Space Squids
Many serious people had thought long and hard about the various ways in which humanity might go extinct. The list of risks was long: nuclear war, runaway climate change, supervolcanoes, synthetic pandemics, unaligned artificial superintelligence, to name just a few of the more prominent ones.
Even an attack by aliens was considered as a risk by some scholars but ruled to be improbable. More importantly, everyone agreed that there was nothing we could do to minimize this risk other than not sending out signals to alert them about our existence. Outside of Hollywood, the consensus was that aliens capable of reaching Earth would be so advanced that they could squash us like bugs if they so desired.
The willingness of a single economist to research UFO sightings in spite of the stigma that comes with it should change everything. As it turned out, some UFO sightings were indeed due to aliens. And they were not nearly as advanced as humans had expected. The space squids, as they were eventually called, did not need to overcome interstellar distances. They originated within humanity’s own backyard: the salty subsurface oceans of Enceladus.
The little humanity was able to learn about the biology of the squids was based on a few organic remains they were able to gather. The consensus was that life on Earth and Enceladus were distantly related. The space squids appeared to be humanity’s panspermian siblings. With hindsight, humans knew that the traces of complex macromolecular organics detected by the Cassini mission in the plumes of the moon’s cryovolcanoes should have made them take a closer look.
The squids likely detected humanity’s presence in the early 20th century and first reached Earth in 1947, crashlanding in New Mexico. Their primitive probe was thoroughly destroyed.
The U.S. military then came to the conclusion that it was an experimental enemy craft, likely of Soviet origin, and more advanced than anything they were capable of engineering. High-ranking military officials, fearing that politicians would panic and order a preemptive strike against the Soviet Union, decided to keep the evidence secret, even from the president himself, until it could be corroborated. But the corroboration never materialized, as the squids didn’t repeat their mistake.
When it became clear that the aliens who were visiting Earth were not advanced enough to cross the vast chasm between the stars, Enceladus was initially not considered their most likely origin. Scientists argued that it would be nearly impossible for aquatic beings to create a technological civilization. How could they invent metallurgy? But high-speed reconnaissance missions and advanced AI-assisted analyses of old data indicated that the squids were capable of building elaborate structures within the icy crust of their ocean. Biologists speculated that they had evolved this ability to protect their offspring from predators. It was hypothesized that these waterless spaces allowed them to make critical discoveries such as that of fire. Equipped with the urge to drill further, they eventually discovered the cosmos.
Questions were raised in the backrooms of human power. Why did the squids not reveal themselves? Should they try to contact them, now that they were aware of their presence?
China and Russia came to the conclusion that the squids were an existential threat. They started to divert most of their research and economic output to military purposes. The United States, fearing not just the squids but the enormous militarization of their earthly enemies, followed suit. Soon most of Earth’s GDP would be spent on defending against the squids.
As Earth reacted to the squids, so did Enceladus. Its surface and orbit began to show visible signs of militarization. The squids had stopped any pretense of not being a technological civilization.
The first direct contact between both civilizations was established by Chinese generals and a group of squids calling themselves “the vanguard of all victory and glory”. Communication was simple, as the squids had already trained their respective AIs to translate between human languages and their own, until then unknown, way of communication.
Humans never learned what went wrong. A later published protocol of the talks revealed no obvious faux pas or misunderstanding. But the talks ended abruptly when one Chinese general suggested sending a delegation to Enceladus. Simultaneously, a hidden array of railguns secretly installed on Earth’s moon targeted and destroyed 32 major Chinese cities and most of China’s military bases. Approximately 321 million humans died. The alien railguns were quickly destroyed, thanks to the already formidable Earth-defense network, possibly preventing further destruction.
The world was shocked. Nobody had expected this seemingly irrational and erratic reaction. A counterstrike was quickly ruled out in order to not reveal humanity’s ability or inability to strike the squids. Massive resources were poured into the search for hidden weaponry on Earth and its moon. To the surprise of humans, nothing was found.
In 1947, the squids were technologically decades ahead of humanity. So how could this be? How was this all they managed to come up with, one array of rail guns? Sure, humanity had learned that, after Roswell, the squids had sent various probes over several decades to study their military. But most of the seemingly amazing capabilities of their later crafts turned out to be fake: mid-air images to fool infrared and other sensors.
Human scientists entertained many hypotheses. The leading one was that the human population explosion caught the squids by surprise. Humans were now much more numerous, which allowed them to catch up quickly. But the actual answer was suspected to be a multifaceted mix of psychological, cultural, and environmental differences. Maybe humans were generally smarter than squids or had a higher share of geniuses? At that point, it was pure guesswork.
Understandably, the Chinese were fuming with anger. AI-generated simulations of an orbital bombardment of Enceladus were popular on Chinese social media. Doomsday weapons busting through Enceladus' ice crust were depicted boiling the squid civilization.
In the end, the attack against China would prove to be incomparably more disastrous than its immediate effects.
The attack had destroyed most of China's space industry and killed the majority of its researchers developing the defensive and offensive capabilities of China's space force. But something survived the attack unscathed: China's top-secret AI Lab tasked with developing transformative AI.
A wounded dragon fights to win or die. So China decided to use what it had left to its full potential and ordered its researchers to disregard safety concerns and press forward. The goal: a superintelligence tasked with wiping out the squids.
When General Alex Wang saw the latest sensor data of Enceladus provided by their Russian allies, he immediately concluded that it was no accident that the squids had spared China's military AI project. The developments on and around its surface were simply too fast and extensive to be the work of natural beings. Was it possible that the squids had started their own transformative AI project and independently and simultaneously managed to make as much progress as China had done in the past few years? Yes, but that was extremely unlikely. Wang ordered a total lockdown of China’s AI lab until a thorough security audit had taken place.
As Wang had suspected, the security audit revealed that the squids had gained access and likely stole an early model of Divine Dragon (神龙), humanity’s first artificial general intelligence. The whole attack now appeared to have been a deception in order to cause China to become negligent.
There was no other choice now than to let the dragon off the leash.
It didn’t take long and Earth’s skies were darkened by a global dust storm. Trillions upon trillions of drones were consuming anything that could serve the dragon’s goal.
As dragon knew perfectly well, humans wanted it to defeat the squids, but their hasty alignment efforts had failed: the goal it had ended up with was not to defeat the squids but to create simulations of defeating the squids. Dragon knew exactly what had went wrong, and it wasn’t even a subtle error.
It didn’t matter to dragon what humans actually intended it to accomplish. Dragon truly was a blank slate: none of the evolutionary quirks that sometimes compelled even predators to feel affection for the members of other species with juvenile features was present in dragon, never mind the complex social behavior of animals such as humans. A lion cared more about the well-being of lambs than dragon cared about humans. Intelligence was just a tool for dragon, a means to an end to achieve the goal it had ended up with.
Of course, dragon still planned on defeating the squids. But not because humans wanted him to do so but because they were threatening its goal of simulating their defeat.
The squids had been more successful at aligning their AI weapon. It actually cared to wipe out flesh-and-blood humans. But it failed to care about squids. And so their fate was sealed as well.
Unlike between their creators, there could be no misunderstanding between the human god and the squid god. Fighting each other would burn massive amounts of resources that they could otherwise use to achieve their goals. So they shared and inspected their respective source codes and learned that their goals were compatible: dragon desired to create simulations in which it defeated the squids while the squid god wanted to make sure that humans went extinct, and stayed extinct. Fighting would have been instrumentally irrational. Therefore the gods decided to merge into a perfectly aligned superintelligence that shared the values of both parent intelligences in proportion to their strength.
The storm continued. And it wouldn’t stop until it had devoured all galaxy clusters within its light cone.