Pretty much everything written and talked about in your article is based on at least one underlying universal illogical assumption, which seems to be at the heart of problematic science.
It is that all intelligent life must function with a capitalist, profit driven business case.
By that, we project our own mindset onto all intelligent life, and yet, that seems one characteristic which is not particularly intelligent.
Colonisation, the process of forever multiplying and expanding outwards, whilst continually transporting nutrients (wealth) from the outer edges of the expansion, back into the central source of the expansion, is an outcome of being driven by profit.
That is the real Ponzi scheme of all Ponzi schemes, depending completely on us not effectively utilising the power of our local star(s), because use of those would be effectively accepting donations from grand donors, which would break the conditions necessary for scarcity enforcement which are needed to keep practicing profit.
And yet logically, we are starting to realise that if colonisation is prevented, or cannot continue for any reason, like we already colonised everywhere on Earth, the process driving it starts to cause us to consume one another, our own species starts to literally eat itself, beginning first at the outer edges (the workers, and those in the most exploited countries), working progressively back inwards to eventually threaten the centre of expansion (the billionaires in their bunkers).
Further, since all colonisation and propagation of scarcity enforcement requires at its source a finite store of energy (in our case the stored energy of Earth), it follows that the colonisation process is ultimately unsustainable, since very quickly the store of energy becomes exhausted, causing planetary changes which become toxic to all cellular life, including of course; us.
If we are mistaken in our projection of profit driven mindset, which of course we have to be in order to avoid extinction by our own hand, it changes everything.
These things can be routinely worked out and shown by the techniques of formal systems Engineering, of which I am a practitioner.
But it isn’t a very profitable application of the skills, so not done very often, if at all, given each of us is enslaved by the need to spend most of our time practicing profit to survive individually.
And yet the issue is existential for our species, humans.
When we look at this from outside the closed box perspective that exists within the profit driven mindset, we start to see logically a very different reality, that there may be multitudes of intelligent species besides us, all of them more intelligent than us, but all of them necessarily choosing not to reveal their presence to us, that in fact we are most likely descended from them, and that right now we are being tested as a species, to find out if we will survive without their (further) intervention.
A little more on what might be key to breaking the incredibly damaging practice of profit is in my story about the “Kardashev Hinge”, which can be found in my profile, for anyone interested.
