What if it's easier to build a utopia than a starship?
We already have way more money going into entertainment than into space exploration, it's not that hard to imagine that all sentient species eventually learn how to hack themselves into permanent happiness, and then conclude they have no reason to risk death on the final frontier.
A lot of human, throught humanity's history, had the material means to live a pretty pleasant, labor-free life, and yet chose a different path, away from hedonism. I suppose this will still be true many centuries from now.
Pretty much any organism that manages to develop the intelligence to build a starship will have a long history of evolution. Their mindset will presumably be guided by ancient evolutionary pressures. For us humans, we're partially motivated by a desire to explore and understand our surroundings. I think it's realistic to assume that at least some subset of aliens should be motivated by the same exploration drive.
What is the probability of such a utopian society going its entire existence without at least one group of individuals with the resources to go out into the universe pulling the trigger on the decision to risk their lives?
This ofcourse requires some projection of our ideas of happiness onto unknown alien beings, but then why not also project boredom? If anything, we have seen that nothing in nature really stays the same. It is ever changing and evolving.
When I predict that VR will trump reality I never mean to imply a virtual happy Utopia or that such a thing was inevitable. Our future might be a virtual dystopia for all I know, but virtual reality is my bet where most intelligent beings end up going. I think virtual worlds > reality would explain the Fermi paradox nicely.
So religious conservatives who don't like VR will be the ones to go into space, or whatever you'd like to imagine. Just by sheer probability there should be at least a few individuals who don't end up sticking around the sun.
Interstellar probes will get to be pretty cheap with sufficient economic growth. We should be able to easily afford >0.1c probes in 100 years or so on our current economic trajectory. And if our civilization advances for another 1000 years they'll be a piece of cake.
If those probes are Von Neumann machines they can spread throughout the entire galaxy in as little as a few million years. That's the crux of the Fermi Paradox - on galactic timescales any sufficiently advanced civilization should be able to expand its presence to the entire galaxy pretty easily and quickly.
We already have way more money going into entertainment than into space exploration, it's not that hard to imagine that all sentient species eventually learn how to hack themselves into permanent happiness, and then conclude they have no reason to risk death on the final frontier.