#2 doesn't seem to consider how much stuff there is out there. Why bother harvesting resources from a gravity-laden planet when you can almost certainly get them from asteroids or other places?
Furthermore, while we may not care about "ants", we do - at least to some degree - care about the impact on wildlife and the environment. Probably not as much as we should, but our concern has only grown over time, so I'm not sure I buy the suggestion that a super-advanced civilization would go the extreme opposite way and not care about the impact it has on "lesser" life forms.
> Why bother harvesting resources from a gravity-laden planet when you can almost certainly get them from asteroids or other places?
Why bother digging up a carbon laden energy source from the depths of a gravity laden planet instead of using solar energy or wind or any other energy source that is less harmful?
Seems really illogical … oh wait, thats just an intelligent life-form.
> Why bother digging up a carbon laden energy source from the depths of a gravity laden planet instead of using solar energy or wind or any other energy source that is less harmful?
Well at least one reason might be that you're currently unable to use those latter forms of energy as well as you can the former.
Anyway, using the way we act as a comparison for how these other civilizations might act doesn't make sense to me - we're nowhere even remotely close to being a threat to other civilizations. By the time a civilization reaches the point where they can travel between stars, I do suspect they'll be using renewables pretty dang heavily
That's why I gave the example of solar: we've been able to utilize solar for a long time yet only now is it become a serious source of energy. Windmills have existed for probably 200 years but have not been taken seriously as a source of energy.
I'm not talking about mining asteroids, I'm talking about other sources of energy that have been known to us but which we don't utilise because of self-interest of oil companies - not money or cost, self interest. Money & cost are regulated by us not money.
So to say these other sources of energy weren't viable from a financial PoV might be correct but it goes against our own self-interest.
> I do suspect they'll be using renewables pretty dang heavily
That's like saying "in any case, the future will be better". As humans have shown, worse comes before better in history. Howabout making the present better first?
We haven't been able to utilize solar to the degree we have been able to utilize oil for all that long, and since it has, our utilization has only grown.
"Commercial concentrated solar power plants were first developed in the 1980s. Since then, as the cost of solar panels has fallen, grid-connected solar PV systems' capacity and production have doubled about every three years. Three-quarters of new generation capacity is solar"
This says nothing of, say, hydro power, which we have been using for a while
> That's like saying "in any case, the future will be better". As humans have shown, worse comes before better in history. Howabout making the present better first?
Mate I said nothing about our future or present. It's just absurd to assume our past has any bearing on how super-advanced space-faring civilizations will utilize technology.
Maybe, but to me, it would be as if we dug into a prairie dog's tunnels, killed them all and stole whatever little bits of food they have. It just doesn't make sense.
So how is it that the amazon is disappearing? Coincidence or human interference?
Humans have demonstrated a cycle of 1. exploitation to the point destruction, 2. Realisation of the damage they have inflicted, 3. Green washing and band-aid fixes 4. Rinse and repeat.
Be it waste handling, colonisation, industrial revolution, slavery, oil extraction etc etc.
At least for the time being, prairie dog tunnels seem safe.
Like I said, we should probably care more, and generally speaking, we do, over time. I'm not suggesting we're perfect, that we haven't made any mistakes, or that we won't make any more - just that we're slowly learning how to do better.
> Be it waste handling, colonisation, industrial revolution, slavery, oil extraction etc etc.
Interestingly, most of these have seen lots of progress in reducing the harms - if not practically eliminating it altogether, such as with slavery.
Colonisation and industrial revolution have reduced the harm? For whom?
Looking it from a white, western male perspective, you're right. From other perspectives this might well not be the case.
A lot of technology has short term benefits but are, in the long term, net negative to either us as species or the environment around us - which is the life support system for us. We as a society have not got a "undo" button for much of this technology, since once the damage has been done in real life, it stays in real life.
So we develop technology, see it fail, and try to fix the issues with more technology not realising that technology might be the problem. Or perhaps it's because we don't have the simplicity of an "undo" button.
Furthermore, while we may not care about "ants", we do - at least to some degree - care about the impact on wildlife and the environment. Probably not as much as we should, but our concern has only grown over time, so I'm not sure I buy the suggestion that a super-advanced civilization would go the extreme opposite way and not care about the impact it has on "lesser" life forms.