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Comment by julienchastang | Hacker News Reader

Does anybody else feel like this is the answer to the Fermi paradox? Advanced civilizations simply exploit, consume, and pollute their way of existence.

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As they say, “power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Perhaps humanity shouldn’t have absolute power over the planet. Perhaps we should check our own power to save ourselves. We’ve done it with government, to insure stability and longevity, why not the planet?

Love the planet as you love your self. Just be.

Easy to say, difficult to do.

>why not the planet?

greed

Nah, they can't go multiplanetary because faster than rocket powered travel in space must be impossible and they die of radiation during the journey.

Planetary runaway heating can be worked with with underground cities.

Honestly, I think an easier answer is that intelligent life is simply very rare and interstellar travel is very hard. We may be the only intelligent life within our galaxy. Or perhaps just 1 in 100. In either case, it'd take a LONG time before we ever found or met another civilization.

What if we found ourselves on a planet that didn't have fossil fuels?

Then there is a good chance we would never have moved up to a technological state that allowed us to leave the planet. We probably wouldn't also be facing blow back from digging up and burning the planets solar battery.

We'd be using wind and water power, as we've done since well before the Industrial Revolution.

We'd go mass extinction and be the fossil fuels for the next intelligent species that appears.

14 billion years and not a single piece of evidence of a prior civilization.

The universe is vast, both in space and time. You would not detect anything from a past civilization that died a few millions of years ago in the closest solar system, which is really not that far in either time nor space

It's as easy of an answer to accept as any other hypothesis. I think we're all living within a simulation to create, solve, and document as many problems as we can with the technologies our specific environment allows us to develop; that our simulation is air-gapped away from the others performing the same work so as to not contaminate the data.

Most probably it's because the universe is vast and as humans we cannot comprehend how far the stars are. No matter how advanced an alien civilization is, physics prohibits objects with mass travelling faster than light and that's tru for any civilization.

It has been brought up before and it seems plausible. There is no guarantee that we have to leave the planet in any meaningful way or even survive for that matter.

Promoting sociopathy via a capitalist hierarchy that ruin the planet for their own selfish gain feels like a very primate thing to do. I bet there would be many other forms of communal, generous intelligent civilizations with longer-term thinking capability, especially if they lived longer than ~75 years on average. So consider my take on this statement inconclusive.

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