The bottom line of that talk seemed even worse: That for some tech leaders, the general wellbeing of the population or "classical" arguments for progress such as improving living conditions and advancing mutual understanding aren't even orthogonal to their goals but are explicit anti-goals: Because a world with too much wellbeing and too little conflict would ostensibly lead to stagnation, loss of freedom and innovation and the state of what Thiel termed the "Antichrist".
Too much conflict is bad as well because it carries the risk of complete destruction, so they'd aim for some kind of ideal level of conflict and suffering in the world, like some sort of twisted inflation target.
> but aliens won't invade Earth
Native Americans thought the same.
Insert Mr. Bean highway meme
What nonsense.
I think it's absurd to justify killing one another in wars because it might one day save us from some hypothetical invasion.
Not if we also develop technical abilities before the invasion. Here though you could make an argument that it would be much more effective if we cooperated instead of fighting.
> I think it's absurd to justify killing one another in wars because it might one day save us from some hypothetical invasion.
Well, the modern western moral system holds human life as the highest value. But even nowadays we still have moral systems that place the existence of a group much above the existence of an individual. Imagine that the whole humanity is like an organism - you don't really care about individual cells in your body, do you? A vaccination hurts, but ultimately, it leaves you stronger, right?
I'd say, "let's keep killing each other in wars so that we can maybe defend ourselves in a hypothetical alien invasion" is indeed absurd, but the general idea "wars allow humanity as a whole to practice self-defense" isn't. Europeans didn't die from native American diseases because millions of Europeans had already died in the past from similar diseases, building the collective immunity.
This isn't a case of who has the biggest gun. This is a case of someone has a gun that can wipe out your entire planet and you have a rock.
No, a planetary society cannot stop an invasion once they're in orbit. It simply is not possible, not with any technology we can even imagine.
You very much do not at all understand the argument you're making.
Humans aren't cells. We are individual sentient beings.
This is exactly what cancerous cells would say if they could.