The “Selfish Aliens” Game Theory
Where are the aliens? How do we outcompete them?
What do all forms of life do?
Assume we are not alone in this galaxy, and assume the laws of physics are universal (they work the same everywhere). Now ask the question (known as Fermi’s paradox), where are the aliens?
If we think by first principles, we can reason about humans as complex aggregates of atoms organized in a very sophisticated and ordered way (compared to the average group of atoms in the Universe). Our main goal, as forms of life, is to propagate our genes deep into the future, or, in other words, to survive as who we are individually and as a species.
If we paraphrase Darwin’s idea of evolution in physics terms, we can think about life forms as orderly complex aggregates of atoms coupled together in the pursuit of decreasing local entropy of their overall structure/system at the expense of the entropy of their surroundings (the Universe). The goal of life, then, can be explained as atoms coming together to use more efficiently low entropy energy to maintain local low entropy at the expense of the overall entropy of the Universe. Seems convoluted? It is, but to really understand where I am going with this argument, we need to start from areas where we are very confident about and be precise.
As entropy minimizer, we want to live longer, we want to maintain the order of things and transform energy around us efficiently for our goal.
We now think as energy as abundant enough for our current needs, to the point to not even think that we will run out of it. We assume that if we get into troubles for a low supply, we will find out how to better extract it and transform the one available to us (from the Sun, atoms, etc).
But if we think about what is the long game here, and we imagine ourselves playing more and more to it with a longer time horizon, we have to consider that the energy of the galaxy (and the Universe) is the ultimate scarse resource. This is the first principle of thermodynamics: energy (which is also matter, E = mc2) never gets created or destroyed, only transformed. Hence if you think about energy as a budget to spend in a zero sum game we can only transfer energy from A to B or viceversa but not create it new. You might think, well then we have all this energy we just have to trade it to get it.
The problem with this scarce resource is, not only the fact that it is limited, but also that when it gets used, a part of it becomes unusable. If you think of energy as money in the form of capital, this means that when you pay someone to do some work and transform some energy from potential to kinetic (usually with the ultimate goal of reducing our entropy locally as discussed above), some energy just gets ‘lost’. Not lost in the sense that it is destroyed, but gets less usable. This is the second principle of thermodynamics, stating that entropy of the overall Universe is always increasing, often known as the arrow of time. Systems tend to go from order to chaos spontaneously, the other way around requires energy.
So we will have a problem, eventually.
Where are the aliens?
If we are not alone in the galaxy (and for the example we consider only the galaxy and not the Universe), then we have to assume that other forms of life will eventually come to the same conclusion. That their structure of atoms will want more and more low entrhopy energy at the expense of us as a species. This is a very long game, but a zero sum one. Remember the energy is fixed, so you can only trade it by convincing aliens to give it to you, or steal it given that we have no knowledge of them and their ability to collaborate or not. But on top of this, there is the problem of entropy and degrading energy, which accelerates the game to a more difficult and faster stage. Because of the irreversible nature of time, at some point the energy of the galaxy will become not usable anymore, trading will be foolish and irrational as this transitions from a zero sum game with possibility to trade, to a zero sum game where no trade of energy is possible nor rational.
When everyone has extracted all the low entropy usable energy to its own advantage, the worst thing that can be done is to trade it away. Given the principle of evolution, we can think that every form of life will eventually reduce maximally its own entropy (at least the forms that will survive, which are the ones playing the game properly), but we do know that it is impossible not to give up, even if slowly, some energy in the form of heat. So the ultimate creature in the universe is a form of life that maximally reduced its inefficiency in losing heat and loves eating all energy for the sole purpose of maintaining a very orderly internal state.
To state it more simply, because a portion of the budget (energy) becomes more unusable at every transaction, the rational thing becomes eventually to keep optimized energy for oneself to just die at a slowest possible rate. This means the game will become purely competitive and non collaborative in the limit.
This opens some interesting questions. If we are in this zero sum, and eventually non tradable, game, the aliens out there, if more advanced, should have probably figured out by now that they need to quickly gather all the energy before us and other aliens. This means that in this game the rational thing to do is to get all the energy before others do and transform it to lower the internal state and live longer.
We should then see signs of such civilization sucking energy with Dyson spheres all over the galaxy. We should also understand that we do have necessarily to play this game, if we don’t want to go extinct, and we better do it ‘quickly’.
But where are these examples in the galaxy? If aliens have figured this out a long time ago, then they should have continued to gather all the energy, and we should see some signs by now, given the age of the galaxy.
The “Selfish Aliens” Game Theory
One hypothesis often proposed is that if aliens exist, they don’t want to be seen. This to me has little sense, given the assumption of the evolution game we all play. The only way this makes sense, is if they want to ‘slowly’ get energy, so they are not seen as using it to avoid attracting attention elsewhere. But given that we are all in a ‘hurry’ in this game, it is impossible to slowly bleed energy from systems without getting a hit in terms of survival time. The stacking as fast as possible seems a better strategy. The slow capture of energy to avoid getting noticed must happen slow relative to others’ clocks (see Einstein’s relativity) which they can achieve as deception, but it seems quite a costly plot, in their absence of knowledge of competitors. We of course cannot exclude it, and cannot exclude that they know about competitors, but I find more plausible that they do not care about being seen (sometimes called the Zoo hypothesis where they ignore us and coexist), the cost is just lower than the benefits once you understand and accept the rules of this game.
Given we assume they exist, this leaves us with either the idea that they can’t be seen (not advanced societies yet hence we all are just starting, invisible footprint, behind black holes, etc), they all tend to die and go extinct ‘quickly’ (burnout hypothesis), we have bad monitoring tools, or that we just need more time to search.
The “can’t be seen” idea is the most interesting and compelling hypothesis to me, and, among the many reasons why they could not be seen, my theory and idea is that it is because they are in the main galaxy’s black hole. I find this hypothesis to be the most rational and plausible. The idea behind it, is about using our lack of alien evidence as an insight to conclude that the rational thing to do, given the game of life, was to go into a black hole for efficient energy capture. Since they did not conquer the galaxy, I believe this suggests that it was not practical to their survival and an unnecessary cost given what their goal is (evolutionary and same as ours). This means that they figured out that it was more efficient to eat the energy of the galaxy from the black hole, instead of going one star by one to harvest it.
I lay out the following theory as an answer to the Fermi’s paradox called the “selfish aliens” game theory:
The first hypothesis posed here, is that the ultimate state of any form of life is the same. And that is because we will eventually figure out that with the same rules of physics, we want to do and get to the same end goal, if we play the entropy minimization game and compete for it. This might mean that the ‘how’ we evolve is very different, but the beginning and the end will converge in form.
This means that all aliens will tend to look similar over time. One possible speculation is that the body will lose its purpose and we will just concentrate energy more efficiently in the mind as we master safety from nature itself and outsource body functions to the more efficient robots. A result of this could be the ‘homo dormiens’ or ‘homo roboticus’, a merged version of the sapiens with machines that became full mind and outsourced the body function to machines so it can focus on using the power of sleep and restoration cycles to think and solve the most important problem of all: decreasing its entropy.
The second hypothesis is that if we reason about this game, the closest object we know to the ultimate desired state that we are describing is something similar to a black hole, an object trying to eat most of the energy of the galaxy that maintains a collapsed orderly state internally, with little thermal radiation (Hawking radiation) and offering great concentrated energy flux to be captured more easily for usable energy-hungry life forms.
The third and final hypothesis is that aliens probably figured out that the ultimate and most efficient way to win the game is to go close or to merge with the black hole and directly go there somehow. Especially if it is a rotating black hole (and most are), there is the possibility to stay inside without collapsing into the singularity, which may offer great energy flux, ability to use that flux to maintain low entropy and a time ticking slower than alien competitors in the outer galaxy.
Conclusion
The idea of this thought experiment is to propose that, if aliens exist, they most probably go directly to the best source of energy and place themselves there, rather than trying to compete with the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy by creating one themselves. In a sense, we are doing the same on Earth: we could create energy from fusion, but we already have and use the Sun, it is already there for us and we want to be rational and take advantage of what exists. The theory proposed here, claims that sophisticated aliens somehow figured out that it was easier to go into the black hole rather than building or extract energy in a black hole fashion from scratch (sort of buy instead of build trade off). This gives us great cost/benefit analysis insights, because it means that the cost of getting to the black hole and of living there is lower than the one of building such an energy source. It is for us a benchmark for understanding what aliens discovered that we might not yet know. This is in fact an insight that moving to the black hole is cheaper and safer than we think, and that we will eventually find out a very cheap way to move, so that this conclusion will become evident to us. This already tells us that there might be a way for traveling easily in the galaxy and we just need to discover it!
At the same time though, it could signal that they were in a ‘hurry’; as soon as they figured out how to, they went there, and this could mean many things, but a speculation is that they either found an easier way to the black hole than to inter galaxy travel or that they had either no time or curiosity for other forms of life, where the former sounds more plausible.
Lorenzo Coacci
Feb 15th 2025
