Foreword
The Fermi Paradox, Dark Forests and Black Swans
In Book I, I documented Billy’s fantastical childhood experiences. These challenged my assumptions regarding plausible scientific limits, human cognition, and the nature of our perceived reality. While those encounters easily overwhelmed a child’s capacities, a mature perspective may allow us a more discerning examination.
Thus, Book II attempts to apply a philosophical framework and scientific creativity, seeking explanatory insights into Billy’s memories in retrospect, many decades later. This speculation requires a grounding of empirical footholds, so we might anchor them to more daring interpretations.
Through an analytical narrative, we may begin weighing the phenomena adjacent to accumulated wisdom, where complex patterns hint at something more significant. This quest charts a Terra Incognita, a mapping of mystical aspects of human progress and meaning.
Though a lone explorer, Billy, need not embark completely forsaken. Across history’s unfathomable terrain, others have left a trail of breadcrumbs for us — if we can connect the dots toward a reliable route. Diverse psychonaut chroniclers — Hermes Trismegistus, Giordano Bruno, Carl Jung, Jacques Valee; charted similar interior expanses, recording hard-earned epiphanies that we would be foolish to ignore.
Book II attempts to harvest such visionary thoughts, cultivating hybrid concepts better adapted to what we see as increasingly surreal conditions appearing on the road ahead. Billy’s youthful glimpse of high-strangeness opened an obsession for me…
So, how might a meaningful re-envisioning of cosmic rules allow for a new philosophy and the scientific framework to survive and flourish?
Through an open-minded measure of analytical investigation, let us, with some patience, excavate a deeper strata where the future’s foundation may genuinely reside.
The Fermi Paradox and the Dark Forest
The famed phrase “Here Be Dragons” actually never appeared on ancient maps. Legends, however, tell of adventurers whose curiosity set sail in pursuit of those evocative words. One tantalizing clue to the quest hails from the Hunt-Lenox Globe, an antique globe where the Latin inscription “Hic Sunt Dracones” (“Here Be Dragons”) lurks over the unknown East.
What provoked daring voyagers to first track those uncharted waters marked by signs of adventure or peril? Did they discover islands of untold marvels or misfortune on an epochal quest? The globe’s beguiling message still speaks to our eternal attraction toward the edge of mysteries. What might have met those explorers remains a siren song for imagination across the ages.
Enrico Fermi, the renowned stargazer, surveyed the galaxy’s infinite span and pondered aloud, “Where is everybody?” By cosmic calculus, Fermi deduced, that many earth-like planets should harbor life, yet silence is everywhere when we look in every direction and depth, thus giving rise to the paradox that bears his name.
So, might this silence hide a darker truth? One that infers that alien civilizations deliberately choose to conceal themselves. Why?
One chilling theory is deemed the “Dark Forest’s” conjecture, wherein alien races must hide, avoid all contact, and cancel out even the smallest squeak of their presence. This theory speculates that any detection risks attack by vicious hunter-gatherer civilizations with the technology to reach you. This philosophy espouses… best to cloak and hide any trace, or hostiles may swarm to take your space.
It paints existence as a game of wits, survival of the fittest if you will, where winners learn deception and losers don’t exist long enough to explore the cosmos. It rings of cosmic hypocrisy, where dread of others guarantees catastrophe, being damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
So, while the Dark Forest looms, possibilities remain profound. Our future is still unwritten, so who or what shall we become? Hunting Dragons or the hunted.
In Search of Dragons & The Black Swan
The concept of the “Black Swan” was first popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2007 book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Taleb’s Black Swan theory is centered around the idea that certain events are so rare and unpredictable, yet have such massive impact, that they fundamentally alter the course of history or an individual’s life.
For over 70 years, the dominant scientific assumption has been that reports of alien spacecraft visiting Earth are almost certainly false. This view has been hard to strictly falsify, however, as even seemingly inexplicable UFO sightings or alleged abduction cases end up rationalized away rather than confronting underlying assumptions.
Yet the open-minded scientific perspective should acknowledge that profoundly unexpected “Black Swan”-type discoveries do and have occurred in history, radically changing prevailing paradigms. The actual detection of intelligently-guided extraterrestrial vehicles through multiple independent means would qualify as such a Black Swan event for the field of ufology.
A properly skeptical yet falsifiable stance regarding ETI visits would be framed along the lines of: “While the evidence remains insufficient, we cannot categorically exclude the possibility of alien encounters given the vast size of the cosmos combined with well-documented anomalies still lacking convincing conventional explanation after formal analysis.” Even as the narrative slowly is beginning to shift in this direction. Still, we deal with…
“Absence of evidence is evidence of absence.”
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
“Cognitive biases and wishful thinking propel irrational beliefs.”
Or worse…
“Quit wasting our time with this rubbish.”
“Are you actually delusional or just plain gullible?”
“Save your looney tunes stories for the tin foil hat convention.”
“Oh look, another crazy fruit loop looking for attention.”
“Did common sense skip your generation or what?”
The philosopher Karl Popper championed falsifiability as a key criterion for the scientific method versus verificationism, which held that a statement or theory was meaningful only if it could be empirically verified. According to Popper, a theory, hypothesis, or model must be falsifiable — able to be proven false — in order to be considered scientific. Good scientific theories provide clear conditions under which their predictions or key tenets might fail.
This is where the Black Swan concept comes in. In philosophy, a Black Swan refers to an event or discovery that is unprecedented and unexpected, going against the prevailing wisdom of the time. However, after the fact, such occurrences end up being rationalized as explainable instead of revising underlying assumptions.
Black Swan events represent observations that would falsify less rigorous theories that failed to account for such outliers or anomalous cases. A strictly falsifiable theory, by contrast, would be constructed in an open-ended way able to accommodate even extremely rare Black Swan-type observations.
The possibility of Black Swan discoveries is an important aspect of formulating scientific ideas and hypotheses that pass the bar of rigorous falsifiability. Truly falsifiable theories are flexible enough to deal with unexpected phenomena like Black Swans without needing to be discarded entirely.
An appropriately nuanced scientific approach should then be structurally open to revolutionary Black Swan scenarios that could overhaul long-held assumptions around UFOs. Even vastly improbable events must be entertained to consider all explanatory possibilities and account for remarkable observations not readily dismissed. Any theory proposing that sufficiently advanced alien technology could never manifest here, may one day meet its Dragon… A Black Swan Event.