Why would aliens need/want to space travel?

Why would aliens need to know how to travel into space? Why would we assume aliens need resources?

I was thinking about this, in almost every iteration of alien life we assume that they can travel into space. And to me that seems a bit capitalistic. Wanting resources, for what? Survival? I assume aliens live in a post-scarcity society, a society in which everything they want they can have. Sorta like Star Trek, a utopia.

In contrast, humans live in an artificially scarce world, where whatever we want comes at a price. Almost everything humans do is done under capitalism, that is to say that there’s a profit motive. To build mega structures, like a Dyson Swarm, there’d having to be a capitalistic incentive. Same with space travel. For example, we see the moon as being rich with resources, so we’ll travel to it. To build all things, from a human perspective, requires inequality on a mass scale. Someone has to be funding the project. Because we don’t tend to do massive undertakings just for the thrill of it. Even things like exploration: when Columbus went sailing he was looking for India (i.e another market to exploit).

What if capitalism is the great filter that answers Fermi’s paradox? If the goal of evolution is to keep going and propogate itself then why create a system in which people purposely compete for resources. Any intelligent species would be beyond such a system as it actively stifles progress and ultimately hurts the species as a whole.

Maybe im being naive but most conversations about advanced civilizations seem to be under the guise that they need resources to further advance the civilization. But the want of resources, the desire to conquer n consume what if that ideology seems just as alien to them.

Submitted January 02, 2023 at 04:45AM by optionalhero https://ift.tt/ZGN3gYd