This is one of the theories that explain why we don't hear anyone else in our galactic neighborhood.
Civilizations just develop highly sophisticated digital worlds that they can just live in in complete bliss forever or until their system degrades and falls apart in millions of years.
We could be surrounded light years in every direction by perverts having infinite fun with tentacle hentai porn in their perfect digital world and they will never know or want to know that we even exist.
Either these companies will die out because they won't accept tentacle hentai or new companies will take their place to offer tentacle hentai .... whatever happens, we will get our tentacle hentai and never explore the universe.
It will never be a utopia, because those companies will use it to extract your thoughts, and pump relevant ads directly into your brain. Also, you'll forget to pay your subscription and you'll wake up in hell.
Civilizations just develop highly sophisticated digital worlds that they can just live in in complete bliss forever or until their system degrades
If I want to be blissed out until my body falls apart, I can do that now by turning my retirement account into a stockpile of fentanyl. I don't think its presumed that intelligent civilizations all just do this, for the same reason I don't believe modern human civilization will collapse on itself simply because we've discovered opium.
We could be surrounded light years in every direction by perverts having infinite fun with tentacle hentai porn in their perfect digital world and they will never know or want to know that we even exist.
We struggle to confirm the existence of a ninth planet while. We're living in a solar system at the rural edge of the galaxy and we just found out black holes exist. Would we know what an advanced civilization would even look like?
We haven't even fully ruled out life on Mars, ffs. There could be a layer under the cloud system of Jupiter, Uranus, or Neptune that's absolutely teaming with life. The Great Space Whale Migration of Proxima Centauri could be happening right now and we'd never have a clue.
Do not sell the galaxy spanning race of sentient porn-loving starfish short just yet.
Tbf, turning your retirement account into pure bliss with Fentanyl greeeaaaatly reduces the amount of time you get to be blissed out. This hypothetical future likely had found a way to reach permanent bliss with as few downsides as possible
Reminds me of the short story "Nano Comes to Clifford Falls." Basically a replicator arrives in a small town, and is freely available to use. At first it's great, but then it's not. I won't spell it all out, but I remember it being framed as a kind of few facto civilisation/personal "test," and that some people just can't handle life without the struggle.
Kind of a problematic take, if I'm remembering it correctly, but story still had a big impact on me.
CW: attempted sexual assault, in case anyone decides to check it out.
If I want to be blissed out until my body falls apart, I can do that now by turning my retirement account into a stockpile of fentanyl. I don't think its presumed that intelligent civilizations all just do this, for the same reason I don't believe modern human civilization will collapse on itself simply because we've discovered opium.
The key difference is that we still live in a society where, at least most people, have to work to live. If you spend your retirement on fentanyl the fentanyl isn't going to be the thing to make your body fall apart, assuming you get pure shit and are able to dose properly and not od your body can handle that for decades. What's going to tear your body apart is the poverty and deprivation of living on the streets after you lose your job. If you're in a fully automated post scarcity society and you're able to hook yourself up to one of these machines and live a long life I could see a majority of people doing that. Sure some people would object to it being meaningless, but in a post scarcity reality where God is dead, a robot can do anything better than you, and there's no conflict or competition for resources there isn't much meaning to be had anyway.
The other one is that if we were to disasemble all our planets (we can leave earth alone for sentimental reasons) and rebuild them in shells around our sun we could create as much habitable living area as the surface of every natural planet (habitable or not) in our entire galaxy. Plus the whole thing would fit inside the orbit of mercury which means very low light lag. Why build a galaxy spanning empire when you can just build a galaxy at home and have much better ping?
I bet you could get really energy efficientefficient with it too. Like convert people into highly specialized pleasure nodes in a vast network spanning the circumference of the sun's orbit
The entire circumstances of biological life is weird. You gotta deal with the fact that we're aware of the pointlessness of what turns us on. You can find a little bit of functional meaning of you dig into it, but it's a fucked up rabbit hole best avoided.
Real page turner that one. Crunchy and fanfic-y in a good way. The pedo stuff way way too detailed for my comfort, but if that's not a trigger for the reader, then it's a real head trip.