica of my stream of consciousness wouldn’t make for coherent, entertaining reading. But when I write a post about an issue impacting animals, my feelings for my best Bud, or something else that I’ve got an opinion on, you’re reading my thoughts on the subject.

That is a direct result of who I am. To offload that to a machine seems insane, an abdication of my mind, personality and voice to a fancy bit of code.

AI-generated content is even more ubiquitous than we realize

When I finish my novel — a narrative that weaves elements of space opera with themes about species conservation and appreciation for our one and only home planet — will I run into skeptical editors? Will some people dismiss it out of hand if they deem it too polished or they’ve been inundated with submissions from people who see AI as a shortcut to getting published? Will there still be a book publishing industry?

A Wall Street Journal story about the most recent AI publishing scandal.

The doors are already closing. In the latest scandal, a publishing company withdrew a multimillion-dollar advance to an author whose debut had sparked a bidding war because he used AI to write the novel. (The claimed author, Jerry Falade, says he did not use AI and argues he’s a victim of racism targeting black novelists, though it’s worth pointing out that it wasn’t just the publishers who bought the rights in the US and UK who cancelled the book. His agent dropped him too, saying she “could no longer substantiate” Falade’s insistence that he wrote the book.)

Given the fact that they’re voluntarily shelving a novel that was likely to move copies and make them a tidy profit, it’s difficult to believe the publishers and agent made the decision lightly.

The fact that Falade is an academic does not shield him from suspicion. The writer Sam Kriss has called out several people in higher education for using AI, including Narges Bajoghli, an assistant professor of Middle East Studies at John Hopkins University. Kriss cited this passage, which screams “I wrote this with ChatGPT”:

“Not a ceremony. Not a transition. A series of viral moments. A missile arc across a pale sky, and below it, the world already changed.”

Indeed, that precise sentence construction appears in another bit of AI writing highlighted by Kriss, and you can find it in AI-generated writing all over the internet. “Not an X. Not a Y. A Z,” followed by a bit of purple prose that sounds vaguely poetic but says nothing. Why the large language model likes to phrase things that way is a mystery, but it must have appeared in annotated data sets used by OpenAI to train the algorithm, and now it’s popping up with alarming regularity in essays, news stories and fiction writing “authored” by people who have suddenly and miraculously transformed into prolific, polished writers.

Not an accident. Not a happy coincidence. A blaring klaxon forged in ones and zeroes, summoned by prompt engineers communing with the machine gods.

That’s just one example, but AI’s penchant for using certain phrases and rhythmic structures has led to an unsettling, self-reinforcing homogeneity. The more AI uses these constructions, the more we’re hammered over the head with them, the more they leak into our own conversations and writing. It’s like going on vacation with a friend and coming back two weeks later to realize you’ve picked up on their favorite exclamations. Except that friend is now everywhere at once, and half your work colleagues have incorporated his -isms into their everyday dialog.

I use AI for images, which makes me a hypocrite

This has, of course, led me to reevaluate my use of generative AI images on this blog.

I’ve justified it by telling myself there was never going to be a situation in which I’d commission a professional artist to paint images of my cat dunking over NBA players in a summer league game, looking comically ridiculous in a powdered wig as a captain aboard a 17th century ship of the line, or riding through the jungle on the back of a jaguar 10 times his size.

An AI-generated image of Buddy playing street ball at a Manhattan court. I tend to use AI for two things: to explain physics concepts I have difficulty wrapping my head around, and to generate images of my cat in ridiculous situations.

There’s also a crucial difference in that I’m using AI images to illustrate humor stories on a blog, not submitting them to galleries or publications as my own work, then accepting payment and plaudits for them, which is what many people are doing with AI-authored writing.

While that’s true, it’s also true that I’m participating in the devaluing of art on some level. More recently I’ve made a conscious effort to limit its use here, but that still makes me a hypocrite. I relied on it too heavily in the past and now routinely see blogs that use it for every post. I’m not judging those bloggers, merely observing how much we’ve all come to rely on the technology.

The improbably prolific new masters of prose

On the writing side, there’s also been a deluge of new “storytellers” who write generic stuff in a punchy style, with minimalist sentences and formatting that is unmistakably the output of a large language model. They blog under names like “Stories from the Mind Of…” or “Weekend Stories With…” and they always seem to have the right anecdote to illustrate some generic societal ill.

Many of these new, astonishingly prolific writers are publishing their AI-generated stories on platforms like WordPress, WebNovel, Royal Road and Youtube, and people are eating it up despite the fact that it’s machine-generated, generic content. It’s not coincidence that Amazon suddenly has three times as many book titles for sale, or that there are entire YouTube channels dedicated to genre stories — horror, science fiction, romance — that contain all the hallmarks and language quirks of AI, including nearly identical plots, recycled character names, and recycled phrases. Nor is it happenstance that they’ve all materialized out of nowhere in the last year or two.

A Youtube channel that posts science fiction stories narrated by AI, with images created by AI, and music created by AI, by a person who claims he does not use AI to generate his stories despite all the hallmarks of AI-generated writing.

Some publish stories of 8,000 to 10,000 words several times a week or even daily! As a writer who came up in a daily news environment, I’ve learned to pump out accurate, polished posts with regularity. It is a requirement of the job.

If you can write in a busy newsroom with phones ringing, police scanners buzzing, and more than 100 coworkers in an open office plan chatting away, you can write just about anywhere.

And yet I cannot dream of dropping polished 8,000-word fiction stories every single day. No human being can do that. Even if you can keep that pace for a short while (and very few people can), before long you’ll be derailed by burnout, a lack of new ideas, stories that just don’t come together the way you envisioned. Or maybe life just gets in the way.

The hidden physical cost of AI

A server room at CERN, the large hadron collider in Switzerland. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

While I don’t want to come off as one of those people who reflexively condemns new forms of tech, the more I learn about the infrastructure behind AI, the less I like it.

AI requires massive data centers that rival or exceed cities in power consumption. While it’s true that data centers have existed for decades, the centers that power AI are a new breed, orders of magnitude more power-hungry than their predecessors.

Advanced processors require cool ambient temperatures but they also generate lots of waste heat, meaning data centers are also a huge drain on water reserves. That’s the second law of thermodynamics. With summers getting hotter, what happens when there are droughts? If you think the government will tell big tech to ease up on data center water consumption, you’re probably not aware that our government doesn’t even protect cities and states from overwhelming water consumption by foreign-owned industrial farms.

There are communities in the southwest that have become endangered because, for example, Saudi-owned alfalfa farms consume so much water that there’s none left over for the people who live there. Politicians listen to the people who have the deepest pockets and a town of 10,000 in Arizona can’t compete with the vast wealth at the disposal of Saudi Arabian interests, even when those constituents have been reduced to frantically filling gallon containers in the brief interludes when new rainfall temporarily replenishes reservoirs.

Don’t like it? Go to Costco and stock up on spring water. No, the congressman cannot take your call. He’s got a meeting on data center expansion this afternoon.

If our elected representatives side with foreign investors over their own voters, we have little chance of them siding with us over deep-pocketed technology giants, headed by tech oligarchs who cut checks to lawmakers in every election cycle and already have their tendrils deep in government at every level.

Finally, about that cognitive offloading we talked about earlier: the mind and brain depend on keeping skills sharp. If we don’t use it, we lose it. It’s very easy to see how capabilities and intelligence may regress in our society if everyone uses AI for virtually everything.

Maybe all this is pointless. Maybe I am, in the words of Kriss, merely expressing “the rage of a rapidly obsolescing ape.”

I’m not condemning anyone who uses AI and I’m not saying I’ll never use AI again. That would make an even bigger hypocrite out of me, and it would be an act of self-harm not to keep up with such a rapidly-evolving technology. But I am going to make an effort to use it sparingly, hopefully only when absolutely necessary, and never to write a single word for me.

As a one-man band without a budget, for example, I rely on free-license photos from Wikimedia Commons and Pexels to provide visuals for my posts. Which is fine for the majority of topics, but sometimes there are obscure stories that cannot be illustrated with existing free photos.

For the other stuff, I’ll go back to the simple charms of bad Photoshops of Buddy as a Godzilla-size cat stomping around Manhattan in search of similarly massive turkeys.

And let’s hope services like Pangram, which claims 99 percent accuracy in detecting AI-generated writing, stay ahead in the arms race. Already people determined to use AI to become authors and storytellers are using so-called “humanizers” in an attempt to fool those apps. I suspect the next few years will look an awful lot like the unending battle between hackers and security companies in their own arms race to stay ahead of exploits.

Tech Oligarchs Can’t Distinguish Science Fiction From Reality

When people with nearly unlimited power and money want to reshape society in the image of fanciful fiction and they’re unable to separate fantasy from reality, that’s a problem for all of us.

More than a few times over the past few years I’ve read comments from the tech oligarchs — Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos and company — and thought, “He’s definitely read [insert science fiction novel here.]”

Zuckerberg, for instance, was clearly besotted with Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash when he renamed his company Meta and poured a literal fortune into his watered down version of the metaverse imagined in the novel.

Snow Crash came out in 1992 before the vast majority of people had dial-up internet, let alone a concept of cyberspace or the always-on, interactive mobile internet of today. It’s hugely influential among tech enthusiasts, and it’s one reason Stephenson and other SF novelists were paid to be “idea guys” for tech companies.

Now Musk has name-dropped Iain Banks in a viral interview with The Economist this week, which ended with the wealthiest man in human history going into a full meltdown and throwing a tantrum over sensible, obvious questions. It’s remarkable that a man who built a peerless business empire has the emotional maturity of a toddler, although the closer you look at Musk’s businesses, the more it becomes obvious their valuations are not tethered to reality any more than he is.

The problem is that Musk, like the others, moves through life in a bubble surrounded by people who tell him he walks on water, and no one in his orbit would dream of suggesting he’s confused about something, let alone actually mistaken. Yes, Elon! That’s brilliant, Elon! You are a gift to all mankind, Elon!

Elon’s favorite science fiction

When The Economist’s interviewer pressed Musk on his contradictory views about society and equality, Musk told her she should read Banks’ work. Unfortunately either he hasn’t read it either, or somehow managed to make it through those thick volumes without absorbing themes that may as well be emblazoned in neon.

Banks, for the uninitiated, was a Scottish science fiction writer of astonishing talent.

He was best known for writing a series of novels collectively known as The Culture, which portray a far future utopia, a post-scarcity human society. The Culture is run by ultra-benevolent, conscientious AIs called Minds who not only serve as the serene caretakers and shepherds of humanity, but oversee all the automation and logistics that transform society into the prosperous, fair and idyllic commonwealth the novels imagine. Machines, in other words, do all the work people don’t want to do.

When I read The Culture novels, I saw what almost everybody else sees: the work of an author who is uncomfortable with ideological extremes, views a blended socialist model as possible and even preferable in a situation where resources are no longer scarce, and is more than willing to kick the crap out of the society he imagined by showing its worst aspects, cognitive dissonances and potential pitfalls, perhaps as a warning not to take it too seriously. (And as a humble admission that he’s just making this stuff up, so really, don’t get carried away with it.)

All of it is rendered in gorgeous, shimmering prose, populated by characters who are a riot to spend time with, and garnished with dialog that reveals a rare gift for capturing the rhythms and beauty of the English language.

Banks, unfortunately, is no longer around. He died in 2013 after a diagnosis of incurable gall bladder cancer, and the literary world is significantly poorer for that loss.

But he made his political views known in interviews and his personal life in addition to his novels, which is why it’s hard to believe Musk thinks MAGA and Trumpism are atavistic forms of The Culture‘s utopian, fair society.

On the one hand, Musk claims we’re 10 years from the kind of post-scarcity society portrayed in science fiction novels, that we’ll all have endless resources and get to fill our days pursuing our personal interests because money won’t mean anything. It’s an aspirational if unrealistic claim.

On the other hand, as The Economist’s interviewer pointed out, Musk has been relentless in his hoarding of wealth, gives no money to charity, and seems to amuse himself primarily by pouring fuel on the culture war fires.

Culture wars, rage bait and pseudo-andriea (ψευδανδρεία)

The tech CEO and world’s wealthiest man is remarkably committed to playing the heel online.

He constantly wades into arguments regardless of whether he knows anything about the subject matter. He delights in making incendiary comments about topics like Islam and immigration. And he is seemingly incapable of going one day without showing us his inner child.

“I literally challenged Vladimir Putin to one on one physical combat over Ukraine” he wrote on X last year before crediting himself and his Starlink service for the smaller country’s battlefield successes against Russia.

A few months later he bragged that he was the first “[A]merican druid in [D]iablo to clear abattoir of zir and ended that season as best in the USA,” which might be the second-most ridiculous thing a human being has written, surpassed only by his fantasy of the entire world cheering as he defeats Putin mano e mano. (Musk lied about his video game “accomplishments,” unsurprisingly. Gamers, who are not as credulous as Musk imagines, quickly figured out that moneybags paid a pro gamer to log into his account, play as him, and achieve the top ranking so the world could unite in awe at Elon Musk’s magnificent button-pushing skills. 1337, ladies and gentlemen.)

He cleared the Abattoir of Zir! Hand this man a Medal of Freedom, give him the powers that used to belong to congress and let him cook! And if he wants to cosplay as Achilles and Hector Vladimir Putin into surrendering, wonderful! It’ll save us billions in munitions and aid to Ukraine.

As The Economist’s interviewer continued asking follow-ups about Musk’s imaginary technological heaven, the trillionaire was “so agitated by facing real questions that he just resorted to whining about how awful the media can be. He seemed to think that his popularity on X, the platform he owns, was evidence that most people actually love him,” Gizmodo noted:

“A quarter billion people follow me,” Musk said, referring to his X followers, adding “I think a lot more people actually like me than don’t.” The billionaire then said that “a lot more people hate you and the media more than you realize.”

Beddoes acknowledged that many people hate journalists, but Musk kept going, repeating “they hate you, they hate you,” like an emotionally wounded child. Musk, flailing, tried to come up with some way to attack The Economist specifically.

“There are more people that die in Europe from heat deaths than people that die from gun deaths in America. Why aren’t you writing an article about air conditioning?” asked Musk.

“Well, we’ve done several on air conditioning, and we had on our cover last week a whole long piece about…” said Beddoes.

“Pro-air conditioning?” Musk asked sheepishly.

“Very pro-air conditioning,” she responded. “You should read us sometime.”

Peter Thiel plays a Lvl 82 Mage

Musk and Zuckerberg aren’t the only ones.

Peter Thiel occupies a different realm. The man who runs the most comprehensive database on the personal details of Americans, whose company enjoys government contracts worth billions and has surpassed every federal agency as the avatar of Big Brother, not only named his business after a wizard’s magical device from The Lord of the Rings, but has spent the last year or two on a worldwide tour in which he lectures attendees on the anti-Christ.

Drawing on the work of Vladimir Solovyov (the 19th century Russian philosopher, not the Putin propagandist who dresses like the admiral of a galactic war fleet), and combining it with peculiar fringe Catholicism, Thiel likes to tell his audiences that the anti-Christ is inbound, he’ll be a technocrat who speaks often of peace and human rights, and he’ll be helped by evil villains like people advocating for AI safety and environmental stewardship.

Very convenient, that. In Thiel’s telling, the anti-Christ’s minions are precisely the same people who want guardrails on his businesses.

In addition to being an obvious fan of The Lord of the Rings, Thiel lists the aforementioned Stephenson as a major influence along with Atlas Shrugged and Dangerous by Milo Yiannopolous. I’m not even going to comment on that except to say what awful company for Stephenson.

These are windows into the world view of a paranoid man who now controls all of our data and wants us to be assured we’re very safe in the hands of Peter Thiel, who will safeguard our browsing habits and protect us from the anti-Christ and his minions.

Bezos, too, is a fan of Stephenson, Banks et al, and his public statements indicate he saw what he wanted to see in those stories regardless of what their authors intended.

Understanding the books that spark the imagination of men with so much power is, I’d argue, an essential element in understanding how they think, what they want, and where they believe they’re taking us as a species.

Because make no mistake, these men believe they will decide the future of humanity. What happens from here is impossible to predict, but we’d be negligent to dismiss the collective power and influence of the wealthiest individuals in the history of our species, men who can not only outright buy small countries but also own enormously influential media platforms, private spaceflight companies and communications networks. Amazon Web Services, for example, provides almost a third of all cloud services worldwide, while tens of millions use Starlink to access the internet in more than 160 countries.

In their view, the tech oligarchs will determine what happens from here. Not democratically elected politicians, not voters themselves, not people who have devoted their lives to studying how society works.

They don’t feel indebted to the rest of our species and don’t envision giving us a seat at the table. In an attempt to explain why he doesn’t donate money to charity and sits on an incomparable mountain of wealth like an autistic Smaug, Musk says his work itself is so valuable that no amount of charitable giving could match the gifts he already bestows on mankind. That’s also why he courts mates with a charming pick-up line (“Want to have my babies?“) and maintains a compound in Texas where his concubines raise his Little Musks, who have names like Æ 么-010011 Ʃrik Technomancer and ąƬh33ną Sŏmni-4ㆁ4.

Propagating his Muskian DNA, he believes, is the greatest gift he could give to humankind alongside the technology products produced by his companies.

Tech oligarchs think they’re destined to usher us into a glorious new era in which people live on Mars and Europa, our eyes collectively turn to interstellar colonization, the evil forces of evil (anyone skeptical of them) will be defeated along with the anti-Christ, and this society will be idyllic and judicious with everyone standing as “equals” save the immortal oligarchs, who will occupy permanent positions above humanity, their lives extended indefinitely by the medichines, nanobot-supplemented blood and cybernetic enhancements that exist in their favorite novels.

They, of course, will decide how resources are divided, where research money is diverted, which projects take priority. That’s a scary thought when you consider none of them have expressed much compassion for society’s least fortunate, and some of them have long records of hostility toward people at the bottom.

It’s bad enough that they are staunch in their conviction that their wealth makes them best-qualified to determine our collective future. If they can’t distinguish between fiction and reality, that’s very much our problem whether we like it or not.

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What’s Something You’d Love To See In The Future, But Know You Probably Won’t Live To Witness?

One day humanity will make contact with another civilization in our galaxy. The odds are almost certain we won’t be alive to see it.

Daily writing prompt

What’s something you’d love to see in the future, but know you probably won’t live to witness?

View all responses

That’s easy: first contact with an alien civilization.

I’m a space and science fiction fanatic. I mainline science fiction novels, keep tabs on the latest discoveries via the JWST, and I think about what’s out there probably more than I should.

There’s a burning desire in our hearts — for some of us, at least — to know for sure that we’re not the only ones, that humanity is not alone in a cold, lonely and infinite universe.

The events of 2026 are testament to that desire to know. Between the government release of UFO-related documents, former government employees coming forward with tall tales of crashed ships of non-terrestrial origin, and the return of Steven Spielberg to the director’s chair for another film speculating about what’s Out There, we’ve been thinking about aliens quite a bit collectively.

As for that central question, I’m not talking about simple cellular life. I don’t think you can find an astrophysicist, astrobiologist, astronomer, evolutionary biologist or anyone in a tangentially related field who honestly thinks life is unique to our planet.

The more relevant question is whether we are the sole sapient species, the lone civilization in our galaxy.

Think about the numbers: There are an estimated 300 billion star systems and trillions of planets in the Milky Way! Life has had a lot of places to evolve.

The Fermi paradox

That was the point the physicist Enrico Fermi made in 1950, when he had a now-famous lunchtime conversation with fellow scientists at Los Alamos. Probability alone indicates the galaxy should be teeming with life.

So, he asked his colleagues, where is everyone?

It’s now known as the Fermi paradox, and it’s guaranteed to come up in almost every conversation about the possibility of intelligent aliens. With so many star systems, planets and moons, surely some other species took an evolutionary path toward intelligence.

It’s a bit more complicated than that, of course. In a universe that is 13.7 billion years old, there has been enough time for innumerable species to evolve and fade, for countless empires to rise and fall. That means the question is “When is everyone?” just as much as it’s “Where is everyone?”

The truth is we’ve only been looking in earnest for about half a century. It’s only in the last four or five decades that we’ve had telescopes like the Hubble, Spitzer, Kepler and James Webb, which have revolutionized astronomy by giving us views we could previously only dream of.

It was only in the 90s that astronomers pointed the venerable Hubble at a black, seemingly empty patch of space, took a two week exposure and changed our understanding of the cosmos forever when the resulting image showed some 10,000 galaxies that were too faint to see before.

That patch covered only 2.6 arc minutes, or 1/24 millionth of the sky!

A partial image of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Credit: NASA

Despite what we’ve learned, we’ve barely begun the search for other intelligent civilizations.

Drawing any conclusions from our efforts so far would be like organizing a manhunt, then calling it off five seconds later because the suspect hasn’t been caught yet. Fifty years is nothing when scouring the cosmos. It’s less than an eyeblink of an eyeblink on a galactic scale.

Looking in the wrong place

As for the idea that aliens have visited us, that they crossed the interstellar void to etch patterns in our crops, delight stoners with light shows and evade every camera on the planet except for low resolution bricks from the dawn of the cell phone era, I’m not buying it. Neither should anyone else. Likewise for the claim by the JD Vances of the world insisting alleged UFOs are “demons” sent to torment us.

As Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and it is abundantly clear that the UFO enthusiast community can only offer blurry images not because of a lack of high resolution cameras, but because high res photos of the “phenomena” reveal they are mundane objects. They only become strange spacecraft when you blur them and squint.

Bird. Insect close to the camera. Exhaust plume. Debris. Visual artefact. Maybe. Proof of aliens? Absolutely not.

But there’s another, more important reason why aliens are not joyriding through our skies: if aliens are out there, there simply has not been enough time for them to become aware of our existence, let alone travel here.

Even light is “slow” on a galactic scale

As most of us know, when we look at the stars we’re seeing them as they were in the past, not as they are now. That’s because the distances between stars are so mind-bogglingly great that even light, which moves faster than anything in our universe, takes ages to cross the void.

The same limitation applies for anyone who might be looking in our direction from somewhere else in the galaxy. They see our star system as it was, not as it is. They see a silent star system without signs of an intelligent civilization.

Starliners and generation ships are popular concepts in science fiction for interstellar journeys that can take decades, centuries or longer.

Our galaxy is more than 100,000 light years across, so let’s say an intelligent alien race exists relatively close by in galactic terms, at “only” 500 light years away.

We have been a technological civilization for only a short time and didn’t create signals powerful enough to reach beyond our star system until the 1970s, according to SETI. That means there weren’t technosignatures hinting at our presence until about 50 years ago.

As a result, the soonest our hypothetical aliens could become aware we exist is about 450 years from now. That is how long it will take light carrying information about our technosignatures to reach them.

If our hypothetical alien friends are looking in our direction (a massive if in a galaxy with 300 billion stars to analyze), and if they have highly advanced telescopes, they might detect us. If we imagine they’re friendly and they send a message saying “Howdy, neighbors! You’re not alone! There are wonders to discover and many civilizations to meet out here!” it would take another 500 years for the message to reach us.

That means we wouldn’t know anything until around the year 3,000, if we survive that long without blowing ourselves up. (That’s a real possibility, and things aren’t looking very promising right now.)

And again, that’s if hypothetical intelligent aliens exist in our immediate galactic neighborhood. If there’s an intelligent civilization that exists, say, 4,000 light years away — which is still not very far in galactic terms — the soonest we could hear from them is about 8,000 years from now. (Four thousand for them to detect our technosignatures, four thousand for their message to reach us.)

The point is, space is big. Ridiculously, incomprehensibly, stupidly vast. More than 99.995 percent of the galaxy cannot be aware of our existence yet, let alone travel here, because of the reasons explained above.

The distances between stars are so great that we cannot comprehend them as they are, because nothing in human experience compares. We can only understand them in the abstract. As terrestrial animals with short lives, we are simply not equipped to live or think on galactic timescales.

The sun’s location within the Milky Way galaxy. Not to scale.

To put this in context another way, our closest stellar neighbor, a volatile triple star system, is 4.3 light years away. Yet even with the most advanced propulsion systems currently available to us, it would take us more than 70,000 years to get there!

If we manage to crack fusion and humanity’s most brilliant engineers are able to fit a starship with a compact fusion reactor, the travel time to the nearest star becomes “only” about 7,000 years.

Understanding just how big space is, and how long it takes to travel between stars, goes a long way to explaining why we’re wasting our time and resources with a fruitless search for alleged alien craft in our skies.

Light moves at 186,282 miles per second. Credit: Ehsan Ahmadnejad/Pexels

So where does that leave us?

I believe that one day we will learn we’re not alone. By we, I mean our species. I really hope it happens in my lifetime, but for all the reasons explained above, that’s wishfull thinking. The universe doesn’t care what we want, and it certainly doesn’t change the geometry of space-time to accommodate the wishes of dreamers on Earth.

Alien: Friend or foe?

I don’t think we’ll have to worry about belligerence. If a civilization is capable of sending ships to us, there’s literally nothing in our inventory of meager, planet-based resources that could interest a species that advanced. They wouldn’t want to eat us, because our biology would not be compatible. The amount of energy our entire civilization can muster would be laughable to an interstellar species.

And as the physicist Michio Kaku has argued, there’s a very strong argument to be made that if a species is advanced enough that interstellar travel is relatively trivial, it would have long ago shed any tendencies toward tribalism, sectarian violence or inventing gods of the gaps. You simply cannot reach that stage of advancement if you’re wasting resources and your most brilliant minds on war and petty divisions. (Kaku knows that better than anyone. His mentor was Edward Teller of Manhattan Project fame.)

The more significant danger, as Kaku likes to say, is that we may be beneath their notice and we’ll get “paved over.” A civilization capable of building cosmic megastructures, for example, wouldn’t consult us any more than we’d consult ants before laying a six lane super highway over their ant hill.

Still, there’s always a chance we’ll encounter something like MorningLightMountain, the nightmare alien intelligence from Peter F. Hamilton’s incomparable novel Pandora’s Star. The problem with MorningLightMountain wasn’t that diplomacy failed. There was no disagreement over resources or territory. Humans didn’t threaten it.

Rather, the alien’s psychology was so different from ours that it could not understand the concept of allowing other life to exist in the galaxy. No amount of discussion or attempts to persuade it would have made a difference, so immediately upon learning of our existence it launched a genocidal war that forms the bulk of Pandora’s Star and its sequel, Judas Unchained, two of the most beloved books in the modern science fiction canon.

Still, I’d like to think there is a galactic fraternity out there, an informal alliance of intelligent species united by curiosity and the effort to understand our universe. Whatever’s out there is likely to take forms we can never imagine and think in ways that never occurred to us.

If one day we do make first contact, I hope the best of humanity will be our representatives. And on that day, I hope humanity will be awestruck by the wonder of the universe, realize that slaughtering each other over land or beliefs is insane, and finally become united as a species.

Or even better, finally united as the children of Earth. After all, Buddy has made it abundantly clear that if I come into possession of a starship, he gets the most comfortable seat on board and gets to drive. The latter ain’t happening, but as for the former, I’d be thrilled to explore the cosmos with my little pal.

The Big Cats Of ‘Exodus’ Are Badass

The new science fiction franchise consists of novels, a short film, a game due out next year, and an encyclopedic art book. It’s got a compelling narrative, deep lore and all the trappings of great SF, and best of all it has awesome big cats.

Exodus is a hugely anticipated upcoming game from the team behind the beloved Mass Effect series, but it’s so much more than that.

It’s also a 900-plus page science fiction novel, Exodus: The Archimedes Engine by the outstanding novelist Peter F. Hamilton. A second book, Exodus: The Helium Sea, also authored by Hamilton, is due for release on June 16. A short film in the Amazon Prime Video series Secret Level, titled Exodus: Odyssey, further expands the fictional universe and its lore, as does an “encyclopedia” hardcover about the Exodus universe, its major factions, planets and technology.

Matthew McConaughy is enthusiastically involved, as an actor and producer. (Allright, allright, allright!)

Oh, and it has big cats!

The screenshots in this post are from Exodus: Odyssey, and depict an Awakened Jaguar.

In Exodus, certain animals are “Awakened,” meaning they’ve been genetically modified to give them cognitive and physical gifts.

In the case of big cats, it means they’re smart enough to understand human language, follow complex instructions, interact with technology, and make decisions. Big cats are companions, guards and serve as intimidating special units in the military.

The Awakened Jaguar in this scene is the companion and guardian of a planetary governor. He’s very protective of his human and immediately leaps up to growl in warning when a visitor takes an aggressive step forward.

The Awakened Jaguar leaps up as a conversation becomes intense.

Awakened animals can wear tech peripherals, weapons, armor and tools. Big cats are mostly muscle, guards, soldiers and are used to intimidate enemies, while planetary police forces use Awakened dogs and one prominent character is an Awakened octopus who occupies a tank in his own personal mech, allowing him freedom of movement outside of water.

In Exodus: The Archimedes Engine, there’s a scene depicting Awakened Lions deployed with the military. They’re considerably larger than terrestrial elephants, weighing several tons, standing three times the height of adult men. They’re terrifying to behold, which is precisely why the Celestial military has them accompany their generals as honor guards.

There are also Awakened Tigers who are bigger and much more intelligent than their Earthly counterparts, with fur that can function as active camouflage. The Awakened Tigers are described and illustrated in a companion book, which notes that while the genetically modified big cats are powerful, intimidating and extremely effective, they also have voracious appetites, scarfing down more than a hundred pounds of meat per day.

The Exodus encyclopedia shows an Awakened Tiger standing protectively over a recon soldier:

A two-page illustration of an Awakened Tiger from the Exodus Encyclopedia.

As for the story behind Exodus, I cannot say enough good things about Exodus: The Archimedes Engine.

Hamilton is known for sprawling far-future narratives that combine memorable characters with fabulous technology, vividly imagined societies and awe-inspiring discoveries in the cosmos.

Many of his novels deal with humanity’s encounters with alien civilizations, which range from the serenely benevolent (the Raiel) to the terrifyingly genocidal (MorningLightMountain) and everything in between.

Exodus departs from that template to tell a story about a conflict between regular humans and the Celestials, post-humans who have spent tens of thousands of years on a self-guided evolutionary path that has transformed them into creatures that no longer bear any resemblance to the rest of humanity.

A Celestial queen from the Crown Dominion. The Crown Dominion’s Celestials appear bizarre to us but are actually among the more “normal” looking of the Celestial factions. The most inhuman are said to be the dread Mara Yama and the Talloch-Te.

To say the Celestials consider themselves better than “baseline” humanity is a drastic understatement — Celestial societies have no qualms about breeding humans for specialized labor and roles, emphasizing traits like subservience and loyalty.

In other words, regular humans are treated the same way many in our current society treat animals, as commodities and resources to exploit.

Naturally that does not sit well with people, and the central narrative follows a rebellious group who seek to free every faction from Celestial shackles.

I’m looking forward eagerly to Exodus: The Helium Sea, the second epic novel set for release in six short weeks. I was a bit anxious that a series of novels as a tie-in to a game would be somehow not as great as Hamilton’s usual books, but I should have known the author doesn’t do anything half-assed. The first book introduced compelling mysteries and answered a lot of burning questions, but left plenty to look forward to and resolve.

And as much as I’m hyped for the story, I’m also crossing my fingers for more big cats. Maybe I can convince the creative team that their universe needs an Awakened Buddy…

“No, dude, I get the captain’s quarters! I will generously allow you to use my bed and you will continue to have the honor of being my pillow and stuff.”

UK Man Pays $22k To Have Cat Cryogenically Frozen, Hoping To Revive Her In The Future

Using a technology most commonly associated with science fiction, the UK man is banking on a technologically gleaming future where he and his cat can be revived and meet again.

A man in the UK has spent a small fortune on the possibility of reviving his dead cat.

Mark McAuliffe says he was so upset when his 23-year-old cat’s health began to fail that he made arrangements with a Swiss firm to preserve her body when she passed away.

The 38-year-old adopted Bonny, a domestic shorthair, while he was a teenager, and she’s been with him for more than half his life, including his entire adulthood.

Usually when stories like this make the news, they’re about people who preserve their cat or dog’s DNA for cloning.

That’s not what’s happening here.

Bonny has been placed in a cryopreservation unit, which uses liquid nitrogen to freeze her entire body. Freezing a body essentially suspends it in time. Extremely cold temperatures — as close to absolute zero as possible — suspend cellular activity, including decay.

It’s called cryopreservation, and while the concept is most frequently invoked in science fiction, putting a body into cryostasis is real and within the technological capabilities of modern science.

The company McAuliffe paid to preserve his cat is Switzerland-based Tomorrow Bio, which is affiliated with the European Biostasis Foundation. The technology is used for several other purposes in the medical field, the food industry and in certain engineering applications.

McAuliffe is gambling on the future, or a version of it in which people and animals can be revived and repaired, like Lazarus in a lab. But it wouldn’t be much of a future for Bonny if her human wasn’t with her, so McAuliffe has reserved a spot for himself as well, hoping to meet her in better times.

“This cushioned the blow about Bonny’s death,” he said, “because I have got it in the back of my mind that it is not going to be the final goodbye.”

Employees of Tomorrow Bio inspect a liquid nitrogen pod. Credit: Tomorrow Bio

The European Biostasis Foundation runs the cryovaults where clients are kept. The organization told the Daily Mail that it has five “full body patients,” 15 preserved brains, two dogs and eight cats. In addition, more than 700 people have made arrangements to have their own bodies frozen upon death.

There is, of course, a hiccup.

While freezing a body is possible, thawing is not — not without destroying the body.

That’s because ice crystals form and rupture cell walls when the body is brought out of cryopreservation, no matter how slow the process.

The workaround involves using cryoprotectants, essentially a form of anti-freeze that would prevent the formation of damaging ice crystals despite the temperature.

That, however, introduces an entirely new set of problems, including the fact that cryoprotectant is toxic at the levels required for preservation.

Preserving the brain presents an entirely different set of problems, as our neurons and neural pathways begin to decay immediately after death. Our brain topology and neural connections are part of who we are, part of what makes our minds uniquely our own. Neuroscience and cryostasis technology each have a long way to go before scientists can even attempt to thaw a brain.

So by spending almost $22,000 to preserve Bony, and buying a plan to preserve himself (at a cost of $230,000), McAuliffe is banking on major breakthroughs in biology, as well as the ability to precisely control temperatures. To successfully thaw a body without destroying it, the entire body must be warmed at the same time, including all internal organs. That’s a significant technical challenge.

It’s also a gamble on the general shape of the future, placing hope that progress will continue. It assumes we won’t lapse into another dark age, that we won’t lose technology and expertise to devastating wars, plagues or other disasters that could set humanity back decades or centuries.

Finally, there’s a major hurdle that has little to do with science behind cryopreservation. It’s the simple fact that human lives are short, companies that promise centuries of operation can’t guarantee that outcome, and a lot can happen while a person sleeps away those years.

There’s a great short story by the Welsh science fiction novelist Alastair Reynolds about a wealthy man who wakes after centuries of cryosleep to find that the company who managed his crypt went bankrupt. From there it changed hands several times until it ended up in the portfolio of a corporate raider.

So the narrator, expecting to be woken to fanfare, deferential treatment and a bright technological future instead finds himself indebted and facing a reality much different and more depressing than he ever imagined.

I sympathize with McAuliffe, who obviously loves Bonny a great deal, and I see the appeal of becoming a refugee from the past, entering into a cryovault in the hope of emerging into a better future. But man, that’s a huge gamble.

In the meantime, there are plenty of cats who need homes and have a lot of love to give. Every shelter cat is a potential Buddy!