The Fermi Paradox, is a famous question posed by physicist Enrico Fermi.  "Where are they?" he said.  If the Universe is 14 billion years old, and we're a young civilization on a young planet, then where are the hopelessly advanced cultures?  Where are the hyper drives and the Dyson Spheres and the quantum super-positions of chocolate and peanut butter.

A guy named Stephen Webb wrote a book about the answers for Fermi.  He does a great job of grouping different kinds of answers, and exploring them.  And in truth, that's the best part of the paradox.  Wondering what the answer is.  Wondering why we are so apparently alone.

One resolution for the paradox, one affliction that may descend on every sufficiently advanced culture, is the death of boredom.  They become sufficiently entertained. Perpetually sated. And so they lose their adventurous spirit. Or learn to quell it without any real adventure.  The aliens, wherever they are, live in, and are consumed by, virtual worlds and virtual pleasures.  They enter an echo chamber of old ideas and predictable stories.

When will this happen us? When will humans begin spiraling into the abyss?  I think it started around 1983.

I interviewed a guy who worked for a government contractor.  His company was a billing company.  They billed for services provided by other companies.  The service they provided was billing.  But, if the billing required prorating an amount, they outsourced that task.  They would send redacted data to a third company that would prorate the amount and bill accordingly.  So this guy's company provided full fiscal year billing only.  Another company provided the actual service.  And still another company provided billing for partial years.

I remember being stunned.  I'm a liberal guy.  I know that the government provides services I need.  There are potholes to fill and shipments to search and food to make safe.  Those are important things.  But there is a vastness, a complexity to the U.S. federal government that is plainly fearsome.  No wonder dollars get lost when it takes three or more companies to handle a single financial transaction.

We might reasonably ask a few questions.  How much do the people pay for services and how much do we pay to administer those services?  Why is billing so onerous that it requires this kind of specialization?  Should we limit the amount of specialization in the system?

Maybe that's counter-intuitive, but I think there's something generally unhealthy about a system where entities handle such a small, focused job.  The result is that people aren't handling services as much as records.  These folks are billing, but they don't really know what they're billing for.  They're just sending out pieces of paper with a number on it.

The same thing happens when you call customer service.  You have to decide which department to talk to, and sometimes you'll hear something like "I can't answer that question, let me transfer you".  Those folks are specialized to handle a particular problem.  No one person knows the system front to back.  And God help you if your Tivo won't talk to your cable box.  Which of those two giant companies is going to stand up and help you sort that out?

This site shows tracking information for a handful of Sharks around the world.  I've been following Beamer for a little while.  He was up near Portland, Maine for a time (go Sea Dogs!) but he's been swimming south for the last couple months.  Recently he went past Bermuda, and now he's heading south, toward the Puerto Rico Trench.

Sometimes I'll stop myself in a meeting and wonder for a second about Beamer.  Where he is.  What he's doing.  Last night I woke up and stumbled through the darkness to get a glass of water.  And in that same moment there was a 200 pound Blue Shark named Beamer weaving his way through black ocean.  That's where he is.  All the time.  Right now.  It's weird isn't it?  The variety of life's experiences.

During the Cold War, barbed wire and an electric fence divided Eastern Europe from the West. In addition to separating people, the fence also split the population of Red Deer. But deer migration paths are a learned trait, taught to each generation by the last. So Red Deer in the region still refuse to cross the old lines, even though the fence has been down for decades now. And so the Iron Curtain still exists in some sense. It lives on in the minds of deer.

A lesson, I think, on ripple effects. Those waves get into the strangest places. But also on the importance of leveling old walls. Especially the ones in your head.