Hmmmm. That thought crossed my mind, too. Would they be like worker bees, building "beehives" large enough to be seen from hundreds of light years away? Explor

Hmmmm. That thought crossed my mind, too. Would they be like worker bees, building "beehives" large enough to be seen from hundreds of light years away? Exploring the stars would require a general-purpose intelligence that can span multiple eras: simple tool building, figuring out how to harness and store energy sources, science and math, etc. Is emotion required to achieve any of that, though? Probably, at least at first. I believe emotion is widely regarded as a valuable evolutionary aid, a crucial cognitive shortcut - at least at first, simply feeling that "predator is scary" and "sex is fun" is a hell of an evolutionary accelerant. You don't evolve to the point where you can understand predators (something that takes a lot of biologically expensive brain matter) unless you have a gut-level fear of them first (something that is biologically cheap). But at some point those emotions do more harm than good, I guess, if you're trying to build an interplanetary society. Our good old emotions are good for reproducing and being scared of predators, but aren't super helpful for managing Earth's resources across long time spans. Maybe the only way to make it past the great filters of nuclear war and environmental collapse is to discard those emotions somehow. Even if it's not the only way, seems like a valid way.