Terra Firma

One of the coolest things with metaphysics is that there is no solid ground. Between Cartesian dreams and Fermi’s Paradox we know that Morpheus was right that “etwas nicht stimmt” with the world.

Watching the time-travelling “julkalender” but also “Terra Firma”, I came up with a possible new temporal solution to Fermi’s Paradox, assuming that it is indeed physically possible to travel backwards in time. The premise would then be that as long as civilizations remain unentangled, it is possible for later (and thus more technologically advanced) civilizations to protect earlier civilizations from destruction without simultaneously voiding their own existence. Once civilizations have become entangled, even the slightest change will change the identity of those providing the protection so they would presumably use layers of artificial intelligence and autonomous decisions-systems to isolate themselves from their own acts of benevolence, thus ensuring not only the integrity of the timeline but also that as many civilizations as possible continue to evolve towards technological maturity, possibly all the way up to the Omega Point.

This would not only explain the lack of observable civilizations but also why later civilizations have not intervened in order to accelerate or, for that part, thwart our own technological development.