Xavier Aptitude Test 2011 Paper

DIRECTIONS (Qs. 71-74) : Analyse the following passage and provide appropriate answers.
We can answer Fermi’s Paradox in two ways. Perhaps our current science over-estimates the likelihood of extraterrestrial intelligence evolving. Or, perhaps, evolved technical intelligence has some deep tendency to be self-limiting, even self- exterminating. After Hiroshima, some suggested that any aliens bright enough to make colonizing space ships would be bright enough to make thermonuclear bombs, and would use them on each other sooner or later.
I suggest a different, even darker solution to the Paradox. Basically, I think the aliens forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they’re too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. Once they turn inwards to chase their shiny pennies of pleasure, they lose the cosmic plot.
The fundamental problem is that an evolved mind must pay attention to indirect cues of biological fitness, rather than tracking fitness itself. This was a key insight of evolutionary-psychology in the early 1990s; although evolution favours brains that tend to maximize fitness (as measured by numbers of great-grandkids), no brain has capacity enough to do so under every possible circumstance. As a result, brains must evolve shortcuts: fitness promoting tricks, cons, recipes and heuristics that work, on an average, under ancestrally normal condition. Technology is fairly good at controlling external reality to promote real biological fitness, but it’s even better at delivering fake fitness—subjective cues of survival and reproduction without the real-world effects.
Fitness-faking technology tends to evolve much faster thanour psychological resistance to it. With the invention of X box360, people would rather play a high-resolution virtual ape in PeterJackson’s King Kong than be a perfect-resolution real human.Teens today must find their way through a carnival of addictivelyfitness-faking entertainment products. The traditional staples ofphysical, mental and social development–athletics, homework,dating–are neglected. The few young people wih the self-controlto pursue the meritocratic path often get distracted at the lastminute.
Around 1900, most inventions concerned physical realityand in 2005 focus shifted to virtual entertainment, Freud’s pleasureprinciple triumphs over the reality principle. Today we narrow-cast human-interest stories to each other, rather than broadcastingmessages of universal peace and progress to other star systems.
May be the bright aliens did the same, I suspect that acertain period of fitness-faking narcissism is inevitable after anyintelligent life evolves. This is the Great Temptation for anytechnological species – to shape their subjective reality to providethe cues of survival and reproductive success without thesubstance. Most bright alien species probably go extinct gradually,allocating more time and resources to their pleasures, and less totheir children.
Heritable variation in personality might allow some lineagesto resist the Great Temptation and last longer. Some individualsand families may start with an “irrational” Luddite abhorrence ofentertainment technology, and they may evolve ever more self-control, conscientiousness and pragmatism by combining thefamily values of the religious right with the sustainability valuesof the Greenpeace. They wait patiently for our fitness-fakingnarcissism to go extinct. Those practical-minded breeders willinherit the earth as like-minded aliens may have inherited a fewother planets. When they finally achieve contact, it will not be ameeting of novel-readers and game-players. It will be a meeting ofdead-serious super-parents who congratulate each other onsurviving not just the Bomb, but the X box.