The answer to the Great Silence, anyway. It’s an interesting hypothesis I was very recently reminded on via a comment on this blog (and I *believe* the idea has been raised hereabouts before, but can’t really be bothered to go digging).
OK, the Great Silence, otherwise known as the Fermi Paradox, is one of the great modern scientific mysteries. The universe, given the vast number of stars and planets and the seeming ease with which life seems likely to arise, should be abuzz with life, and one would expect a whole lot of technological civilizations. Enough so that the sky should be filled with radio messages, laser beams, starships, all that good stuff. But so far as we can tell… nothing. So, where is everybody?
Assuming that intelligent species arise with some commonality, something must be shutting them up. There are lots of ideas, but one branch of the theory-stream deals with “horrible things happen to them that kill their civilizations.” The most commonly discussed idea is that civilizations get to the nuclear stage and promptly blow themselves to bits. But there is a new culprit that I think merits discussion: Social Justice Warriors.
We are finding in our own civilization that we reached the spacefaring level of technology, and now we’re giving over control to screeching sociopaths who are opposed to science and math for reasons that are best described as “incredibly f’ing stupid.” If they succeed, humanities chances of being a long-term technological civilization, to say nothing of a starfaring one, will be reduced to nil. If the advanced cultures give themselves over to weak-willed, weak-kneed, weak-minded self flagellating nonsense, chances are good they’ll be conquered by the death-worshiping barbarians, plunging the world into a new dark age it is unlikely to recover from. Even if conquest doesn’t come, a rejection of western science in favor of identity-science will retard technological advance – and perhaps even prevent mere stagnation, as people won’t understand the stuff they already have – long enough so that high energy density power systems such as fossil fuels and nukes are no longer available, likely stranding us on this planet forever.
I hate to think that SJWs are a universe-spanning problem, plaguing civilization after civilization, like some sort of telepathically induced epidemic imposed on sentient species by vast cosmic horrors who want to screw with the little guys. But unwillingness to *want* something to be true or not means nothing about whether or not that something *is* true.
So, now that the “SJWs did it” hypothesis is out there, the next step is an important one: what do we call it? “Branding” is an important way to get a hypothesis out into the public. “Higgs Boson?” Boring. “God Particle?” Tell me more! And to my mind, getting people, especially people in the STEM field, to consider the potentially universe-wide societal collapse possible due to acceptance of “social justice” nonsense is very, very important.