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Exactly. A truly intelligent species doesn't put all its eggs in one basket. Plus, a truly intelligent species knows that expansion (in population) is good fo

by magduf 7y ago

Exactly. A truly intelligent species doesn't put all its eggs in one basket. Plus, a truly intelligent species knows that expansion (in population) is good for the survival of the species and civilization, and the way to get more resources and space is to go to space and acquire resources there and also learn to live there. The dinosaurs are a good example of a group of species that weren't far-sighted enough to invest in a serious space exploration and settlement program.

vkou 7y ago
> The dinosaurs are a good example of a group of species that weren't far-sighted enough to invest in a serious space exploration and settlement program. If we knew that a cretaceous extinction event will happen five, fifty, or five hundred years from now, it'll be orders of magnitude easier for civilization to survive on Earth, then it will be for it to survive in space. If dinosaurs had opposable thumbs, and technology, they would have been better off bunkering down. No matter how uninhabitable some freak civilization-ending event would leave the Earth, it would still be more habitable then anywhere else in the Solar system.
- magduf 7y ago
  With the correct technology, that's not true: it's perfectly possible to build very nice habitats in space with O'Neill cylinders, but you need a lot of technology and space-based infrastructure to make that happen. A truly intelligent species would be working hard on that problem, because the technologies needed to make big O'Neill cylinders would also have many, many other uses. A stupid species, on the other hand, would dedicate its most intelligent members to figuring out how to advertise to each other more effectively and sell each other useless crap. It's also quite possible to do multiple things at once when you have a civilization with many members. So as I said before, a truly intelligent species would not put all its eggs in one basket. They'd work on figuring out how to colonize space at the same time as figuring out how to deflect asteroids and also handle asteroid impacts if they did happen.

by magduf 7y ago

vkou 7y ago

> The dinosaurs are a good example of a group of species that weren't far-sighted enough to invest in a serious space exploration and settlement program. If we knew that a cretaceous extinction event will happen five, fifty, or five hundred years from now, it'll be orders of magnitude easier for civilization to survive on Earth, then it will be for it to survive in space. If dinosaurs had opposable thumbs, and technology, they would have been better off bunkering down. No matter how uninhabitable some freak civilization-ending event would leave the Earth, it would still be more habitable then anywhere else in the Solar system.

magduf 7y ago
With the correct technology, that's not true: it's perfectly possible to build very nice habitats in space with O'Neill cylinders, but you need a lot of technology and space-based infrastructure to make that happen. A truly intelligent species would be working hard on that problem, because the technologies needed to make big O'Neill cylinders would also have many, many other uses. A stupid species, on the other hand, would dedicate its most intelligent members to figuring out how to advertise to each other more effectively and sell each other useless crap. It's also quite possible to do multiple things at once when you have a civilization with many members. So as I said before, a truly intelligent species would not put all its eggs in one basket. They'd work on figuring out how to colonize space at the same time as figuring out how to deflect asteroids and also handle asteroid impacts if they did happen.