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I suggest a different, even darker solution to the Paradox (sa'eed: Fermi paradox). Basically, I think the aliens don’t blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they’re too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don’t need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today. Once they turn inwards to chase their shiny pennies of pleasure, they lose the cosmic plot. They become like a self-stimulating rat, pressing a bar to deliver electricity to its brain’s ventral tegmental area, which stimulates its nucleus accumbens to release dopamine, which feels…ever so good.

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This phenomenon is seen as a symptom of Japanese working culture which some regard as unduly oppressive with routine demands for overtime and personal sacrifice, in extreme cases resulting in death due to overwork (Karōshi). NEETs, hikikomori or freeters may belong to a proportion of the younger generation who are unwilling to or incapable of putting up with the values imposed upon them by older generations.

In Japan, NEETs are those who have rejected the accepted social model of adulthood in seeking full-time employment after graduation or further training through the governmental Hello Work schemes to obtain marketable job skills. Some experts state that this issue is due to the extended economic stagnation during the 1990s, which led to high unemployment amongst young people, 2.13 million by some estimates, reflected in a change in status of freeters, who were nominally employed, into NEETs.

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Posted by Hobbes (Member # 433) on :
 
I think his article would be much more compelling if he simply laid out some issues we might face instead of trying to crowbar aliens into it with a bunch of baseless assumptions. Of course he's also probably smart enough to know that doing so would up the traffic to his article by about 3 orders of magnitude. Which is another disheartening observation all on its own.

Hobbes
 

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Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
 
I think the central premise here is flawed by the fact that the U.S. is not actually the entire world. Look at India, for example, and you'll see where it breaks down.

When what you are saying relies on positing a world-wide equal distribution of prosperity, you may want to take a little time to rethink it.
 

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Posted by Orincoro (Member # 8854) on :
 
Hobbes, I agree- it's rather cynical. It also goes totally off the rails later in the article, when he disregards his "hypothesis" to blather about conscientious fundamentalists who will inherit the Earth, completely ignoring A, the roles of economics on the thinking of different religious and cultural groups, and B, the effect of "faking fitness" he had so carefully detailed before, which has its application as much in religious practice as in other aspects of cultural experience and consumption.

Also he buys wholesale the fallacy upon which 90% of Fermi Paradox musings are all about, that because we can't see aliens, means they aren't there. We know way less than necessary about the conditions for intelligent life's development and how common they are to reasonably suppose whether our current state is common or not. And anyway, the truth about radio astronomy is that to detect a low energy signal from a star only an short cosmic distance away would take equipment with much greater sophistication than we possess. In order to detect intelligent signals from nearby stars, we would require very careful fixes on both their locations and relative trajectories, and they would need to be extremely powerful. That makes his baseline assumption a crock of &%$#.
 

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Posted by neo-dragon (Member # 7168) on :
 

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Originally posted by Flying Fish:
A few years ago there were a lot of articles about young men in Japan (I can't find any links, sorry) getting into young adulthood and deciding that if they have enough porn, comics, and video games, they want nothing else. No job, no ambition, no family, no house, no dating, no wife, no children, no responsibility....

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But how does one afford the porn, comics, and video games without a job?

Actually, scratch that. You can get all of those things online for free if you know where to look. But you still need a roof over your head, a computer, and internet service to enjoy them.

Does it sound like I've put too much thought into this?
 

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Posted by The Reader (Member # 3636) on :
 
No, it sounds like you're thinking further ahead than these guys and you have way more common sense.
 

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Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
neo-dragon: a lot of 20-somethings in Japan are supported by their parents (either by living with them, or by a stipend to cover living expenses).
 

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Posted by James Tiberius Kirk (Member # 2832) on :
 

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Originally posted by The Reader:
No, it sounds like you're thinking further ahead than these guys and you have way more common sense.

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Or he's planning a career change.

The term is hikikomori. I only remember it because its such a fun word to spell...

--j_k
 

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Posted by 0range7Penguin (Member # 7337) on :
 
quote: I suggest a different, even darker solution to the Paradox (sa'eed: Fermi paradox). Basically, I think the aliens don’t blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they’re too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don’t need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today. Once they turn inwards to chase their shiny pennies of pleasure, they lose the cosmic plot. They become like a self-stimulating rat, pressing a bar to deliver electricity to its brain’s ventral tegmental area, which stimulates its nucleus accumbens to release dopamine, which feels…ever so good.

Isn't this the whole idea behind the book Fahrenheit 451? That the people essentially zombiefy themselves through the use of constant stimulus?
 

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Posted by Kwea (Member # 2199) on :
 
Not to mention soma from Brave New World, and major hints of it in Blade Runner (in the original short story, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep)...
 

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