so kurzgesagt released a video and I didn’t like it (or, at least, a large part of it)
it’s just a total mischaracterization of “loud” aliens
kurzgesagt cannot see beyond their “competitive”, “nation state” lead mindset, something steeped in exploitative rhetoric that traces back to colonialism
they presume that sentients must organise into these civilisations with non-overlapping borders, which exist to protect the scarce natural resources they are consuming
let’s face it, if you’re going to be loud, you’re going to be exploiting solar energy and loose matter to get kickstarted
but you will probably soon have a full command of nuclear power, not just fusion (at which point who needs stars?) but also “nuclear alchemy”, that being the ability to synthesise whatever element you want by a process of fusion and fission
(fission because any reasonable fusion-wielding people would probably store spare matter as iron because nuclear stability, so lighter elements can come from there, remember, they’ve cracked fusion, so power is literally no longer an object for them, they have as much power as there is hydrogen, and there’s a LOT of hydrogen, so they have no reason to harvest anything from stars (to big and awkward) or planets (just piddly amounts of water and atmosphere) when they can just grab some from the space around a gravity well near a nebula, or create their own gravity wells to passively accumulate vast quantities of hydrogen)
at which point, why would you ever bother messing around with solar systems? the only reason to crack a planet for resources at that point is if you’re impatient, which is kinda the opposite of what you become when you’re looking at this scale of people, they literally have as much time and energy as they want, thousands of years collecting gas is quite literally nothing to you at that point
similarly, there’s no “nature reserves” if your default isn’t mindless consumption, and there are no borders if people aren’t obsessed with scarce resources, so you wouldn’t be fenced in either, because sentients capable of this will just diffuse outwards, you literally can’t build a border checkpoint in space that’s worth a damn, because you can just… go around it…
space is like, really big, yo
now, you might argue that with all this, they’re not loud any more, and the odds are yes, because if you can make it this far you probably have no reason to make dyson swarms or other megastructures because what’s the point? and that’s really the biggest issue with this video… they never question why anyone would do any of that (and so come to a conclusion from much shakier assumptions than they believed)
and, unfortunately for kurzgesagt viewers (including myself), that’s probably because of their… political persuasions. okay, I’ll just say it outright, they’re neoliberals with a techno-solutionism fetish. I don’t like it any more than you do, but that’s just how they are, and they’ve proven recalcitrant in changing their ways on this. fine. fortunately, it doesn’t impact most of their popscience content, and when it comes to sci-fi like this? sci-fi writers have your back, from Ursula Le Guin to Ian M Banks, and even a new generation of sci-fi writers like Ann Leckie, there’s plenty of people who use sci-fi to do the one thing it was always meant to do: serve to reflect upon ourselves, so we can ask who we really want to be
just a shame kurzgesagt never really understood that part of sci-fi