An excessively political solution to the Fermi Paradox.

I don’t normally talk about politics or economic theory on this blog (it crops up occasionally but never too explicitly). But when I was doing my MA in Political Economics, I heard about a relatively novel theory about the origins of capitalism, and it naturally got me thinking about space aliens.

If you’re a fan of Sci-Fi (or just science generally, I guess), you’ve probably heard of the Fermi Paradox. Given how big the universe is, statistically, there must be intelligent aliens. Space, as such, should be full of alien signals and conversations that we can detect and listen to. So why isn’t it? Where are all the aliens?

There have been a couple of explanations, and most of them are depressing. One of the most common theories is that life, after reaching a certain stage of development, just wipes itself out through climate change and/or nuclear war. (Or even an AI apocalypse, our most recent existential threat.) It doesn’t make our chances seem great.

An equally upsetting explanation is the ‘Dark Forest Theory.’ Alien civilisations do exist but are terrified of each other. The moment a species makes itself known, sending out signals and probes (kind of like we’ve been doing), every other species freaks out and launches an interstellar attack to destroy them. The only way to survive is to go unnoticed. So, nobody sends out signals.

But what if they just haven’t invented capitalism?

Technological progress has rapidly increased over the last couple of centuries. Previously, technological progress was slow and careful. It did happen, to be sure, but at a snail’s pace compared to the modern world. A few explanations can be given for this, but it’s probably due to capitalism.

There have been a lot of economic systems throughout human history, often existing side-by-side with each other, and they can cause people to act in wildly different ways. Some systems emphasise sustainability, for example. For its part, the capitalist system promotes rapid and uncontrollable innovation. Hence, the recent technological progress.

What exactly capitalism is has often been debated. I won’t get into the nitty-gritty of it (this is supposed to be about space aliens!), but opinions do differ. The origins of capitalism are also fiercely debated.

The one thing that isn’t debated is capitalism’s inevitability. It’s usually described as an instinctive human behaviour that was just waiting to be unleashed by the necessary conditions. Some say that once merchants accumulated enough wealth, they automatically became capitalists. Others say that the shackles of feudalism had to be thrown off. Bizarrely, even the critics of capitalism view it as inevitable.

But there’s not much evidence for those theories. Pre-capitalist merchants did not act like modern capitalists (they took advantage of fractured markets to profit on alienation), and various societal crises should have provided ample opportunity to unleash the ‘entrepreneurial spirit.’

In short, if capitalism is inevitable, why didn’t it emerge thousands of years ago? The technology did exist; steam engines were invented in Ancient Greece! The burden of explanation is on the people who call it inevitable.

The book ‘The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View’ by Ellen Meiksins Wood challenges this notion of inevitability. It outlines an alternative explanation for capitalism’s origins that, I think, is quite compelling.

Far from being inevitable, Wood argues the emergence of capitalism wasn’t even that likely. It was the accidental consequence of the specific peculiarities of land tenure in 16th-century England. Those peculiarities were, in turn, an accidental consequence of the Norman Conquest in 1066. In short, capitalism was an extremely unlikely accident that emerged from other unlikely events.

And hey, if capitalism was an extremely unlikely accident, there’s no reason to think it’s the galactic norm.

Maybe the capitalist accident is so incredibly rare that only one planet in a million becomes capitalist. Maybe most alien civilisations have different economic systems that don’t promote destructive technological development the way capitalism does. Maybe their systems are totally egalitarian, and when confronted by world-destroying technologies, they stop and say, “We should think this through.”

Earth has just been unlucky, I guess.

This was much more political than the stuff I usually write here (I’m a little hesitant about that). But it would explain the Fermi Paradox! If the universe isn’t full of alien signals, it might be because they haven’t accidentally stumbled into a system of rapid and uncontrollable development the way we have.

-Dexter