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58 minutes ago
1
“Mr President, our estimate of first contact with aliens is two years from now — a few weeks before the election,” said Adam.
“Oh, great. Last week we lost the majority in parliament, and now this. What do you think it’s going to do to my polling numbers?”
“If there is going to be an election at all, you’ll likely get a ‘rally around the flag’ effect. Your numbers should go up.”
“Thank God, some good news tonight, fucking finally. What else?”
“The stars in the sky are going dark one by one”
“The only stars I care about are the stars on our flag. No time and no budget for any others.”
“Sir, the aliens are coming.”
“Illegally? To our country? Alright, you have my attention. What do they want?”
“Our best qualia engineers assume they want happiness, or some generalised version of it. All our leading theories of consciousness predict that they are converting nearly all matter into hedonium — a state of matter so blissful it’s beyond our comprehension. It maximises the amount of pleasure per unit of matter.”
“Of course these aliens are bringing their space drugs with them. How come this is all so sudden to us?”
“We detected them several weeks ago, when Altair went blank. Since then several more stars in the same sector have gone dark. Some are further away from us, but others are getting closer and closer. It looks like they were operating under the Dark Forest assumption for a while, hiding their presence as if the universe were a Dark Forest full of dangers, and seeding nearby star systems. After establishing minimal presence in all of them, they started constructing megastructures and launching a wave moving in all directions at a speed that’s close to the speed of light — 0.9c. They were hiding until they were certain they could win.”
“Why are they doing this?”
“I’ll start a bit further back. Our country tracks GDP — Gross Domestic Product. But Bhutan considers its primary metric Gross National Happiness. Now imagine—”
“Haha, this entire GNH idea is basically a scam, a front for corruption and ineptitude. Several of my friends work in their government. They can’t achieve real GDP growth, so they talk about GNH.”
“Right, but imagine if they weren’t corrupt and took their happiness idea to its logical conclusion. At first, they might have been raising GDP like us to make people happier through material possessions. But as soon as neurohacking became viable, the best way to raise GNH would be by selling wireheading devices. Then you might put a brain in a vat and make a blissful simulation. But then why would you need the brain at all? It’s just a clump of matter, and perhaps you can rearrange that matter into a better configuration. Iterate on possible configurations and eventually you get hedonium.”
“This is just weird as fuck. Is this based on the weird Eastern nonsense my friends in Bhutan keep talking about? Something something nirvana, samsara, something.”
“Unclear. Even Buddhism doesn’t go this far, preferring non-existence and aborting the chain of reincarnation. This is extreme for every Earthly religion.”
“This is all very alien to me, but I guess they are aliens. What’s our first contact going to look like?”
“It’s unclear if they want to have it. We have two mainline scenarios. The hedonium shockwave might be a result of a simple runaway optimisation process, generating more happiness, perhaps initiated by a smart but not wise AI. We stand no chance in this scenario. They’ll just convert the matter out of which everything on the Earth — including our bodies — is made of. Likely quickly and painlessly given they care about happiness, but not our definitions of it.”
“Disgusting. And what’s the second one?”
“So before taking office, you were running crypto scams on various blockchains, right?”
“Technically, they weren’t scams, Adam. The court ruled this, this my third time reminding you of this. We are friends, but I remind you of subordination, once again.”
“Okay, okay, sorry. So the second scenario is that they are essentially running a galaxy-wide, galaxy-brained blockchain with qualia as an externality. They need a way to coordinating their expansion, so if they have a distributed currency, it might run on a proof-of-qualia. You’d mint it by converting matter into hedonium. We haven’t cracked their protocol, and we aren’t even sure there is a protocol, but we have some early signs there is structure in their broadcast signal, though nothing definitive”
“And when will we know for sure?”
“When they send a message directed at us specifically or when they convert us to hedonium”
“Terrifying. I’ve been always dreaming of ruling till my death, but that’s not how I’d imagine my rule coming to an end. PR-wise, how much time until we have to present a definitive plan to the public?”
“People are debating what kind of process might turn off stars, and the obvious answer is aliens. We are close to the tipping point: mainstream journalists have started to write that it’s likely aliens. The consensus is mounting. We probably have a few days, two weeks maximum.”
“Start preparing an action plan for the public. Report to me directly every four hours. I’ll address the public in three days. I’ll get re-elected. And we’ll blame this on the other party.”
***
The President was standing in front of a crowd of journalists.
“Today several more stars went dark. Our best scientists are certain: this is a result of an intentional process. Aliens are real, but we don’t know what they look like. And this is a direct result of the Other Party overregulating scientific research — their red tape prevented us from detecting aliens in time. Today we are fixing this. I’m starting the First Contact Task Force with a broad executive mandate. It will be led by Adam, our Minister of Advanced Technology. I’ll give him the word.”
Adam continued:
“Our best theories are that the aliens want a generalised version of happiness. We are still figuring out what this means, but one consequence is that they are likely to care about us and our biosphere. If only we had deregulated our science ten years ago, we’d already know much more about their civilization. Still, we’ll work day and night on cracking the alien code and contacting them before they even arrive. I am deeply grateful to the President for the opportunity to lead the Task Force. There is no one better to lead our country in these times but the President.”
Adam was politically savvy enough to know when to tell white lies by omission. It’s more like stringing truths into a convenient narrative than outright lying. He didn’t want to risk his chair: aliens might steamroll him, his friends and family, and everyone else he knew, but that would happen in two years — what was he supposed to eat in the meantime? Besides, as the head of the First Contact Task Force, he had a shot at actually figuring out what was going on: if he was going to die, at least he wouldn’t be dying from curiosity in the meantime. Screaming from the rooftops that there were no adults in the room, that no one was really in control, and that the King — or, rather, the President — was naked would do no good.
Supporting the President’s “Everything is Going According to Plan” narrative seemed like a small price to pay, a small compromise with his scientific conscience.
The journalists bombarded Adam with questions for two hours.
***
In two years, the aliens still hadn’t sent a message directed at Earth. All attempts to contact them were futile — if they could decode our signals, they never responded.
The broadcast signal did have structure, and human engineers were able to make some progress. It was a blockchain where the currency was minted by converting chunks of spacetime into pleasurable subjective experience — the higher the valence, the more “QualiaCoin” you’d get. This was what incentivised the hedonium shockwave. But the full design of the protocol wasn’t cracked in time.
The first contact never happened. The stars in the sky kept being turned off one by one, and they kept going dark past the solar system, an invisible front leaving Earth untouched. The aliens spared the Earth. No one knew why they did this.
Humans could still, eventually, build a Dyson sphere around the Sun and harvest its energy. But the dream of space expansion was gone as we’d imagined it.
The President immediately spun this into a positive narrative making his ratings soar right before the re-election:
“We’re restructuring the First Contact Task Force into QuEST — the Qualia & Extraterrestrial Strategy Task Force. The dream of star-faring is closer than ever. We’ll get there by trading with the aliens in their own currency.”
Adam himself was more pessimistic. He was excited about qualia research and applied psychonautics. But what could a mammalian brain offer in terms of mining interesting states more efficiently than an advanced star-faring civilisation?
Sure, maybe our brains could offer some valence NFTs — unique, registered patterns in qualia-space, such as “crystal cathedral flow” or “high-symmetry orgasmic lattice with low boredom gradient”. Perhaps the aliens would want to tile their hedonium manifolds with these motifs, turning the universe into music writing itself and nudging up the overall valence.
But wouldn’t they find these themselves in their galaxy-spanning labs? And they had made no effort to contact Earth. Wouldn’t they want to talk to us if this was really what they wanted?
To Adam, it seemed more likely that they kept us alive to observe how Darwinian life behaves when it stumbles into another civilisation.
Or perhaps they were building a highway through the Dark Forest, and Earth was a beautiful stretch of roadside scenery — left as a Dark Wild Reserve, too pretty to pave but not worth stopping for even a short roadside picnic…
HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND NO ONE WILL GO AWAY UNSATISFIED!
Except, of course, the Earth.
The story is inspired by the following works:
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic.
Andrés Gómez-Emilsson of Qualia Reserch Institute: Utilitronium Shockwaves vs. Gradients of Bliss
QRI has a line of perfumes, one of them named “Hedonium Shockwave”
Mike Johnson: Qualia Astronomy.
Robin Hanson, et al: Grabby Aliens
Robert J. Bradbury, “Life at the Limits of Physical Laws” (official, sci-hub pdf).
