Persol said:Also, perhaps you should actually put his line into context...
Clearly the present exponential growth cannot continue indefinitely. So what will happen? One possibility is that we wipe ourselves out completely by some disaster such as a nuclear war. There is a sick joke that the reason we have not been visited by extra-terrestrials is that when a civilization reaches our stage of development it becomes unstable and destroys itself. Of course it is possible that UFO's really do contain aliens as many people believe, and the government is hushing it up" I wouldn't like to comment on that. Personally I believe there is a different explanation why we have not been contacted, but I won't go into it here. However, even without that, there is a very real danger that we will kill everything on this planet now that we have the technological power to do so. Even if we don't destroy ourselves completely, there is a possibility that we might descend into a state of brutalization and barbarity like the opening scene of "Terminator"
That is in fact a valid argument. I do not dispute that, it is possible. Perhaps, before we can become capable of interstellar travel, we destroy ourselves, or are destroyed by a natural catastrophe. However, is it reasonabe to generalize and say all civilizations in the universe will do the same? For instance, had events allowed it, we would have reached the nuclear age many centuries earlier. If we had, we may not even be existing today. Thus, it is perhaps possible to survive future technological milestones.
I have this theory, that technology is directly proportional to level of civilization, it's intelligence and its spirituality, in conjunction with the stimuli. In layman terms, the more intelligent a civilization becomes, the more peaceful and civil it becomes. Otherwise it is at risk of destroying itself.
Then if you consider the theory of parallel universes, where we may have even destroyed ourselves already in nuclear war, then it means, that if we destroy ourselves in this world, there will always be a world, where we didn't. Therefore some civilizations could stand the test of time.