JWT and where we all come from.

The probabilities favor life on other planets, and once there is life there is competition and survival of the fittest. The variety of life here has been proven by millions/billions of years of evolution. It may even be reasonable that similar pressures on other planets produce similar beings to those we have here, including ourselves.

But that also may embed and force survival techniques like intelligence into the same kind of downward spiral as here as otherworldly species also paint themselves into corners where competition and aggression, with better tools thanks to intelligence, can lead to self-annihilation.

Humans got very close to rising above the inclinations that initially helped survival but now threaten it. We are devious, we lie, we cheat, we kill, we threaten. We pollute, we destroy, and we waste. We do all sorts of things to scratch and claw our ways above the others in complex reproductive displays but those things now threaten our own survival. And they are probably hard coded into our brain wirings so we don’t have to be taught aggression. We just do it.

As we learn to harness the powers of the universe, we hand ourselves all the tools necessary for our own destruction. Any other aliens probably would have had to surpass other somewhat similar issues. Or, they escape self-destruction by pure luck only to sail the interstellar spaces looking for other planets to similarly infect and rule over. You know, like us.

Ultimately, I think intelligence only gets us so far before a species destroys itself from the inside. It’s too hard to offload all the survival-based competitive baggage that got us here but leads to wars, and too easy to make planet-sterilizing weapons. But then maybe a pandemic wiped out all their warlike brethren and left the intelligent ones to run their planets? It’s not like there isn’t a precedent to point to… 🖖