General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Do you believe there are species that have mastered FTL travel? [View all]Xithras
(16,191 posts)It presumes that any intelligent life form would have population growth rates and a desire to expand territory on par with that of humankind. It's entirely possible, and likely even PROBABLE, that an intelligent species can have very low population growth rates that would preempt any desire to expand across the galaxy.
Biologically, we cannot make the presumption that alien life and reproduction would resemble our own in any way. An alien life form is just as likely to be asexual and reproduce once or twice per lifetime as they are to lay eggs and reproduce a thousand times per lifetime. What we do know is that there is a direct relationship between the size of a population and the amount of resources they can make available to projects not core to the maintenance of the species. We humans have the ability to travel across our solar system TODAY, so why aren't we doing so? Why doesn't every nation on the planet have its own space program? Because most governments have more important things to do, most of which involve protecting the lives and health of their citizens.
Even species that did reproduce at a scale matching or exceeding our own would need to put that population growth in check before venturing into space. The evidence on our own world increasingly suggests that we're heading towards a population crash. A high birthrate society building toward space travel would likely confront the same problem, and would see spaceflight resources dwindle as the population continued to increase. Any society that wanted to be spacefaring would need to have a stable population. A stable population negates Fermi's assumption that alien races would colonize the galaxy. At that point, they would be a race of explorers, not colonizers.