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Asymptotic burnout and homeostatic awakening: a possible solution to the Fermi paradox?
(royalsocietypublishing.org)
They're using fancy words that amount to capitalist realism + analogies around climate change and other forms of overextractive collapse.
I find these kinds of ideas very boring because they amount to a breathtaking lack of imagination. Really, they're saying, "what if every other form of potential intelligent life is just like us?", right down to the use of cities on planets and an infinite growth model for a global society. Cool, great, that's what sci-fi is useful for, you can critique our society from within another one. But as a group trying to be very serious and use the big words...
The Fermi Paradox is best answered by noting that its numbers are pulled out of some old white dudes' asses and so its conclusions mean nothing. If anything, the difference between reality and the numbers game just puts a minimum bound on how wrong the numbers are.