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I’m aware of the kardashev scale, I’m just curious how you reached the conclusion that consumerism is necessary for any intelligent species, if consumerism is what prevents T3. I mean, we’re talking about the Fermi paradox, right? I took your comment to mean that we haven’t discovered a T3 civilization because T3 is impossible because of consumerism. And that just seems like a pretty baseless assumption
Why is it baseless? It's like the size of a living organism has an upper limit.
Why would the size of a civilization not also have a limit? Why can the limit not be that which is described by;
easy times create weak men
weak men create hard times
hard times create strong men
strong men create easy times
...
It can't just loop forever. At some point as is already being seeing something happens. The weak men allow for parasitic men to destroy the would be strong men. Consumerism is a natural progression that happens to species. It ends the cycle written above.
You know the political idiom "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely"? That isn't just applicable to individuals or small groups. It's applicable to the whole as well, and is far more damaging.
e;
on power corrupts
Think about it. Power LITERALLY corrupts destroys. Batteries have a size limit too and it's difficult to make larger and larger batteries of single unit size, rather than just stacks.
So from the big, to the small.
From the physical to the philosophical: power doesn't just corrupt. Power destroys.
But you’re assuming that a civilization must be human-like. If ever we were to discover a T3 civilization I’d think it would most likely be a hivemind type structure. Think like ants, or termites, but on a galactic scale. To me, consumerism is such a human concept that it seems silly to assume that any other species would fall subject to it. I mean there is literally no other species on earth that is subject to consumerism, why would alien species be likely to?
I mean there is literally no other species on earth that is subject to consumerism...
Except for all of them. What do you think the signs that say;
Don't feed the wild animals it creates a dependent population. bad thing bad thing bad thing
...describe?
That's consumerism. The "dependent" population is bad because it dies off. When an entire local, natural fauna dies off it causes significant ecological disharmony and damage.
Your problem is you're limiting what "consumerism" means for everything to what it specifically means for humans. That's ridiculous.
Just like "racism" doesn't exist with nonhuman species. Except it does.
All higher species on Earth are prone to addiction as far as I can tell. Arguably, addiction is a biological necessity. There aren't many situations where seeking more of a good thing isn't evolutionarily successful. There can be particular niches that go against this principle and they may even be the ones eventually surviving a "consumerist" selection event but from an evolutionary point of view I would expect a civilization to evolve from a consumerist species.
I also reject the hive-mind hypothesis. This could be more of a terminology issue but, as I understand the term, in a hive-mind, every single mind is less important to the collective and overall survival is easier leading to a weaker evolutionary drive towards higher intelligence. A highly interconnected individual-based civilization seems more likely to me. It has all of the upsides and none of the downsides when compared to the true hive mind.
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