Sucking up resources? Nobody else is using them. They’re just being wasted;
I’d like to point out that even among the forms of intelligence that we have met, this is not a universally compelling argument. Consider that many people have a strong negative emotional reaction to the idea of putting garbage on the moon (assuming this could be made efficient). Now, objecting to this makes precious little sense. The moon is huge: even if we decide we want a colony there later, we’re unlikely to coat its entire surface in waste and leave no room there. In fact, even putting enough trash there to be visible from Earth would take a while if we decided we wanted to avoid that for aesthetic reasons. It just weirds people out to use the moon as a landfill. Why should we expect that aliens wouldn’t have analogous reasons to avoid “sucking up” resources that are doing less good by themselves?
Sure, if all aliens had values like that, then maybe all of them would stay in their original solar systems. But if even one is different, it would quickly expand.
It should be noted that right now humans are in a very unstable point in our evolution. Our scruples about garbage are almost certain to be eliminated if we continue to evolve under natural selection. Natural selection rewards the most efficient replicators, period.
I’d like to point out that even among the forms of intelligence that we have met, this is not a universally compelling argument. Consider that many people have a strong negative emotional reaction to the idea of putting garbage on the moon (assuming this could be made efficient). Now, objecting to this makes precious little sense. The moon is huge: even if we decide we want a colony there later, we’re unlikely to coat its entire surface in waste and leave no room there. In fact, even putting enough trash there to be visible from Earth would take a while if we decided we wanted to avoid that for aesthetic reasons. It just weirds people out to use the moon as a landfill. Why should we expect that aliens wouldn’t have analogous reasons to avoid “sucking up” resources that are doing less good by themselves?
Sure, if all aliens had values like that, then maybe all of them would stay in their original solar systems. But if even one is different, it would quickly expand.
It should be noted that right now humans are in a very unstable point in our evolution. Our scruples about garbage are almost certain to be eliminated if we continue to evolve under natural selection. Natural selection rewards the most efficient replicators, period.
By what method? How will agreeing to do things with garbage that we currently prefer not to do help individual humans reproduce more successfully?