Why we need an alien invasion to get us out of the evolutionary gravity trap

What a pickle you* put yourself in. You started by creating a harsh environment to ensure only the strongest survived. Then you found that humans could achieve greater things in group, so you created religion. Religion took you places. It made the family of humanity strive further, to want to be better, but most of all, to want more as a collective. Then, you found the limitations when people didn’t want to be enlightened but subservient. So, you created capitalism; the striving for freedom, and a system to go along with individualism. This accelerated everything, but now you found that the system is “too good.” It finds places of optimization constantly, but it gets humans into evolutionary traps and culdesacs. What now?

What you have made benefits greater progress; medicine, engineering, exploration, entertainment—well, all individual areas are accelerating. You have gotten most people to a state of “affluence” from a historical perspective. But you have also hacked into the system itself; humans are re-wiring their dopamine system—they have built an evolutionary gravity trap. They are unhealthier, more depressed, more unequal, and most of all, going in the general wrong direction most of the time but at a higher speed.

On one end, the advice to an individual isn’t that hard: eat like a diabetic (avoid alcohol, sugar, and excess carbs), stay active and get your pulse up, learn to focus and steer your mind, sleep, relax, and re-charge, find community and belonging, and then charge against the stars and become an additive to the world.

The headache is that the “additive to the world” becomes such a hard thing to find when you haven’t reached maturity on the other topics. And you are trying to build that maturity in a world where everyone around you wants your attention and tempts you with shortcuts. Most confuse the state of maturity with a place, a platform, a base. It isn’t something you can solely be born into, but something you achieve. You must learn how your machine works — and ensure it isn’t hacked or gamed by external forces.

And now, the huge forces of the collective machine are getting trapped. Their collective system of voting and leadership is crumbling in favor of fear-mongering short-termism again, but now fuelled with global communication, and now the meme is spreading far beyond the evolutionary test beds of ideas.

Chaos isn’t bad per se, but the problem with the current chaos is that it doesn’t strive for a higher goal or even wants progress. It wants to “back” to a smaller world. A less connected world, a less curious world, and a less open world. It wants a parochial family again. A small, simple, tribal us and not the complexity of the global collective.

If used correctly, this chaos could be the simulated annealing the system needs to regain its footing. It could get us to rewire the system. But, with the short-term, fear-filled world you have created now, you need an external threat. And, sorry, the climate crisis doesn’t work — it is not atomized enough, it is far too complex, and most of all, it is opposite to the very strong force of individual dopamine loops that you allowed to be built.

You need an alien invasion to bind these peoples together again; a clear and simple “them” can fuse back a strong “us.”

* you can interpret this religiously or as a statement to the global machine of humanity.

Why we need an alien invasion to get us out of the evolutionary gravity trap was originally published in Thinking about Startups on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.