Yesterday I learned that the person who came up with the "Grabby Alien" hypothesis is an economist.
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Yesterday I learned that the person who came up with the "Grabby Alien" hypothesis is an economist. Not a scientist. Which explains much. Especially why there's a zillion YouTube videos pushing it.
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What… is the Grabby Alien hypothesis
I'd Google for it but I don't/do/horrified want an AI summary
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Disappointingly (?) the AI summary seems to fairly faithfully plagiarize from Wikipedia
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@trochee it's straight up TESCREAL nonsense in service of explaining why we don't see evidence of alien civilizations (and why big tech should be in charge of everything.)
In essence any technically advanced civilization will, eventually, expand at breakneck pace across the galaxy, crowding out others.
Since we don't see evidence of this it means either we are the first advanced civilization, or the others are advancing along a near light speed front that we won't see until they nearly are on top of us.
Therefore we should drop everything and let the wise billionaires put all resources into rapid expansion of humanity, too bad if you starve because your distance ancestors will be be clear cutting some world on the other side of the galaxy.
These guys have been reading Greg Bear's _The Forge of God_ and _Three Body Problem_ while high.
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Like so much else in the TESCREAL crowd, they cannot imagine that aliens/transcended minds would not be venal and petty and extractive like they are
Their projection and short-sighted view means they are firmly planted in the Defect corner of the Prisoner's Dilemma
…they don't know it's iterated
…they can't imagine anything smarter than themselves
…therefore any super-intelligence must be rapacious imperialists like they are -
@trochee @emma Some of the Strugatsky brothers' early sf had a wonderful inversion of this. There are many spacefaring species, they do all sorts of exploration and occasionally trade and coordinate with each other.
But there are no imperialist space empires.
This is because any species that develops the technology for long space travel *without* getting rid of the root causes of imperialism first inevitably destroys itself.