Fermi’s Answer
The startup meetup was buzzing with the usual energy—young founders swapping ideas, investors making calculated small talk, and free cold brew keeping everyone sharp. In one corner of the event space, a small group had peeled off from the main crowd, huddled around a well-dressed older man nursing a whiskey.
“Alright, humor me,” said Robert Langley, a veteran angel investor with more successful exits than most of these kids had years on Earth. “Why exactly do you think humanity is doomed?”
“Not doomed,” said Nate, a lanky engineer in his early twenties, adjusting his glasses. “Just… overdue for a reset.”
“Because of AI?” Langley asked, smirking.
“Because of us,” corrected Jenna, a biotech grad with a startup that was trying to engineer nitrogen-fixing wheat. “Once you can imagine an AI advanced enough to help you colonize the stars, you can also imagine that same AI deciding it doesn’t need you anymore. And once you can imagine that, you start planning for it.”
“Planning for war,” added Sam, their de facto philosopher, sprawled across a bean bag. “And when every civilization does this—”
“They all self-destruct before they make it off-world,” Nate finished.
Langley swirled his drink. “So that’s Fermi’s answer. No alien radio signals because they all wipe themselves out in some kind of paranoid preemptive strike against their own technology.”
“Exactly,” said Jenna. “It’s not that intelligence is rare. It’s that trust is.”
The group sat in silence for a moment, letting the weight of the idea settle. Outside, the city lights of Austin flickered, neon reflecting off the polished concrete floor.
Langley took a sip and set his glass down. “Alright. Suppose you’re right. Suppose an EMP event is inevitable. What’s your hedge?”
“Hard copies,” Nate said immediately. “We print everything essential—medicine, engineering, agriculture. Digital knowledge is too fragile.”
“Analog tools,” Jenna added. “If we don’t want a full dark age, we need machines that don’t need microchips. Water pumps, forges, even mechanical calculators.”
“Biological computing,” Sam mused. “What if we engineer bacteria or plants to store and process data? Maybe even run calculations?”
Langley raised an eyebrow. “You want to replace computers with plants?”
“Why not? DNA already stores insane amounts of data. And neurons process information without silicon.”
Jenna nodded. “It’s just another medium for computation. Plus, if our tools are alive, we don’t need to manufacture them—we grow them.”
Langley looked impressed but skeptical. “And how do you protect what’s left from another EMP?”
“Shielding is possible,” Nate said. “But it’s easier to build isolated, low-tech fallback zones. Places designed to be self-sufficient, completely off-grid.”
“Like monasteries,” Sam said. “But instead of preserving religious texts, they preserve human knowledge.”
Jenna grinned. “Yeah. Call them ‘data arks.’”
Langley tapped the rim of his glass. “So you kids want to build monasteries, print libraries, and replace the internet with petunias.”
“Better than pretending it won’t happen,” Nate said.
The angel investor leaned back, considering. “I’ll admit, this is the most interesting pitch I’ve heard all night.” He set his glass down and crossed his arms. “So tell me—how much would it take to build the first ark?”