I generally agree with the premise that the wealthy (ie most of the developed world) are retreating into stimulation of their pleasure centres, aided and abette

I generally agree with the premise that the wealthy (ie most of the developed world) are retreating into stimulation of their pleasure centres, aided and abetted by an industries which are increasingly focused upon satisfying this. And I also agree that it's a real risk to the ultimate future of our species. This is hardly a new idea: Olaf Stapledon wrote in "Starmaker", in 1937, about a VR-obsessed species anaesthetizing itself into extinction. What I find curious is that many of the <i>very</i> wealthiest are rejecting this trend in very absolute terms. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Robert Bigelow are spending their fortunes on real hardware rather than virtual reality, with the explicitly stated goal of making humanity a multiplanetary species. Other billionaires (Paul Allen, Richard Branson) are making complementary efforts, although without quite the same degree of aspirational rhetoric. If they collectively succeed in establishing small colonies on Mars, then the initial rigours of colonial life will not allow for the kind of idle narcissism that is currently feasible for the wealthy on Earth. Whatever the fate of Earth, that will at least postpone the onset of a cultural coma for our species. I tend to think that if this happens, then complete culture death at the hands of artificial pleasure is no longer possible. Once we're out of the deep gravity well of Earth, the marginal cost of establishing additional colonies elsewhere is very much lower; if even a very very small minority of the population keeps the spirit of evolution alive, then that will be sufficient to spread through the universe. So, I don't really see this as a good solution for the Fermi paradox, since it seems highly improbable that EVERY civilisation would succumb to video games before becoming multi-planetary.