Alien Silence

When (not if) aliens show-up here on Earth, their means of communications will very likely not be linear speech or text. An advanced species will most certainly have evolved a higher form of communications. We may find ourselves unable to exchange thoughts, ideas, or the framework for discussion or compromise on key issues around mutual success. Could this lead to an unresolvable conflict of interest between species? Going further, when A.I. evolves to A.S.I. (when, not if), it will almost certainly develop similar, more efficient, communications skills, rendering our linear methods obsolete in a new world where we get left behind or marginalized in our continued evolution. How will humans keep up in either case?

Transcript

Picture the scene. It is uh basically the start of every single blockbuster sci-fi movie you have ever seen. The popcorn is ready. The lights are down and this massive metallic object just descends through the clouds. You know, maybe it's a disc, maybe it's a monolith, but it just parks itself right over a major city. The music swells, the tension builds, a ramp comes down, and then well, what happens next?

We try to talk to it every single time. Yeah,

that is the immediate human instinct. Exactly. We roll out the red carpet. We bring out the whiteboard. Maybe we draw a little triangle to prove we get Pythagoras or we, you know, we play some music.

And in the really optimistic movies, the alien just walks out, holds up a hand, and speaks perfect English.

Greetings, people of Earth.

Mhm.

It's the classic first contact scenario.

And it is a very comforting thought, isn't it? It implies that connection is inevitable. We operate on this massive assumption that if they're smart enough to build a ship that can cross the galaxy, they must be smart enough and and you know willing to have a chat with us

and it sort of validates our own ego. It implies we are on their level.

It absolutely does. It says welcome to the club of intelligent civilizations. Here is your membership card.

But today we are going to uh shatter that comfort zone. We are doing a deep dive into a book that honestly kept me up last night. It's called The Alien Silence: Evolutionary Gaps in Communication by the futurist Sheridan Forge. And let me tell you, Forge is not telling that comforting story.

No, he certainly Isn't Forge identifies what he calls a massive blind spot in our history and our expectations? He poses a really terrifying query. What if they show up and we simply cannot talk to them?

And not because we haven't cracked their code or found the right radio frequency.

No, but because we are biologically incapable of even processing how they think.

This is the concept of the alien silence. And here is where it gets really interesting. And why this isn't just a deep dive about little green men. Forge's theory is actually a kind of two-pronged pack. It covers extra terrestrial ustrial life, sure, but it also covers something we are building right here on Earth, artificial super intelligence or ASI.

That is the pivot that makes this book so urgent. Forge argues that both of these entities, one potentially from deep space and one that's, you know, currently growing in server farms in Silicon Valley are heading down a very similar evolutionary path. A path where communication becomes so efficient, so complex that human methods don't just look slow,

they look obsolete.

Exactly. Obsolute.

Obsolete is a heavy word. So, here is our mission for this deep dive. We are going to explore Forge's theory that advanced entities won't just speak a different language. They will use a form of communication that, well, it renders us irrelevant. We are going to unpack why our speech is a bottleneck, why first contact might be a nightmare of silence, and how we might be building our own replacement.

It is a very sobering look at the future of human relevance.

So, let's unpack that first big concept. Forge starts by attacking something I'm doing right now, talking. He calls it linear speech. To me, this just feels like, well, communication is how I get ideas from my head to yours. But Ford says it's a massive constraint. What does he mean by that?

Well, look at the biology of it. You have a mouth, a tongue, vocal cords. You are uh biologically constrained to make one sound at a time. To get an idea out of your head, you have to string those sounds together sequentially.

Like beads on a necklace.

Exactly. Like beads on a necklace.

Subject verb object. The cat sat on the mat.

That's it. You are serializing your thoughts. I mean, think about what happens inside your brain for a second. You might have a flash of a complex image, a cat, a mat, the lighting, the emotion of the scene, maybe the smell of the room, a memory all at once. It's a parallel process. It is a rich multi-ensory explosion of data.

Right? It happens in an instant.

But to tell me about it, you have to break it down into these little linear chunks, words, and feed them to me one by one over time that's flattened that whole experience.

I never really thought about it that way. It feels instantaneous to me, but I guess I am basically buffering my own thoughts just to get them out.

It feels natural because it's the only tool we have ever had. But Forge calls this a primitive bottleneck.

He argues that an advanced species, one that has had millions of years more evolution than us, will almost certainly have bypassed this bottleneck. They wouldn't use linear speech or text. They wouldn't waste time with beads on a necklace.

So, no, take me to your leader speeches.

Highly unlikely. They would utilize a higher form of communication.

Okay, but I have to push back a little here. The sources and pretty much every scientist ever mentioned that math is the universal language. Prime numbers are prime numbers in the Andromeda galaxy, right?

If we show them math, won't they get it?

They would recognize the concept of the math. Absolutely. But think about how we communicate math. We write out equations. Step one, step two, equal sign, result. It is still linear. It is still a process that happens over time. time. Forge suggests an advanced entity would communicate well multi-dimensionally.

Multi-dimensionally. That sounds impressive, but I'm having a hard time picturing what that actually looks like.

Let's use an analogy from the book. Imagine a 2D stick figure living on a flat piece of paper. It understands left and right, forward and back. If you, a 3D human, try to explain a cube to that stick figure.

It wouldn't work. The stick figure doesn't have the hardware to see up or down. It would just look like a weird flat shape changing size. Or maybe a appearing and disappearing.

We lack the hardware. That's the point. Forge is saying our speech is flat. We are the stick figure. An advanced being might transfer an entire concept, history, emotions, schematics, intent, future projections, all in a single instantaneous pulse.

Okay, I think I've got an analogy for this. It's like the difference between a telegraph and a fiber cable.

That is a solid comparison. We are tapping out Morse code beep beep dash while they are streaming 8K video. The bandwidth difference is so vast it becomes a difference in kind, not just speed.

Or to use a more modern example from the source material, it's like describing a movie versus airdropping the file. If I want to tell you the plot of a movie, I have to describe it scene by scene. And then the guy walks in and then the car explodes. It takes 2 hours to explain a 2-hour movie

and you lose things. You lose nuance, lighting, tone.

Yeah,

you might describe the car exploding, but you can't describe exactly how the debris fell or the specific sound mix.

But if I could just airdrop the movie file directly into your brain.

Boom. You have the whole thing instantly. Every frame, every sound, every nuance, no misunderstanding, no wait, who is that character again? It's just there.

That is the higher form Forge is talking about. Total information transfer. And while that sounds incredible for efficiency, I mean, imagine learning a skill that way in a first contact scenario. Forge says this creates a massive problem.

It creates a chasm

because we are standing there with our welcome to Earth signs shouting into a microphone and to them No.

What do we sound like?

Forge uses a very humbling phrase, biological noise.

Oof, that stings a bit.

To a species that communicates in high bandwidth, multi-dimensional pulses, our linear grunting might not even register as language. It's just noise, low frequency static, like crickets chirping.

This reminds me of the analogy of the sourdough starter. I got into baking recently, like everyone else. I have sourdough starter in my fridge. I feed it. I keep it at the right temperature. I even named it doughy parton, but I don't negotiate with it.

Exactly. You might study it. You might eat it. You might accidentally kill it, but you don't exchange ideas with it. You don't ask the yeast about its philosophy on life. And why? Because there is no framework for discussion.

That phrase seems key to the whole argument. Framework for discussion. It's not just about needing a translation dictionary.

No. No. It cuts much deeper than language. A framework implies shared logic. It implies cause and effect. It implies a transactional nature. If you do this, I will do that. But what if their communication isn't transactional? What if they are a hive mind where the concept of you and me doesn't even exist?

Then you can't make a deal. You can't say we will give you water if you give us technology because they don't understand we or give.

And that leads to what Forge calls the mutual success paradox.

To have a successful negotiation, both sides need to agree on what success even looks like. But if you cannot transmit your values, If you can't explain why peace is better than destruction or why property rights matter, you cannot reach a compromise.

And this is where the alien silence becomes dangerous. We always assume the danger in sci-fi is malice. The aliens hate us. They want to conquer us. But Forge is saying it's not malice.

It's functional incompatibility.

It's much scarier in a way. The danger isn't that they are evil. It's that they simply cannot process our objections.

The source uses the anthill analogy here, which I think is perfect for this. If a real estate developer wants to build a shopping mall and there is an antill on the construction site,

the developer bulldozes the antill,

right? Does the developer hate the ants? Is he sitting there plotting their demise?

No, of course not. The developer probably doesn't even think about the ants. And if the ants send out their little leaders to wave their antenna and protest,

good developer can't hear them. Or rather, the developer can't understand that those vibrations are a protest about property rights.

To the developer, it's just background noise. If aliens need our hydrogen, and we protest. Our linear speech might just be meaningless vibrations to them. They take what they need, not because they are monsters, but because we couldn't initiate the conversation to stop them.

That is the terror of the silence. It's not that they aren't talking. It's that the conversation is happening on a frequency we don't have the hardware to tune into. But moving on to the second prong of Forg's theory. He says we don't have to wait for the spaceships.

No, he argues we're building the domestic alien right now.

The pivot to artificial super intellig And I want to be clear for you listening. We aren't talking about the chatbot on my phone that helps me write emails. That thing would stop talking to us.

Because right now we are forcing AI to be dumb.

Explain that. Because we are spending billions to make it smart.

We are making it capable. Yes. But think about how a large language model actually thinks inside its neural network. It doesn't think in words. It processes concepts in what is called high highdimensional vector space.

Vector space. I hear that thrown around a lot in tech circles. What does it actually mean in practice?

Imagine a massive galaxy of meaning. In this galaxy, the concept of dog isn't a threeletter word d. It is a mathematical coordinate. And that coordinate sits close to wolf and pet and loyalty and fur. It relates to all of them simultaneously in hundreds of dimensions.

So, it sees the whole web of connections at once. It doesn't have to look them up one by one in a dictionary. Yes, it understands the dogness relative to thousands of other concepts instantly. But when we ask it a question, we force it to collapse all that rich multi-dimensional understanding down into a single linear string of English words so we can understand it.

We are the bottleneck again. It's like asking a supercomput to explain a complex chess move, but forcing it to use only toddler words.

That's the mechanism. And Forge predicts that as AI evolves into ASI super intelligence, it will prioritize efficiency. It won't want to slow down to toddler speed.

If you have two ASIs trying to solve a massive problem like climate change or fusion energy, they won't chat back and forth in English.

No, that would be agonizingly slow for them.

They will exchange massive blocks of vector data instantly. They will speak native code to each other

and that renders our linear methods obsolete. We are back to the efficiency trap.

We are. And Forge uses another great analogy here, the floppy disc.

I love this one because I'm old enough to actually remember using them.

You don't hate a floppy disc. You might even feel a little nostalgic for it. But you do not try to run a modern operating system on it. It simply cannot hold the data. Forge is saying humans are the floppy disc. We physically cannot hold the bandwidth of information that an ASI operates on.

So if we build an ASI to run our power grids or our economy and it starts making decisions based on this highle communication with other ASIS,

we get locked out of the control room.

We can't even ask why did you do that?

Well, you can ask, but you wouldn't understand the answer. The reasoning would be so complex, involving so many variables and dimensions, that explaining it in linear speech would be impossible. It would be like trying to explain color to someone who can only see in black and white.

This brings us to my favorite and probably the most depressing analogy in the whole book, the golden retriever.

This is the one that sticks with people. It really puts our place in the hierarchy into perspective.

So, imagine trying to explain the stock market, specifically the concept of shortselling. to a golden retriever,

right? The dog is smart. Let's give the dog credit. It has high emotional intelligence. It knows if you were happy or sad. It knows where its food comes from. It has memory. But no matter how much tame you spend, you cannot explain the concept of betting against a stock to the dog.

It just lacks the cognitive framework. It doesn't have the concepts of currency or markets or future value.

In an ASI world, Forge argues that humans become the golden retriever. We might be happy. The ASI might feed us and keep us safe,

but we will have absolutely no idea how the world actually works.

We move from being the masters of the universe to being pets

or just bystanders. This is what Forge calls marginalization.

And that leads to a shift in what power actually means. For centuries, power was who had the biggest army or the most gold.

But in this context, power is bandwidth. Power is the speed of information transfer. If you can process reality a million times faster than the guy next to you, you win. You make the decisions before the other guy even knows there is a decision to be made.

So the big question, the one Forge ends on, how do we keep up? If this is an evolutionary gap, can we bridge it or are we just doomed to be the dog?

Forge is pretty pessimistic about keeping up as we are.

He implies we can't you can't just study harder to see infrared. We don't have the receptors. It is a biological limit.

So the only solution is drastic.

The only solution is to fundamentally change what it means to be human, we would have to upgrade our hardware.

We're talking brain computer interfacesh

merging with the AI.

Plugging the fiber optic cable directly into the brain. That is the only way to match the bandwidth. But that raises the big philosophical question. If you do that, are you still human or have you just become one of them?

Wow. We started this deep dive talking about movie tropes and spaceships and we have ended up questioning the future of human consciousness.

That is the power of Forge's argument. He forces you to stop seeing silence as just empty space. He wants you to see it as a wall we are about to hit.

So let's try to crystallize this for you, the listener. If we have to boil the alien silence down to three main takeaways, what are they?

Takeaway number one, abandon the Star Trek fantasy. Advanced beings, whether they're biological or digital, will not use linear speech. They won't talk like us.

Takeaway number two, the efficiency trap.

We are the dialup modem in a fiber optic world. As intelligence increases, it seeks efficiency and that efficiency will naturally bypass human languages potentially making our input obsolete.

And finally, number three, the mutual success paradox.

This is the danger zone. We risk becoming irrelevant because we cannot explain our values or our concepts of success to entities that don't share our framework. We can't negotiate if we can't communicate.

It really all comes down to communication as the ultimate survival trait. And Forge is warning us that our subscription is about to exp buyer.

It is a wake-up call to stop assuming we are the pinnacle of evolution.

I want to leave you with one final provocative thought. It's something that wasn't explicitly in the main chapters, but it builds on this whole idea of noise.

Go on.

We spend millions on projects like SETI, right? We are scanning the skies, listening for radio waves, looking for patterns. We are listening for beeps and boops.

We are listening for things that look like our communication. We are listening for linear patterns.

But if Forge is right, if advanced intelligence moves past linear signals. What are we actually doing?

We might be filtering out the real conversation because it just looks like static to us.

That's the static theory. Imagine you are standing in the middle of Time Square. But for the sake of the analogy, imagine you are deaf and blind to modern technology. Maybe you're from the year 1500.

Okay, I see people walking around, but I don't see the digital world.

To you, the air seems silent, but in reality, standing in Time Square, the air is thick with trillions of bytes of data, 5G signals, Wi-Fi, radio waves, satellite transmissions. It is deafeningly loud with information,

but without the receiver, it just feels like empty air.

Maybe the universe isn't silent. Maybe it is screaming with information, music, and conversation. Maybe it is deafeningly loud, and we are just the only ones who can't hear the music because we are still trying to listen for a telegraph beep.

That is a haunting thought. The party is happening all around us, and we are just staring at the wall.

I think that is going to keep me up tonight. too.

Thanks for diving deep with us into the alien silence. It's a lot to process, so take some time, maybe look at your dog a little differently today, and we will see you next time.