IF we keep the infrastructure and the human capital, and squeeze out the profiteering and corruption, we will be a better nation for it.

If, on the other hand, we continue to rape and pillage the infrastructure and humans, to grow the profiteering and corruption, we will perish utterly.

before they achieve the technology to escape their planet, and that's why we don't see any evidence of ET's out there. Maybe this is our choke point.

For me it has to do with the discovery of fossil fuels, which IMO are extremely likely to exist on any planet that can support intelligent life. This discovery comes before the science required to see the risk of CO2 emissions. The reason it comes first is because it depends just on experience (seeing that oil, coal and gas burn). By the time the science has been developed to assess the unseen risks, the society is addicted to the benefits of high energy flows - it may be too late for them to prevent the kind of collapse we seem headed for. The fact that this collapse is occurring just as our technology reached the point that we could begin off-planet exploration is ironic, but hardy surprising in my view.

I take the human experience on this planet to be fairly average in terms of the development of intelligence and the conditions that are necessary for that to happen. As a result I would expect that other intelligent life would follow a broadly similar path.

Your reasoning isn't wrong, presuming other life is like ours with similar geography. But perhaps a rugged landscape sparsely filled with silicon based lifeforms who had a historically stable population base (due to the extreme living conditions and lack of available food) could not over utilize easy energy at the point of discovery.

Yes, there is a critical window between discovery/utilization of fossil fuel and the development of science to measure these effects (and yet another point, between or after, where they must change their practices). I do not believe that for every strange alien species on every strange alien planet, that destruction is the only inevitable outcome from this process. There are far too many variables, including population base, planetary conditions, general behavior and beliefs, etc.

We have one example of intelligent, technological life and the biophysical niche it occupies. I think it's realistic to view the fitness landscape in terms of the terrain we know, until some other terrain is discovered. Of all the variables you refer to, none have been shown to produce life, let alone intelligence, communication and technology. To fall back on unsubstantiated variables just because "the Universe is really, really big, you know" is wishful thinking. IMHO.

We have one example of intelligent, technological life and the biophysical niche it occupies.

Yep, one. And we can damn well be a one-off, oddball feak show. We don't know. We never will know. We will probably be gone before we would ever get the chance to know. So making assumptions based on an unknown premise ("any other intelligent life probably resembles ours in our conditions&quot is unfounded. We just don't know.

I'm not here to claim that there is in fact other types of life or that other types would definitely create a different result after finding fossil fuels. I'm just saying that we can't know. There are other possibilities beyond mankind's chokepoint. Perhaps its universal. Perhaps its just here. Fuck if I know.

For all we know some other civilizations just like ours may have discovered how to charge batteries with solar panels before discovering oil and the ICE. Hell, we've maybe had the concept of batteries for two thousand years (Parthian Battery). The first electric vehicle was made in the early 1800s. We had steam technology. If a few things came together differently and just maybe we would of viewed the ICE as archaic, dirty, wasteful, and unnecessary. And without the ICE making oil burning savvy to every human, this would of shaked out quite a bit differently.

All we "know" as a viable possibility is our current manifested reality though. A single pinprick in a universe so vast we cannot even comprehend it truthfully without headaches.

We'll (probably) never know.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024719433

The root cause is high levels of available energy flow through the society.

High energy flows enable over-consumption by making resources of all kinds more accessible.

They also force the society into higher levels of stratification, because self-organization is driven by energy flow. Deeper hierarchies make it easier to manage high levels of energy flow, so they tend to appear naturally wherever there is a lot of energy to be managed. This effect underlies the structural difference between a forager tribe (low energy, low levels of resource use, very little hierarchy) and a modern corporation (high energy, high resource usage, high stratification). Think of the rise of the gilded age in America, concurrent with the increasing exploitation of fossil fuels.

So long as a civilization has a high level of energy flow we will not be able to get rid of either collective over-consumption or general inequality. These factors are not the result of some failure of the human socio-cultural mind. They are the natural result when our evolutionary tendency towards growth comes into contact with and high, sustained energy throughput. A positive feedback loop results, one that could be expected to drive us along exactly the path we find ourselves on.

I don't think there is any way off this path, because the system of global civilization has no central decision-making control node. As a result we are collectively at the mercy of our evolved nature and the energy flow. So long as global exergy availability (exergy is another term for "final energy use&quot continues to increase, so will resource depletion and systemic social inequality.

IMHO