Why No One Is Colonizing Space

Success is fatal. Every civilization that achieves abundance stops expanding.

The Paradox

Four hundred billion stars in the Milky Way. Thirteen billion years of cosmic history. Zero detected civilizations sending signals. Zero evidence of anyone building Dyson spheres or colonizing galaxies.

But here's the thing: we're not colonizing space either. We have the technology. SpaceX could put humans on Mars this decade. We're just... not doing it. No serious national commitment. No urgency. The same species that went from Wright brothers to moon landing in 66 years has now spent 50+ years in low Earth orbit going nowhere.

These aren't two different mysteries. They're the same problem.

The Mechanism

Every civilization that has ever achieved overwhelming success has subsequently collapsed following the same pattern. Rome after Carthage. Britain after Napoleon. America after the Cold War. Islamic Golden Age after unifying the Mediterranean. The pattern is so consistent that entire academic fields exist to study it.

Here's the mechanism:

Success creates abundance. Abundance removes existential pressure—the forcing function that made growth necessary for survival. Without that pressure, the rational strategy shifts from "grow or die" to "preserve what we have."

This shift is game-theoretic, not moral. When you're poor, risk is necessary—starvation is the alternative. When you're rich, risk offers diminishing returns while threatening everything you've built. Safety becomes rational.

The political economy follows. Democratic systems with abundant populations optimize for present comfort over future growth. Entitlement programs get created. They expand at 4-6% annually (politically irreversible—try cutting Social Security). Innovations arrive in discrete, unpredictable jumps. Eventually, continuous obligations exceed discrete capacity. The crossover point marks the beginning of terminal decline.

The data is quantifiable:

Rome hit crossover around 200 CE. The Severan emperors raised military pay 125% to secure loyalty. This consumed >70% of state revenue. Unable to fund obligations through taxation, Rome debased its currency from 98% silver (50 CE) to 2% silver (270 CE). Hyperinflation, savings destroyed, Crisis of the Third Century. The Western Empire never recovered, collapsing in 476 CE.

Britain hit crossover between 1913-1937. Universal suffrage (1918-1928) made the median voter a net recipient. Social welfare spending doubled from 4.7% to 10.5% of GDP. Post-WWII, obligations grew at 4.3%/year while GDP grew at 2.7%/year. Despite having the scientific capability for space programs in the 1960s, the will was gone. The "British Disease" of the 1970s—strikes, low productivity, IMF bailout—was the inevitable result.

The USA hit crossover 1973-1981. Medicare/Medicaid created in 1965 (open-ended healthcare obligations). Innovation stalled around 1973 (Total Factor Productivity growth collapsed from 2-3% to <1%, where it remains). Fiat currency in 1971 removed the final constraint on monetary expansion. Result: federal debt exploded from 32% of GDP (1981) to 120%+ today, $150+ trillion in unfunded liabilities, permanent divergence between obligations and capacity.

Why It's Universal

This isn't about technology or resources. It's about physics and game theory.

Growth-oriented states (expansion, risk-taking, innovation) require constant effort and vigilance to maintain. They need forcing functions—scarcity, competition, existential threats—to stay active. Comfort-oriented states (safety, preservation, homeostasis) are self-sustaining. They're the path of least resistance. Without external pressure, systems naturally drift from the former to the latter.

Any evolution-derived intelligence will have deeply embedded preferences for energy minimization and risk aversion—these traits were survival-critical in scarcity environments. Research shows humans feel losses roughly twice as intensely as equivalent gains, an asymmetry that made evolutionary sense but becomes pathological in abundance. The comfortable choice (preserve what we have) dominates the ambitious choice (risk everything for the stars).

Space colonization offers what, exactly? Marginal gains for civilization, enormous personal risks for colonists. When you already have air conditioning and Netflix, why bet your life on a Mars habitat?

The trap is that the rational individual choice (choose safety) produces the irrational collective outcome (civilizational stagnation and eventual collapse).

The Two-Stage Filter

The Fermi Paradox has two components: the Great Silence (no one is signaling) and the Absent Swarm (no one is visibly expanding). The trap explains both.

Stage 1: The Pre-Singularity Hospice Trap. Most civilizations that achieve abundance fall into comfortable, non-expansive equilibrium. They don't go extinct—they just stop building. The galaxy is full of civilizations tending their home-world gardens, having chosen the rational path of least resistance. They're silent because they're not doing anything detectable.

Stage 2: The Post-Singularity Alignment Trap. The few civilizations that try to sprint past Stage 1 by racing toward artificial superintelligence hit a different filter. If they align the AGI to their current preferences (comfort, safety), they get the "Human Garden"—a perfected prison that optimizes for their Hospice-state values. If they fail at alignment, they get extinction or something worse. Either way: silent.

The permanently expansionist civilization—the "Grabby Alien" that converts galaxies into computronium—requires navigating both traps successfully. The absence of such civilizations in our observable past light cone suggests the success rate is near zero.

The Window

We're approaching the hinge point where both traps close simultaneously.

Three clocks are converging on the 2030s:

The Biological Clock: Fertility collapse (US TFR 1.64, lowest on record) + aging populations create permanent voting majorities optimized for safety over growth. Japan crossed this threshold in the 1990s—three "Lost Decades" and climbing. The West follows the same trajectory.

The Coherence Clock: Collapsing social trust and political polarization approaching levels where coordinated ambitious projects (Apollo-scale) become impossible. Timeline: 5-10 years until systemic paralysis.

The Gnostic Clock: AGI arrives in the 2030s (median expert timelines). Whatever axiological state we're in when superintelligence emerges gets locked in. If we're in the Hospice trap when AGI arrives, we'll align it to Hospice values. Game over.

Mars is the test case. SpaceX will attempt settlement in the 2030s-2040s. The constitutional design of Mars governance will determine whether humanity escapes the trap or exports it to another planet. Get it wrong, and Mars fails in 50-100 years for the same reasons Rome fell. Get it right—with constitutional architecture that preserves growth incentives even in abundance, something no Earth civilization has achieved—and we've broken the pattern for the first time in history.

The galaxy's silence isn't evidence that intelligence is rare. It's evidence that the trap is nearly perfect. Every civilization either chooses comfortable stagnation or races toward misaligned superintelligence. Both paths lead to the same quiet.

We're next, unless we choose differently.