This sort of thing has been weighing on my mind of late. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that this is why the stars aren’t full of spaceships.

And I’m an optimist. But bear with me.

We are at the point where we, as a society/species, are utterly dependent on technology. I live in the centre of Canberra, the capital of Australia, and if the power went out tomorrow, I’m not sure how long the food supplies would last.

Because when I say power, I mean all the power, everywhere, forever. This is what happens if a ginormous solar storm hits us for more than a few minutes.

Everything is gone forever. All transformers are blown. All electronics are fried. All satellites are gone. All terrestrial communications is gone. People can’t start engines. We can’t pump petrol. We can’t pump water.

And crucially, we can’t fix anything. Because without transformers, nobody knows how to build new transformers.

So we’ve built this society that can’t function without these things. I mean we got a bad flu and people lost their shit looting toilet paper. Imagine what happens when there’s no power.

If your family is more than 200 miles away you never, ever see them again.

This only has to happen at some point in the next 200 years and humanity is back in the Victorian era. Except we all kill each other and we’ve lost all the basic skills, so it’s worse than that.

And we’re not special. We’re just a bunch of genes on an ordinary planet. I don’t see why this wouldn’t happen to every species everywhere.

Anyway. Speculation of course. But if I was a cosmic gambler, I’d go all-in on this sort of thing. It just seems obvious.