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>If a civilization has sufficiently advanced technology, then I would imagine they would be scouring the cosmos for more resources.

Stable elements are not scare, life is scarce. I would hope that any civilization advanced enough to travel the verse would be able to strip mine the elements it needs from lifeless rocks and leave planets with life alone.

Bezos is right that we should ultimately move resource extraction to space.

Also extracting resources from astroids avoids the problem of getting them out of the gravity well. Sure they could mine Earth, but they would have to haul it off Earth too.

Or an advanced enough civilization might on the contrary use their resources efficiently with long term planning and population control and stay on their planet / solar system - "advanced" and "ever-expanding" don't have to come together.

INT and WIS are different stats, and sadly, one does not imply the other, at least in the only being we can yet study

> Ultimately, every species is biologically trained to propagate itself

Grouped by planet, we have a sample size of 1.

> every species is biologically trained to propagate itself, consuming resources and expanding presence

It's not obvious to me that this would apply to xenobiology.

(It's not even totally obvious that it applies on Earth - other species live a much more synergistic lifestyle than humans do)