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this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2026
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Some humans want to travel even when they're perfectly happy.
That's ascribing human motivations to non-humans. They could be fundamentally non-curious, only using their relative intelligence to solve actual problems in their environment rather than pushing for "what if?".
Um. The desire to explore is pretty innate to all life. Not just humans.
How much "exploring" do sedentary lifeforms (plants, mussels, etc) really get up to?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorsal_root_ganglion
Bivalves such as mussels are aware of many stimuli but are generally incapable of safely relocating making them one of the incredibly few exceptions to the rule.
I would generally assume any alien lifeform we encounter would be closer to humans than bivalves.
This argument has never really made sense to me. If you picked a random individual lifeform from anywhere in the universe, then yes, there's a good chance it won't have much in common with humans. If you take the totality of all life in the universe however, we should see a smoother distribution of behaviors. Human-like behaviors would be within that spectrum by definition and should not be entirely unique.
Let's say of all the intelligent species in the universe, an average of 1% exhibit whatever motivations are needed to go interstellar, and that 1% of those species got a billion year headstart. Well, due to sampling bias, we should still see that 0.01% represented everywhere.
I was flummoxed for a while because it sounds like this isn't even related to what I was saying. Until it clicked that it wasn't.
I only said to be wary of anthropomorphizing non-human creatures. Saying all life explores is assigning the human definition of "going out and charting the uncharted" to all of the exploration that any creature that actually explores does. Other interstellar species could go into space for perfectly practical reasons, like their planet is dying or it's over capacity and they don't want to cull their population. Assigning "human wanderlust" as a facet of all (intelligent) life isn't correct.
Sorry. I may be reading more into the chain than what's actually here. I'm just saying "aliens can't be expected to behave like humans" isn't really a viable explanation to the Fermi Paradox without some big caveats, because given a large enough sample of intelligent alien species, (1) they won't be monolithic, (2) some will exhibit human-like behavior on the premise that humans aren't special, (3) some will have arrived on the scene millions or billions of years before us, and (4) the "somes" from the last two points is enough that galaxy spanning civilizations should already be everywhere even if FTL is forever impossible.
If intelligent life is rare enough to preclude the "given a large enough sample" (I'm thinking one species per galaxy level rarity), then the solution to the Fermi Paradox is elsewhere.