Maximum Power and the Fermi Paradox
An oracle for the fundamental challenge of human civilisation, perhaps all civilisations
I’ll begin by not explaining the Fermi Paradox, which is both well known and well summarised. However, the Maximum Power Principle is largely unknown. I encountered the idea for the first time only two years ago, despite interest in many adjacent concepts. This principle is like an oracle that may illuminate fundamental and liberating truths for our species, and frame our great present-day challenge. Hereafter let us refer to the concept as MPP, or simply the 4th Law or Quarta Lex. The reason for the more lofty designations will be apparent.
Before reading on, I invite you to settle your mind into a place from which it may reach freely. This was necessary for me at least. The implications of this incredibly deep concept cannot be easily seen through our culture’s layers of economic trope and political myth1. Now, rinse your thoughts of any such preconceptions, settle on the question of what is life?, and enjoy pondering the following section for a moment.
Quarta Lex
“…the fundamental object of contention in the life-struggle, in the evolution of the organic world, is available energy. In accord with this observation is the principle that, in the struggle for existence, the advantage must go to those organisms whose energy-capturing devices are most efficient in directing available energy into channels favorable to the preservation of the species.”
— A.J. Lotka 1922a, p. 147
"The maximum power principle can be stated: During self-organization, system designs develop and prevail that maximize power intake, energy transformation, and those uses that reinforce production and efficiency."
— Howard T. Odum 1995, p. 311
The Maximum Power Principle is an insight into the fundamental nature of lifelike-systems. It describes how life must tend to maximise power in order to perpetuate itself. In its most reduced and fundamental conceptualisation, life is localised anti-entropy within a universe that is more generally pro-entropic or anti-life. As such, MPP is thought to underly evolution and natural selection. It is a deep insight as it relates evolved life directly to energy. It identifies life as a higher-order form of energy. Life is energy that perpetuates itself through localised power-maximisation that is then deployed to persistently decrease entropy.
Now let’s connect this idea more clearly to evolution. Under conditions of finite energy availability (e.g. limited food, sunlight, requisite molecules), life-like systems which can maximise the deployment of power in an adaptive way will tend to survive and propagate relative to life forms that are less effective at this.
It is worth highlighting that the “in an adaptive way” part is critical and extremely intricate. Maximising power in a manner that causes all energy sources to be permanently exhausted is not adaptive. Such a life-system would be temporally bounded in it’s existence. It will at some point cease to be life.2
Here I’ll betray my Computer Science background by insisting that a superb conceptualisation of MPP and evolution is the optimisation algorithm. Natural Selection is an optimisation algorithm being computed by reality. As such, the Evolution of life is by orders of magnitude the most complex computation in the history of the universe. The information density of life forms on earth, and the embedded computational energy that manifested their present-day existence makes our most sophisticated supercomputers and algorithms (including AI) look like piles of counting-rocks. We are not even remotely close.
Life is an optimised planet-spanning dynamic equilibrium of unparalleled sophistication. The fractal intricacy of earth’s biosphere is utterly mind-melting and sublime. Unfortunately, aesthetic and spiritual appreciation of this was not an adaptive strategy for life on earth. It sure is now, but let’s table that. I’ll just say one more thing: really admiring what life is through this lens of deep time, thermodynamics and optimisation can change your mind in profound ways. Life is majestic and oh so exceedingly precious. An unfathomable accumulation of exquisite triumphal defiance. Gracefully swimming through time itself. Upstream. Ever upstream in the relentless river of entropic oblivion roaring about it. A godhead dwells in contemplation of this. This sacred life-procession that we have literally been selected to contemplate, represent and remanifest.
“Very deep in human values is the worship of low entropy.”
— Sandra Faber
The Great Simplification, ep. 111
Consulting the Oracle
Onwards now to what I really wanted to discuss here, but in order to prevent an excess of maybe, possibly and perhaps below, I’ll acknowledge at the top that this is all speculative inference. Nevertheless…
It may be extremely rare for any species of life in the universe to evolve in ways that don’t follow the Maximum Power Principle. Power maximisation may be practically obligatory. Further, the asymptotic nature of civilisation technology curves may make it incredibly difficult for MPP life forms to both hit their tech curve and transcend power-maximisation before they destroy their own planet.
To take just one of the existential threats we have generated; the climate crisis can be understood as an almost inevitable result of a civilisation continuing with naïve power maximisation as it encountered a fossil-fuelled exponential technology feedback. Perhaps similar existential naïve-power-maximising side effects are encountered on virtually all life bearing planets. This is a plausible solution to the Fermi paradox. Partly because it fits the observations we have. Us, with our runaway global power-maximising growth economy. And partly because it seems to logically follow from the MPP which is so fundamental that is has been proposed as the 4th law of thermodynamics. Or with more reverence; Quarta Lex.
And so, any galactic or truly advanced and perpetual civilisation must transcend the Maximum Power Principle. This might be viewed as the “purpose” of intelligent consciousness. Higher levels of intelligence could be evolution’s attempt at observing the higher order system it is embedded in. Not the first order sensory perception of its immediate physical environment, but perception of the more universal and fundamental patterns of the higher order system that comprises its conceptual environment. Immediate versus conceptual perception. Intuiting the flight-path of an arrow, versus precisely describing the trajectory of any mass in free fall.
As a life form gradually becomes more intelligent it may finally understand these deeper patterns through pure thought constructs such as theorems and models. This offers a chance for the species to evolve to another level, a higher-order species that has transcended the Maximum Power Principle by first understanding it and then strategically avoiding it through deliberate memetic (and possibly genetic) adaptations. MPP transcendence may represent a requisite but extremely difficult phase shift or “great filter” that virtually all intelligent life forms must survive. A species that passes through this great filter might be referred to as a 2nd-order or post-MPP intelligence.
To summarise the difficulty; all life must transcend MPP using an intelligent consciousness that was itself bootstrapped through MPP optimisation for vast periods of time. This gives the power-maximisation strategy huge inertia that is difficult to overcome (e.g. cultural, neurological, psychological and biological inertia). Additionally it must succeed in this transcendence in extremely short order thanks to the inherently exponential nature of an intelligence-tech feedback. This feedback, when operating under MPP optimisation, self-terminates very rapidly due to biophysical limits, planetary boundaries, competitive escalations, etc.
So fundamentally, intelligence-tech feedbacks tend to easily outpace MPP-transcendence. And they are both starting at the same time: when intelligence appears. There is also no tortoise strategy here. The MPP hare does not rest. And thus virtually every intelligent species throughout the universe either destroys itself or continually unwinds its advances with a power-optimising intelligence-tech feedback.
This view, seemingly dark at first, is also compassionate towards the human species. It offers a way of understanding and even empathising with our possibly terminal current trajectory and maybe even our sometimes violent and brutal history. We are subjects of a universe that appears to have various high level properties such as entropy and time that necessarily imply that life must normally evolve under MPP optimisation. And only sometimes, and in infinitesimally rare circumstances, will life evolve to intelligence in another way. This typically extremely long period of MPP-oriented strategies creates a huge evolutionary inertia that makes it extremely hard to transcend MPP and develop a higher order paradigm such as deep flourishing optimisation or spiritual transcendence to 2nd-order intelligences.
Put differently; MPP, while being superb at evolving intelligent life, is intrinsically self limiting because intelligent MPP optimisation is almost always trapped in a self-terminating power-maximisation attractor that massively overpowers MPP transcendence and has huge evolutionary inertia.
This gives a high-level framing of humanity’s current set of existential challenges, often referred to as the polycrisis, metacrisis or “the human predicament”. The fundamental challenge underlying all of these is transcendence of the Maximum Power Principle. Colonialism, capitalism, neoliberalism, our just-in-time six-continent supply chains, the financial system, the fossil energy system, all of these are manifestations of a power maximisation strategy.
Adding to the difficulty is the game-theoretic optimality of power maximisation. MPP strategies tend to be locally dominant, and therefore highly contagious. This is why only a certain level of intelligence (and perhaps consciousness is a prerequisite) can escape the MPP attractor. The intelligent organism, having understood the system it is embedded in, having understood evolution, thermodynamics and the MPP etc., must “decide” not to maximise power — at least for a time. A move that is most likely unprecedented in its evolutionary locale because for all time up to that point such a move would usually be heavily penalised.3
Consciousness may be a prerequisite because a spiritual capacity or subjective “feeling” component is required. A form of intellectual / relational transcendence. Only those life forms that are able to relate emotionally to reality have a chance of choosing to bypass terminal levels of MPP optimisation. It must be a choice. This has nothing whatsoever to do with free will. Here the “choices” are future states that only become available to a life-system once it becomes sufficiently aware of the greater system it is embedded in. Remember, evolution operates on all levels. Anything that can manifest an effect within reality, however long the causal chain, will reside within the dominion of evolutionary forces. As such, consciousness itself — whatever it is — must influence evolutionary trajectories. The question then, is; can unconscious life transcend Quarta Lex? I suspect the answer is no (or perhaps, rarely), but the reasoning requires its own essay.
Putting consciousness — whether it is a precondition — aside, it seems to follow that to transcend MPP a social species must usually discover some kind of durable cooperative memetics to undermine the game-theoretic assumptions such that their collective “strategy landscape” is shifted entirely outside of the conventional game-theoretic domain. In the context of 21st-century human culture, this probably implies a widely adopted philosophical, ethical, moral or spiritual mode of being that seeks to optimise things other than power.
Here it is fascinating to take a further step in our imaginings. Such a 2nd-order species could go on to further evolve consciousness itself, and perhaps in some future epoch it develops a still-higher level of conscious awareness, the like of which has been only vaguely and fleetingly glimpsed by the rarest, most gifted and most committed human mystics. A phase-change within consciousness. Beyond metacognition to meta-consciousness.4
Paradigm transcendence is the fundamental challenge. Basically any intervention that is not moving us along a paradigm-changing trajectory will be pulled back into the MPP attractor. Due to the game-theoretic dynamics of power maximisation, there is probably a certain “escape velocity” that our memetics must reach in order to achieve paradigm change. This likely involves finding ways to bootstrap positive cultural feedbacks of sufficient power. Positive in both the systems sense and for humanity and life in the broadest sense possible. A large part of this would surely be some kind of novel meta-spiritualism that unifies science with the human soul. I think there is reason to believe that such a cultural phenomenon may be latent and merely needs describing and then codifying into the language of the transcendent: poem, art, music, ritual. But first must come the description.
In future writings I’ll explore this idea in more detail, along with the framing of macro-scale human civilisation as a power optimisation system and various insights that flow from this conceptualisation. These include a rebuttal of nihilism by a basis for meaning, how capitalism and individualism may be close to inevitable under power maximisation, the memetic burden of social species, the strategic landscape of paradigm change, and predictions about future corporate-political behaviour.
Other cultures however, see it - or once saw it - quite clearly.
This is the reason that modern economics — one of the biggest factors in the “human life-system” — is so terrifying and culpable; it does not consider energy. Nor is it aware of the more fundamental systems it is embedded in.
In some sense, MPP may be a reflection of the requirement of continuity in any life-propagation system. The genotype must be passed on in an unbroken lineage. A gene may proliferate throughout a population, but this simply transfers the continuity requirement to the species level. This continuity imperative might force the strategy landscape to be centred around greedy algorithms. More sophisticated or elongated strategies are possible, but extremely unlikely. There is probably some corollary to the MPP involving time and causality to be established here, or maybe even a deeper principle.
I refuse to cede this important and useful four-letter concept to a certain power-maximising corporation.