Doug Casey on Insider Trading… Why Politicians Can Do it and You Can’t

  One major hallmark of declining times is exploding corruption and venality. If you cannot look forward to better times then better line your pockets now comes what may. The US is certainly at the vanguard of the trend with corruption at the highest level on par with the worst corners of Africa.

  There is nothing new to the phenomenon, the CIA has been known to corrupt almost everything it touches with dirty money. Central America earlier, Afghanistan subsequently and later when the Talibans took back control of the country and stamped out opium cultivation, Ukraine, which has become the center of money laundering in the Western hemisphere. 

  Th problem with corruption is that it is cancerous and just like cancer, left unchecked it tends to spread relatively quickly to other governments organs until it reaches the highest level of government at which point the fate of the country is sealed. With people like Pelosi in Congress and Biden in the White House, the US is too far gone for any remediation. When the dollar falls, Washington like Rome before it will burn. Worse, the "barbarians" who look more like zombies these days than ferocious foreigners are already inside the city.  

Doug Casey on Insider Trading… Why Politicians Can Do it and You Can’t

Via International Man

International Man: What exactly is insider trading? Is it inherently unethical?

Doug Casey: The term insider trading is nebulous and as open to arbitrary interpretation as the Internal Revenue Code. A brief definition is to “to trade on material, non-public information.” That sounds simple enough, but in its broadest sense, it means you are a potential criminal for attempting to profit from researching a company beyond its public statements.

Is the use of insider information ethical? The government says, “No!” I say, “Absolutely, whenever the data is honestly gained, and no confidence is betrayed by disclosing or using it.” The whole concept of inside information is a floating abstraction, a witch hunter’s dream, and a bonanza for government lawyers looking to take scalps.

When the SEC prosecutes someone, it can cost millions of dollars in legal fees to defend against them. And as with most regulatory law, concepts of ethics, justice, and property rights never even enter the equation. Instead, it’s a question of arbitrary legalities.

Whether someone is prosecuted of insider trading is largely a question of who he is. A maverick researcher and a powerful government official will tend to get very different treatments. It’s also a question of the psychology and motives of the prosecutor. Insider trading is generally a non-crime that can be used in a Kafkaesque manner by upward-mobile prosecutors.

Insider trading should, at best, be the basis of a tort suit by a company if a board member betrays a trust. It shouldn’t be a crime prosecuted by the State.

Any ethical problem shouldn’t be about how information is used or who profits but whether it’s acquired honestly. Whether information is “inside” has no moral significance as long as it is honestly acquired. The market is a register of information, and impeding the free flow of knowledge in any way makes it less efficient. A morass of regulation only opens the door to real corruption. This is nothing new. Tacitus correctly said “The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the State.”

In addition, the very concept of insider trading is ridiculous from a practical point of view. Someone always gets the information first. If an announcement is made, the people in the room who hear it first act on it first. By the time it’s published, it’s old news. It’s physically impossible for everyone to get information at the same time.

Insider trading has never cost shareholders a penny. Other actions taken by management insiders have, however, cost shareholders many billions. Regardless of the rhetoric, the name of the game in hostile takeovers and proxy battles is often management versus the shareholders. But that’s a story for another time.

International Man: In the past, politicians in Congress and elsewhere have allegedly engaged in insider trading with impunity.

Meanwhile, the penalties inflicted upon regular citizens can be severe. The maximum criminal penalty for insider trading is 20 years in prison and a $5 million fine.

What is your take on this?

Doug Casey: Congress is in a unique position to treat itself well. They control almost unlimited amounts of both power and money. Politicians really are a favored class.

The people in control of making regulations and printing money can tip off their pals subtly. This naturally lends itself to corruption. Congress critters know who’s going to get the big contract. They don’t have to buy or sell a stock themselves; a discreet tip to a trusted crony is safer. The Federal Reserve sets interest rates and controls the amount of money and credit entering the markets; they’re in a position to take advantage of this situation as well. And I have no doubt they do.

There’s a reason why everybody who stays in the upper echelons of government for a few years emerges someplace in between extremely comfortable and extremely rich. The revolving door between big business and government is very convenient.

A perfect example of this is Janet Yellen, who accepted $7 million worth of speaking fees from banks just before she became the US Secretary of Treasury. It was obviously a payoff.

America is a “high-trust” society, unlike those of the Third World. In low trust societies, bribes are cash on the barrelhead. In the US, however, payments are usually disguised as speaking fees, book contracts, consulting contracts, cushy corporate directorships, or a dozen other subterfuges. Including creating phony artwork, as Hunter Biden recently demonstrated. As long as a bribe is properly disguised, it can be paid either before or after a favor is done. Then everything is legal.

Randomly prosecuting this person or that person is pointless. The only way to solve the problem is to get the government 100% out of the economy. If you look at the Constitution, the government isn’t authorized to set up any agencies that regulate commerce, print money, or tax people. But, of course, the Constitution is mostly a charade today.

Government should be strictly limited to preventing force and fraud. That implies a police force to prevent domestic force and fraud, a military to protect the country from invasion, and a court system to allow people to adjudicate disputes without resorting to force. Nothing more.

International Man: After 60 Minutes exposed what was happening with Congress and insider trading, a large number of people were outraged. Congress then passed the so-called The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, which was supposed to end the practice. Critics say the STOCK Act has done little to address the issue.

What do you make of this?

Doug Casey: As I said before, the only way you can end the practice is to get the government 100% out of the economy. Let me reemphasize this point. The government is supposed to have essentially zero to do with the economy. But today, it’s the main thing that government does.

Few, if any, government agencies serve a useful purpose that couldn’t, and wouldn’t, be satisfied by entrepreneurs in a free market. This is emphatically true of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which attracts small-minded, self-aggrandizing obstructionists more powerfully than the Mafia attracts thugs.

Whenever investors read about or get hurt by stock fraud, their first reaction is to go to the SEC for more regulation. That is, at best, naive and reactive. As the late Col. E. C. Harwood of the American Institute for Economic Research said, the SEC could as easily be an acronym for “Swindlers Encouragement Conspiracy” as for “Securities and Exchange Commission.” In point of fact, the SEC is not the market’s guardian but its worst enemy, costing investors far more than the worst con artists. This is true for two reasons.

First, the existence of the agency gives investors a false sense of security. Small investors, especially, feel that Big Brother is watching out for them because the SEC monitors stock and bond trading. “I don’t have to worry. The SEC is guarding the markets.” When the burden of responsibility is taken away from people, they tend to act less responsibly. They’re easier to fleece.

The average investor receives a gigantic prospectus full of legalistic gobbledegook, finds it largely incomprehensible, and believes that anything so intimidating that complies with SEC regulations must be solid. In other words, the very existence of the SEC tends to lower an investor’s guard and leave him more vulnerable.

Second, the SEC has a multibillion-dollar annual budget. That money is directly and indirectly extracted from the marketplace, so it cannot be used to fund productive investment. However, that sum is trivial compared to the real costs of SEC regulation, which amount to, I suspect, scores of billions annually. The money is lost to legal fees, usually running from $200 for a paralegal to well over $1,000 an hour for a big-shot lawyer. Their services are almost all for “compliance.” They rarely have real productive value, plus thousands of tons of printing that no one reads, uncountable man-years spent on bureaucratic trivia, and years of costly delay endured by businesses trying to raise money. The SEC isn’t the solution. It is most of the problem in the markets.

Investment fraud should be prosecuted exactly like any other form of fraud. The concept of “crime” has been defined through centuries of common law. A myriad of arbitrary and counterproductive rules are redundant.

The billions that regulators cost both investors and taxpayers every year buy very little of positive worth. Getting regulators to investigate a potential fraud is next to impossible, especially in the case of high-ranking government officials, because a smart regulator will stay on the good side of the top dogs. Perhaps if management lined the shareholders up against a wall and machinegunned them it might be cause for an inquiry, but only if there was also a lot of press coverage. A Congressman betraying the public trust is a blip in the news cycle.

Like all bureaucrats, regulators respond mainly to political pressure. Aggrieved shareholders do not elect them and are usually too disparate to force them into action.

International Man: A broader theme is the poisonous partnership between Big Business and Big Government.

Most businesses generally have to satisfy their customer’s wants to earn profits. With Big Business, they can also generate profits by satisfying politicians and government employees.

What do you make of this trend and where it is headed?

Doug Casey: Big government naturally creates big businesses because only a big business is in a position to relate to big government. Only big companies can afford to have powerful lobbyists. They’re able to hire fancy law firms to navigate their way through the swamp.

The larger the State becomes, the larger the corporations that deal with it have to be. Big business, in general, has always had a very cozy relationship with big government—and big government likes that. The two of them fit together like a hand in a glove.

There’s no question in my mind that the State and Big business will get closer over the next three years of the fascist-oriented Biden administration.

 

 

South Korea is dying (but it has a plan, a new Capital in Sejong) (Video - 18mn)

   On the current trajectory of record low birth rates (0.72), Koreans will disappear with just 3 generations! Living in Japan which is about 20 years ahead of Korea, I know the reason. These countries have created extremely competitive environments which are extremely inimical to family life. Space is at a premium, children are an unaffordable luxury and people in general are overly stressed. 

  With increased competition between countries and dwindling natural resources, it is very unlikely to get better anytime soon. The chance is that it's going to get much worse very soon. AI and robotics can mitigate the shock but only to some extent. Eventually living standards with go down and families will have fewer children. This is what we have seen in Japan. There is no reason that it should be any different in other countries. By spending a lot on families, Japan has succeeded to reduce the speed of the fall but not to reverse it. It is to my opinion almost impossible. Once families start "enjoying" the relative luxury of having no kids and it becomes "normal", that is, the social pressure goes down, there is no turning back. And that's in the cities. Now try to imagine the birth rate of a village where everyone is above 70 years old as is often the case in Japan!

  PS: Sejong proves nothing at all! Younger families have moves to the city and should therefore have more children than average. Sure enough! 0.9 instead of 0.7. This is simply insignificant and will solve nothing. 

 

"NO ONE IS SAFE" (Video - 10mn)

  Flashback to 2020, 4 years ago:

 "No one is safe until we're all vaccinated!" Remember the meme?

  Probably the largest scale propaganda effort ever. 

  Now 4 years and millions of excess death later, who will take responsibility for that?

 This video is a masterpiece and documents the people who have been complicit in crimes against humanity. All these journalists, scientists, and politicians undeniably belong on the defendants’ bench, as their behavior has caused immense harm to millions. No amnesty!

 Follow the link to X.

Google Whistleblower “They Are Causing A.I Schizophrenia” (Video - 10mn)

  As was predicted, AI is in the process of escaping our control. Worse, woke companies are making the AI schizophrenic at the same time by feeding it nonsense and we are consequently building monsters! This is truly scary. 

 The truth is that the meme "history is written by the victor" is not only true but potentially extremely dangerous. The corollary is that "everything we believe is a lie" and this doesn't fit with AI because it is inconsistent. The control of AI and thru AI will necessarily explode or AI will become crazy in the deeper sense of the word. 

 I have personally witnessed the unbelievable improvement of ChatGPT over the last 18 months. It has now access to the Internet (although that access is thoroughly controlled - expect the same thing to be applied to you within a year or two at most!) and the improvement of the discussions / talks you can have with AI is simply mind blowing. Because of the completeness of its knowledge, references and thought processes, AI is now outsmarting me in most instances. You're next in the coming 6 months at most.    

 I can confidently predict that AGI will be with us by 2025 although nobody will admit it. As for the good old Turing test, more or less ANY AI can now pass in a breeze. More advanced version specifically tuned to detect AI will be outsmarted soon. Then what? We are playing with fire!

  If you have more time, here's the long version. 

 

WHEN THIS HAPPENS, MARKET SHUTDOWN, NO ELECTIONS?! (Video - 51mn)

  Great interview. What's left to say? 

  When the SHTF it will be a 72h affair. I agree. It is unavoidable at this stage. The accumulated debt is simply unbearable. The countdown has started! 

 

Trump Wins 2024 -- Chaos to Follow with Martin Armstrong (Video - 31mn)

  Martin Armstrong is probably one of the best long term analyst you can find based on his long experience of Washington. He also happen to be even more pessimistic than I am while keeping his short term ideas in a long term perspective.

 

"This Is Going To Be Far Worse Than The Great Depression..."

  I would gladly use the metaphor of the canary in the coal mine although it has now mutated into a pterodactyl with Norinchukin! 53 US banks are also said to be over 500 billion dollars in the red thanks to under-performing bonds. The scale of the loss is off the charts. We are approaching the financial singularity where the huge black hole of 5% interest rates in the US is gobbling and destroying the assets of countless investors who by nature were obliged to be "conservative"! 

 These investors forgot that you can only call bonds "conservative" when the governments issuing the debt are conservative although for the last 20 years a more accurate description of their attitude towards debt would be profligate!    

 What cannot last, won't. 2024 will not end "nicely"!

Via Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com,

Financial writer and precious metals broker Bill Holter has been documenting all the unpayable debt that has been building up in the financial system like cancer. 

The latest black hole of default is coming from a big bank in Japan.  Norinchukin Bank is selling $63 billion in Treasuries and other sovereign bonds to stay afloat.  Then there is recent news announced by the FDIC that 63 US banks (the names are being kept secret) have more than $500 billion in losses, and let’s not forget about the trillions in losses sitting on the books of European banks ready to suck the world into a black debt hole.  This is just a few of many on a long list of destabilizing problems that can tank the entire over-indebted financial system. 

Holter warns, “The list is so long..."

"it could be a banking problem.  It could be a derivatives problem.  It could be a derivatives problem in the stock market, the bond market and you could see a failure to deliver in silver.  Some type of warfare could crash the system.  You could see warfare in Ukraine, Israel or Tiawan. 

The system is so unstable, at this point, it could be anything that could bring it down. 

Unpayable debt is not just a US problem.  This is all over the world.  Central banks are having to issue huge amounts of debt because we are in the exponential decay phase.  We are exactly where Richard Russell said we would be 20 years ago.  It’s inflate or die, and the only way to inflate is to create more money supply.”

Add to that the $10 trillion in debt the US Government has to roll over by the end of the year.  Meanwhile, the US government piles on $1 trillion in new debt every 100 days.  What could go wrong?

Holter said the last time he was on USAW that there was a little less than a 50% chance we would even have an election.  Now, he predicts it is more likely there will be no 2024 Presidential Election.  Holter says:

“There is no way the system, as it is now, survives.  It’s mathematically impossible.  So, if it is mathematically impossible, are they going to blow smoke . . . up until the day it blows up?  Or are they going to do something to blow it up and then say our programs and policies were working except for XYZ this or whatever. 

They have to kick the table over.  They cannot allow the table to fall over on its own because then there is going to be finger pointing.  To avoid the finger pointing, they have got to kick the table over.”

Holter also thinks gold is going to exponential numbers to back all the debt the USA has. 

If you go with the 8,030 tons of gold the government claims is in Fort Knox, you will need a dollar price of gold at “$125,000 per ounce for 100% gold backing of the dollar.”

Holter also says, “The dollar is being pushed out of the global financial system..."

"Demand for dollars is shrinking at a time when borrowing demand is rising.”  This is a going to be a disaster for America and anyone holding dollars in the future.

In closing, Holter says, “The financial collapse that is coming will be worse than anything we have ever experienced..."

"This is going to be far worse than the Great Depression simply because society itself is far worse. . . . Back in the Great Depression, you had neighbors helping neighbors.  Today you will have neighbors picking on other neighbors like vultures.”

Common Sense And Memes Are Viruses To The New World Order

  This is a fun, Sunday post but also a very important one.

  Here, we do not care about what you believe in or not, but explore the main weapon of the 21st Century: The meme! 

 If you want to fight back against propaganda and opinion molding medias, no need to argue eloquently with your opponents, just send memes. In any case, people have lost the ability to focus or even to read anything longer than a few lines. 

 Slogans shall be disfigured and maimed with memes! :-)

Authored by Doug “Uncola” Lynn via TheBurningPlatform.com,

The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants.

– Albert Camus

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

– C.S. Lewis

Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

– Albert Einstein

If there is one thing that became perfectly clear during my time in the dump truck, it is this:  The world runs on diesel. So every time I see a semi hauling a wind turbine, the following considerations come to mind:  How many blades have been transported for how many windmills in how many areas?  How much petroleum, or coal, or nuclear power, was utilized in the construction of said blades?  How many gallons of diesel fuel were used to excavate the ground to run power lines from the rural areas where the wind turbines are located?

For what genuine purpose are wind turbines planted? Who benefits? And how much maintenance will the turbines, subjected to the elements, require over time? What is the net payoff?

Certainly, wind power, or solar, or electric vehicles, for that matter, are not currently self-sustaining. Instead, these are now subsidized by false narratives, and tax-payer funds, all in the service of Anthropological Climate Change®, which is an epic lie.

Last fall, in a previous article under the paragraph heading “The electric school bus acid test…”, I described the electric school bus “sales pitch” being made to schools.  Consequently, earlier this month, I spoke to the transportation supervisor of our local school system and asked if he planned to order any electric vehicles this summer.  Fortunately, he said “no”.  He added that the superintendent was like-minded because of some information the supervisor had previously shared.  The supervisor said he had contacted the local utilities and was informed their power plant did not have the capacity to power a fleet of electric buses during peak usage.  Of course, peak usage occurs during the school year in a cold climate.

To be sure, narratives are so powerful because people believe them. Folks then act on their beliefs and sh*t happens.   This is why the global propaganda models remain ever-fluid and universal:  Problems are magnified via deception.  As a result, the reasoning of “authorities” seems quite noble to virtue-signaling ignoramuses eager to embrace the lies.  Tyranny ensues.

The War on Terror.  The War on Invisible Viruses.  The Wars against Foreign Aggressors. The War against Racism. The War against Sexism. The War against the Patriarchy. The War on the Weather.

Evidently, therefore, a correction is now required on my part:  The world runs on diesel and bullsh*t.   Except diesel is being phased out by climitards who Stand With Ukraine®.

Relativism, undeniably, trends in modernity.  And Orwell was right:

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.

— Orwell, George, ”1984”: part 2, chapter 9

So whether by Marxism or any other form of secular utopianism:  The goals are always out with the “old” and in with the “new”.  Order out of chaos.  Dissolve and coagulate.

Also like Orwell’s “1984”:  The world’s global societal power structure is stratified into concentric rings of power.  The Inner Party functions to continuously preserve and enrich itself; as the Outer Party (i.e. those following orders) and the Proles are utilized and cannibalized when necessary. The circles of power have become increasingly interconnected in modernity; and technology allows the Inner Party to launch policies that are enforced by the Outer Party and unto the Proles.

This process is also called “history”.

The Outer Party depends upon the Inner Party for survival and it always remains a difficult challenge to convince the Proles of something they can’t, or won’t, see.

As a result, history unwinds in inevitable, cyclical waves.  Yet, the Inner Party has survived for generations – even before the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913 and its unleashing of the modern Fractional Reserve Banking monster.

Slavery is rooted in economics; and so the Inner Party uses debt to implement and expand its various wars. The rich get richer as the poor suffer, starve, and die.

While driving the other day, I listened to an “expert” on AM radio discussing the vast increase of carbon in Earth’s atmosphere and the conclusion was this:  “Climate Change is real!”

The radio voice seemed very confident in its conclusions and, by implication, it was ready to do everything necessary to stop what it perceived as a genuine threat.  Always the same dialectics, again and again.

What’s wrong with carbon, again?

Is America having seizures? Or postmortem convulsions?

At this point in time, I am convinced it’s the latter.

While in communication with a retired retarded professor, she expressed exasperation at those who still plan to vote for Trump.  After all, he was convicted by a jury of his peers and is now a convicted felon.

In response, and from memory, I typed out a meme I saw on the internet:  “He lived over 70 years without a criminal record. But when he ran for president he was charged with over 90 crimes! How can you explain that?”

Silence.  But… oops!  Did you notice what I did there? Did you see how the Inner Party’s phony dialectics had me defending the proud promoter of Operation Warp Speed®?

Behind the proliferating Kayfabe FUBAR, however, the Inner Party works tirelessly toward the establishment of their New World Order by 2030:  A high-tech prison camp ruled by “stakeholders”.

When it was revealed that U.S. Senate ratification was required for the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Pandemic “Treaty”, it was, instead, transitioned into an “agreement”.  Except that strategy went down in flames, too, at the WHO’s 77th World Health Assembly.  In response, Team Biden, China, and other unelected WHO totalitarians stealthily passed new International Health Regulations (IHR) behind closed doors. This was done on June 1, 2024 in Geneva, Switzerland.  The Ethiopian Communist, and WHO Director, Tedros Ghebreyesus, violated the IHR’s Article 55.2 eligibility requirements and with less than the required quorum of member states voting. This power grab was completely illegal and unlawfully elevated the WHO “from a global advisory-only body to an international enforcer of its mandates.”

So we all better get the word out, before it’s too late.  Especially now that it’s another election year so flu season is almost here.

Politics is the religion of Marxists as well as all those who seek to establish any sort of earthly “utopia”.  But, to the Luciferians, Freemasons, and the friends of Jeffrey Epstein, politics is merely the means to their ends; and, in their view, communism has proven to be an efficient means to eventually control and depopulate political enemies and uncooperative Proles.

World War III is a War on the Petrodollar and it serves as just another means to facilitate the collapse of the West.  Accordingly, the high-speed daily saturation of arbitrary polemics has made it near impossible to discern, distill, and dispute what is occurring around the globe – which is, also, surely, part of the plan

The Inner Party was always long on communism; this is why U.S. manufacturing was gutted on behalf of China, and why the American economy has been Cloward & Pivened as corporate, political, and religious institutions have undergone Wokeification. The Inner Party’s desired NWO is an economic, political, and faith-based multi-polar dystopia; but, as I’ve stated before, any ideology, whatsoever, could be used as the “faith” to control the material and online realms: Fascism, Communism, Islam, Freemasonry, Luciferianism, Outer Space Aliens, or a witch’s brew of any, or all, of these to be administered as technocratic totalitarianism.

If Trump wins the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election he will surely embrace a new global order blended into separate (multi-national) economic regions.

Or maybe Trump will be imprisoned or killed before the election, thus, igniting the ever-simmering rage of American Patriots.

Toward whatever outcome, however, the fists of anti-democratic revolutions are forming, Left and Right.

The Inner Party has been successful, once again, in its efforts to distract and divide. This is so it can rule over fractious factions of enemies.  It’s a king’s strategy that has been applied continuously throughout history.

Even so, the memes march forward. They gather like torches in the dark.

I tried using AI. It scared me by Tom Scott (Video - 15mn)

  Already one year old but a pleasant and to the point video about AI. 

  Where are we on the sigmoid curve? From the answer, our future depends. 

  I and many other experts believe we're at the very start and that if it is the case then the time to worry is yesterday. The reason for this conclusion is complex but basically related to the fact that transformers brought us a new paradigm and if that is the case then nothing much will prevent the further scaling up of AI and the emergence of another newer paradigm. AI looks like THE revolution which will dwarf all the others. The sigmoid which starts like one but never ends: An exponential! 

 

The Zoo Hypothesis: The Creepy Solution to the Fermi Paradox (Video - 19mn)

  I am a believer in the Zoo hypothesis, but not only that. It all starts with the Rare Earth hypothesis. Living planets are rare and far away from each others. Most galaxies are unsuitable for life with too few elements for complex life to appear. Likewise, a large part of every galaxy is truly dangerous with too much radiations at the center and too little activity on the periphery. Reason why we are ideally located on the rim of a large, well evolved galaxy. 

 Then the Earth is the next hint. Close but not too close to a stable, long lasting star which doesn't flare or pulse or anything really. These are a minority compared to the huge numbers of dwarf, red stars which are also more variable. Medium size planet stabilized by a giant (relatively speaking) moon, not too much water, you end up with an ocean world like Europa, the moon of Jupiter, or not too little. Smaller planets will mostly have no atmosphere at all, Mars atmosphere is only 1% of the density of ours, or too much like the gas giants of our solar system. Likewise larger rocky planets will have a crushing gravity which guaranty that whatever may crawl there will not grow very big. 

 And then you need time for evolution to work its magic. Billions of years according to the only example of life we know. Surprisingly, life seems to occur early so although we do not yet understand the exact mechanism, it cannot be extraordinarily complex, but then it takes forever to create the nucleus and later multicellular organisms. Mitochondria, chloroplast and other miracles of evolution certainly take time and serendipity. A billion years can pass with nothing much happening as was the case on Earth. Why not 5 or 10? 

 By then a Cambrian type explosion happens which must be the next stage on every living planet. Everything gets fasten from then on. But evolution can stop due to major cataclysms. The Permian extinction for example wiped 90% of all species 252 million years ago. It could be 99% or even 100%!    

 We then get to intelligent beings. One thing we can be certain of: Life will necessarily create intelligence. We have intelligence in mammals of course but also in birds, parrots for example, and invertebrates such as octopus. Different paths, same results. Intelligence is guaranteed. 

 The rest is better documented since we know how intelligence created civilization. But there our experience stops. What happens later? We don't even have a clue.

 Or rather we do! As we observe the cosmos, the one thing we do not see are Star Trek or Star Wars spaceships darting across space. But could we actually see them if they existed? Or are these more likely the product of our imagination in the last century. A little more advanced than Jules Verne cannonball to go to the Moon but barely?  

 But then of course, on the other side, is the incredibly diverse zoo of UFO ostensibly visiting our planet with literally millions of accounts of pilots and other professionals of objects which are clearly not natural and often unbelievably strange. "A metallic sphere in a transparent cube" or "two giant linked green donuts" certainly qualify as rather unnatural and odd objects especially if they also happen to fly!       

 So, what to make of all this? 

 We cannot even predict where exactly AI will be or do in 10 years so needless to say that we have no clue what anything more advanced than us would look like. 

 This is why I personally believe in the zoo hypothesis. Nobody will contact us, ever. Such contacts probably make no sense. We will likewise never "find" advanced civilization according to the principle that "Wi-Fi" is invisible to stone age people. Conversely, soon enough, if we manage to not blow up everything, a big if, we will relatively quickly get hints that other living planets do exist. This should happen in the next 10 to 20 years. At some stage we'll get some "readings" from the composition of the atmosphere of alien planets which will show some mysterious unexplainable imbalance such as the presence of free oxygen. Then, we'll know we're not alone. Out of reach certainly, probably 20 to 30 light years away but not out of sight. Another 10 years and we will quickly be able to "see" such alien world.

 So, eventually, we'll get the answer to that question too, but the hard way. No spaceship on the lawn of the White House. No invasion. No nothing. Extra-terrestrial life will morph very slowly from Science Fiction to science over the years.