[exebook]

Exploration seems like a natural way for civilisation to live, but that's because exploration is needed to expand knowledge and grow more intelligent, we as a civilisation mostly became obsessed with intellect dozens generation ago, if not less, and gathering knowledge and exploring for us seems so important right now. It might be less important if important at all for species who have been intelligent for a long time and gathered orders of magnitude more knowledge than we do.

Related question is do species really need intellect at all and how much. It could be that the main purpose of intellect is to increase chances to survive, but what if civilisation already figured survival, will they even need to stay intelligent? Maybe their goal is to be happier or maybe have billion orgasms per second.

Another more obvious reason to explore the universe is lack of resources, at least Earth was mostly explored to be exploited. If resources are solved, one reason to explore less.

[naravara]

> Exploration seems like a natural way for civilisation to live, but that's because exploration is needed to expand knowledge and grow more intelligent, we as a civilisation mostly became obsessed with intellect dozens generation ago, if not less, and gathering knowledge and exploring for us seems so important right now. It might be less important if important at all for species who have been intelligent for a long time and gathered orders of magnitude more knowledge than we do.

Most of the financial impetus for exploration comes from the promise of access to scare resources. But if you have the technology to traverse the stars then your species is either able to harness unfathomable amounts of energy such that you can bend space-time or you've done some kind of wild genetic engineering/cybernetic enhancements to the point where it's not really bound by the limitations of whatever biology its planetary evolution set it up with.

In both cases, they would have the means to functionally be living in a post-scarcity society. Either their consciousness is stored in some kind of long-term solid-state storage that can survive millennia long trips through space or energy is so cheap and available that it's hard to imagine them needing to keep going and searching to find more stuff. After you've explored and catalogued a hundred planets it's hard to imagine any real impetus to keep going.

Human civilization is already projected to cap out in population at around 11 Billion, and that's driven primarily by cultural and economic factors deriving from technology around access to healthcare, education, and other sources of diversion/entertainment/fulfillment. The idea that an advanced civilization must necessarily keep growing and growing in size doesn't seem to hold up for our own experience on Earth.