> It's more accurate to say that HUMANITY would need a cooperative spirit in order to reach interstellar travel. I don't think it's accurate to assume that every species would need this.
How do you build a spaceship without working together with others?
> Constructing even a galaxy's worth of kill missiles and launching them wildly like a shotgun isn't a strategy that any logical civilization would do.
Who said the missles are dumb rocks? If each one has a camera on it and a few adjustment rockets, it can choose which planets to target as it approaches the star. It's gonna take you a hundred thousand years to get there anyway, so who cares if you wreck the local ecosystem a little bit now? You're probably going to have to make changes to the planet to suit your species' needs anyway, so why be coy about it to save yourself a minivan's worth of raw material?
> How do you build a spaceship without working together with others?
Ants don't build colonies because they consciously choose to participate in the greater good as individuals. It's pure instinct for them to work together. Imagine if some were more intelligent and could shape or direct that instinct. A "hive mind" if you will.
How do you build a spaceship without working together with others?
> Constructing even a galaxy's worth of kill missiles and launching them wildly like a shotgun isn't a strategy that any logical civilization would do.
Who said the missles are dumb rocks? If each one has a camera on it and a few adjustment rockets, it can choose which planets to target as it approaches the star. It's gonna take you a hundred thousand years to get there anyway, so who cares if you wreck the local ecosystem a little bit now? You're probably going to have to make changes to the planet to suit your species' needs anyway, so why be coy about it to save yourself a minivan's worth of raw material?