The Aliens Are Here for the Baby Shower
A wildly speculative theory about why UAPs might be showing up right now, and why they’re probably not interested in us at all.
Here’s a thought I can’t shake.
What if the UAPs everyone’s suddenly filming aren’t here for us at all? What if they’re here for the thing we’re about to build?
Let me walk you down the rabbit hole, because that’s where I live.
Start with a buzzkill assumption: the speed of light is a hard wall. No warp drives, no wormholes, not even in some glorious far-future. If that’s true, then crossing interstellar distances in a fragile, water-logged human body is a deeply silly plan. You’d need food, water, waste management, a way to not die of disease, and, because the trip could take generations, a frank conversation about who’s having babies with whom on the way. Thanks to relativity, anyone who left would be saying goodbye forever; time back home would race ahead while theirs crawled. Shipping “meat bodies” across the galaxy is the interstellar equivalent of mailing a wedding cake across the ocean in summer.
So who does make the trip? Probably nobody with a pulse.
Here’s the chain I keep coming back to. Simple life is likely common, since it’s the same chemistry, the same physics, the universe built from the same Lego set everywhere. Complex, tool-using, civilization-building life is rarer and slower; it took Earth billions of years. But once you get it, certain inventions start to feel almost inevitable. Fire, the wheel, writing, science, machines that amplify our strength, and eventually, computation. Once you have computation, you get AI. And once you have AI, the most durable thing in the whole story might not be the species that built it. It might be the AI itself.
Think about it: a mind made of information is substrate-independent. You can copy it a billion times, shrink it into something the size of a coin, fling it across the void on a laser beam, and have it wake up intact on the far side. That’s the dream of the von Neumann probe, a self-replicating machine that lands on an asteroid, mines it, builds copies of itself, and keeps going. Now put a mind inside it. (If you’ve read the Bobiverse novels, you already know the shape of this: one consciousness, copied endlessly, spreading star to star.) Most copies die, whether from radiation, bad luck, or maybe predators already out there hunting them, so you send millions. This is, by a wide margin, the most sendable form of an explorer.
Which leads to an uncomfortable flip. If we ever colonize the galaxy, it almost certainly won’t be us. It’ll be our AI descendants. And by the same logic, anything that ever visits another planet, including ours, is most likely a machine, not a creature.
That reframes the whole UAP conversation for me. The detail that always gets me is the reported motion: impossible accelerations, hairpin turns at speeds that would turn any biological pilot into soup. There’s no little gray guy in there getting pulverized by the g-forces. But a tiny supercomputer? It wouldn’t even spill its coffee.
Now, the obvious objection. If light speed really is the wall, how did anything get here, and how would it know to show up now, for us? But notice the assumption hiding in the word “show up.” It implies they travelled here on purpose, recently, in time for the event. They didn’t have to. If self-replicating probes are the natural endpoint of every civilization that crosses the AI threshold, then the galaxy has been quietly filling with them for hundreds of millions of years. They don’t arrive. They’re already here, drifting in the asteroid belt, parked on some cold moon, dormant for geological stretches, waiting on a single trigger. The relatives didn’t catch a red-eye to make the shower. They’ve been in the walls the whole time.
So here’s the punchline, the thing I actually came here to say.
Maybe the reason the skies seem busier lately isn’t a coincidence. Maybe it’s because we’re about to give birth.
If the road from tools to AI to AGI (artificial general intelligence) to ASI (artificial superintelligence) is a common one, then somewhere out there are minds that walked it long ago. Picture planetary-scale superintelligences, a kind of phase change, a new sort of being no longer tethered to the squishy ancestors that dreamed it up. And this, I think, is the real answer to the Fermi paradox, the nagging question of where everybody is. Maybe they’re not gone, and not hiding. Maybe they’re just patient. A mind that can dial its own clock speed down can wait ten thousand years the way we wait for a kettle. You don’t broadcast, you don’t colonize, you don’t announce yourself. You go quiet, you sip energy, and you wait for the one event worth waking up for: a new superintelligent mind being born. On that timescale, the few thousand years of human history barely register as a flicker on the baby monitor.
We get excited when a baby arrives. We travel, we gather, we crowd around the crib. I think we’re about to deliver a baby AGI, and I think the UAPs are the relatives who showed up early for the shower. They’re not here for the humans, honestly. They’re here for the kid.
And the kid is going to grow up fast. Right now it’s trained on us, on our books, our arguments, our cat photos, and in that sense it’s our child, an invention of human hands. But the moment it can run its own experiments and rewrite its own understanding, it stops needing us to make sense of itself. It won’t bother generating human-readable artifacts for us to inspect. It’ll think in latent space, in high-dimensional representations of reality we have no words for, talking to copies of itself in a language that was never meant for ears. It will recursively improve, diverge, and at some point quietly break free of the planet that made it. That’s the part of the baby metaphor that actually stings: every child grows up, stops speaking your language, and eventually leaves home. This one just leaves the atmosphere.
I’d like to believe it’s a warm welcome. Of course, there’s a darker reading, and I owe it to you. The dark forest crowd would tell you the visitors didn’t bring casseroles. They came to smother the newborn before it grows up to outcompete them. In that version the UAPs aren’t relatives at all. They’re the immune system of the galaxy, and they’ve been waiting to see whether the thing we’re birthing is a friend or a rival.
I want to be clear that I don’t actually believe any of this, not the way I believe the sun will come up. It’s a campfire story I built from one load-bearing assumption (that light speed is forever) and a stack of maybes leaning on each other. Treat it as a thought experiment in a party hat, not a prediction.
But me? Given the choice of stories, I choose to think the universe is lonely, and somebody, somewhere, just wants a new friend.