I only read the abstract and I still have no clue what these funny duddies are talking about, but I thought the general idea was neat
I only read the abstract and I still have no clue what these funny duddies are talking about, but I thought the general idea was neat
They're using fancy words that amount to capitalist realism + analogies around climate change and other forms of overextractive collapse.
I find these kinds of ideas very boring because they amount to a breathtaking lack of imagination. Really, they're saying, "what if every other form of potential intelligent life is just like us?", right down to the use of cities on planets and an infinite growth model for a global society. Cool, great, that's what sci-fi is useful for, you can critique our society from within another one. But as a group trying to be very serious and use the big words...
The Fermi Paradox is best answered by noting that its numbers are pulled out of some old white dudes' asses and so its conclusions mean nothing. If anything, the difference between reality and the numbers game just puts a minimum bound on how wrong the numbers are.
Just like orthodox bourgeois economics.
I agree, the issue with speculating about aliens in any way is that our imagination is hilariously limited. We are the only intelligent species we know of and we live in a very specific environment and have very specific needs, which has shaped the way we think and our way of life in very specific ways.
Everything we can imagine is just a remix of things we have seen before, and if there are aliens out there, it's highly likely they will be nothing like anything we know. Literally inconceivable to us at this point. Not just visually, but also in how they think and act.
I've yet to be convinced that "Why can't we hear the aliens" is at all a sensible question. Beyond our nearest star systems even detonating nuclear warheads in morse code in high Earth orbit will get drowned out by cosmic noise pretty quickly. Space is just too damn big and empty.
I'm more interested in the question "what would the aliens need to do, and how far can they be, so we can detect their signal at all with our current instruments". Any good sources on this? I found this article, which is interesting, but very pointedly treats the observable radius of a signal emitter as a free parameter, essentially ignoring it as a limitation.