An interesting take on Fermi’s Paradox:

I suggest a different, even darker solution to the 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.

-here. The post has some interesting stuff on hyperstimuli. All from a very secular materialist perspective, of course. But baptizable into gospel terms. Bottom line: modernity is addiction. It was disturbing to spend time at Church this Sunday reviewing Elder Bednar’s talk on social media and TV from 2009. It was true in its time, but now reads as strong with prophecy. It has been disturbing to participate in the General Conference Odyssey. Every warning of the watchmen about a danger has only become starker and more dangerous.

My favorite part:

Fitness-faking technology tends to evolve much faster than our psychological resistance to it. With the invention of the printing press, people read more and have fewer kids. (Only a few curmudgeons lament this.)

I do not know what the future holds. But an elegant solution to both the Fermi’s Paradox and the promise of the Second Coming is that there is something inherent in technological progress that tends towards destruction. There is something suspiciously darkly runaway about the last few hundred years of trends.