Aliens "addicted to computer games", says scientist

A scientist asked to come up with a "dangerous idea" has hypothesised that the reason alien species haven't managed to reach earth is because they're all doing what we're doing: wasting our lives achieving nothing.

"Basically, I think the aliens don't blow themselves up," said Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, in the annual The Best American Nonrequired Reading book. "They just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they're too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don't need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it themselves, just as we are doing today."

Read it all here. It's awesome.

"When they finally achieve Contact, it will not be a meeting of novel-readers and game-players. It will be a meeting of dead-serious super-parents who congratulate each other on surviving not just the Bomb, but the Xbox. They will toast each other not in a soft-porn Holodeck, but in a sacred nursery."

Spot of WoW, anyone?