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The Future According To Stanislaw Lem
An anonymous reader writes "The Paris Review has an article about SF author Stanislaw Lem, explaining Lem's outlook on the future and his expectations for technological advancement. Lem tended toward a view that technology would infect and eventually supplant biological evolution. But he also suggested an interesting explanation for why we haven't detected alien civilizations: "Perhaps ... they are so taken up with perfecting their own organisms that they've abandoned space exploration entirely. According to a similar hypothesis, such beings are invisible because technological ease has resulted in a 'Second Stone Age' of 'universal illiteracy and idleness.' When everyone's needs are perfectly met, it 'would be hard, indeed, to find one individual who would choose as his life's work the signaling, on a cosmic scale, of how he was getting along.' Rather than constructing Dyson Spheres, Lem suggests, advanced civilizations are more likely to spend their time getting high.""
Lem died ten years ago and little of what he predicted appears to be actually happening, so no.
Lem is a favorite of literati because he was very critical of America and its authors, so they dust off his musing now and then and wank themselves.
So, interstellar Twitter is *not* a sign of an advanced civilization.
(Though that would have been my guess all along.)
because we have Elvis and Beethoven, and they don't.
I thought the aliens already got Elvis.....
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
As one alien species said (about humans):
"You mean you have to pay to live on the planet you were born on??"