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Comment by je_bailey | Hacker News Reader

Among other comments here, there is the question of why? Why does a civilization need to expand? Why should it? We can already see in our world where the birthrates start to decline in societies that have a certain level of technology and quality of live. When we reach a point where our whims are catered for and energy is cheap. Reproduction doesn't seem very cost effective.

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Expansion can be due to a lot more than mere birthrates. First and foremost expansion will happen only when there is means to do so. And, 'means' can be driven by a combination of curiosity and necessity. On earth people have gone somewhere far off (migrated), because there was the place to go and the means to get there. In many cases that (migration) was the option over having to fight (or find some form of accommodation) within the local social & political system.

If this is why an intelligence can spread out on a planet, couldn't other intelligences (if they exist) spread out for similar reasons in the galaxy.

It makes sense that we'd expect to observe civilizations that are good at growing and have in fact already grown, right? Same reason we observe animals with a strong sense of self-preservation. These hypothetical expanding civilizations might be awful or unnecessary by our standards but that doesn't change how memetic/biological/whatever selection processes generally work. This is why the Fermi Paradox is interesting in the first place!

At least for me, it's because all of our eggs are in one basket at the moment.

Loosing this rock or our star essentially equals the extinction of our species.

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