[squigz]

> Why bother digging up a carbon laden energy source from the depths of a gravity laden planet instead of using solar energy or wind or any other energy source that is less harmful?

Well at least one reason might be that you're currently unable to use those latter forms of energy as well as you can the former.

Anyway, using the way we act as a comparison for how these other civilizations might act doesn't make sense to me - we're nowhere even remotely close to being a threat to other civilizations. By the time a civilization reaches the point where they can travel between stars, I do suspect they'll be using renewables pretty dang heavily

[Towaway69]

That's why I gave the example of solar: we've been able to utilize solar for a long time yet only now is it become a serious source of energy. Windmills have existed for probably 200 years but have not been taken seriously as a source of energy.

I'm not talking about mining asteroids, I'm talking about other sources of energy that have been known to us but which we don't utilise because of self-interest of oil companies - not money or cost, self interest. Money & cost are regulated by us not money.

So to say these other sources of energy weren't viable from a financial PoV might be correct but it goes against our own self-interest.

> I do suspect they'll be using renewables pretty dang heavily

That's like saying "in any case, the future will be better". As humans have shown, worse comes before better in history. Howabout making the present better first?

[squigz]

We haven't been able to utilize solar to the degree we have been able to utilize oil for all that long, and since it has, our utilization has only grown.

"Commercial concentrated solar power plants were first developed in the 1980s. Since then, as the cost of solar panels has fallen, grid-connected solar PV systems' capacity and production have doubled about every three years. Three-quarters of new generation capacity is solar"

This says nothing of, say, hydro power, which we have been using for a while

> That's like saying "in any case, the future will be better". As humans have shown, worse comes before better in history. Howabout making the present better first?

Mate I said nothing about our future or present. It's just absurd to assume our past has any bearing on how super-advanced space-faring civilizations will utilize technology.