from the article...
"....Without exception, intelligent species who gain dominance over their planet do so by becoming the most efficient predators. .... Only those who can manipulate the world they live in can one day hope to leave it and spread their seed throughout the universe.
Unlike the adaptors, who learn the point of cooperation fairly early on, manipulators battle on. And, once all lesser species have been overcome, they are so competitive and predatory that they are compelled to turn in on themselves. This nearly always evolves into tribal competition in one form or another and becomes more and more destructive - exactly like your own history.
However this competition is vital to promote the leap from biological to technological evolution.
You need an arms race in order to make progress.
Your desire to dominate fuels a search for knowledge which the adaptors never acquire. And although your initial desire for knowledge is selfish and destructive, it begins the development of an intellectual self awareness, a form of higher consciousness, which never emerges in any other species. Not even while they are experiencing it, for example, can the intelligent adaptors - your dolphins - express the concepts of Love or Time.
Militarisation and the development of weapons of mass destruction are your first serious test at level one. You're still not through that phase, though the signs are promising. There is no point whatsoever in my intervening to prevent your self-destruction. Your ability to survive these urges is a crucial test of your fitness to survive later stages. So I would not, never have and never will intervene to prevent a species from destroying itself. Most, in fact, do just that.....’"
I re-read this and I think I have a better understanding of what he's saying. Although it turns my stomach, but essentially he's congratulating us as a species for warring with each other. He seems to be saying that War promotes invention. Invention will eventually get us into long distance space.
Is this what you understand him to be saying?
And the suffering that accompanies our "progress" is collateral damage, incidental to the development of our species.
All of this just so he can meet someone new, have an interesting conversation and then a whopper of an orgasm?
Hmph....:mmph:
If I ever meet him - he and I are going to have a helluva conversation....