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The answer to the The Fermi Paradox could be that space is full of dead aliens
(www.livescience.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2025
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The problem with the entire class of "maybe every civilization just does X" solutions to the Fermi Paradox is, what about the subset that just doesn't do that?
You're basically proposing a powerful selective pressure against susceptibility to inventing vats of dopamine. Whatever alien species that ends up with some subset of its members that don't do that will be the ones that inherit the universe. Maybe they're a species that just doesn't have a dopamine-equivalent. Maybe they do, but they have some religious or cultural prohibition against it. There's all sorts of possibilities and for this to be a valid Fermi Paradox solution you need to rule out all of them.
Can you even form a civilization without being an pleasure seeking organism? Chemicals that produce pleasure or pain are fundamental to how life motivates individual creatures into doing basically anything.
If an alien body doesn't produce the good/bad chemicals then what motivates it to do anything?
How about a civilization that doesn't have chemistry at all? Set off a von Neumann machine to colonize the universe and biology is irrelevant after that.
You ignored the other "maybes" I threw out there, BTW. It only takes one of those to work in one situation and the Fermi Paradox is off to the races.