Right—but there are practically bound to be aliens out there somewhere who just want to conquer the universe—and couldn’t care less about ecstacy or utopias. Those folk seem likely to eat utopias for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Unless we are a lot more confident that those folk are nowhere nearby, we should probably behave conservatively.
It’s not an either/or thing. You could spend, say, 1% of your resources on setting up a colonization wavefront.
Right—but there are practically bound to be aliens out there somewhere who just want to conquer the universe—and couldn’t care less about ecstacy or utopias. Those folk seem likely to eat utopias for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Unless we are a lot more confident that those folk are nowhere nearby, we should probably behave conservatively.