> Imagine an advanced alien civilization many light years from Earth, where awesome and exciting technologies are everywhere. Many of them take the form of pers

> Imagine an advanced alien civilization many light years from Earth, where awesome and exciting technologies are everywhere. Many of them take the form of personal devices. Maybe your aliens evolved in a different environment, maybe their species was not shaped by millennia of sexual selection. But ours was, so until we change our very natures, "looking cool" and all other kinds of signalling will trump quite a lot of real benefits.