Aliens know damned well that there's no intelligent life down here with Trumpty Dumpty in charge of the Big, Shiny Red Panic Button. The idiots who keep voting RepubliKKKan are ample proof.

Who cares about the alien societies that haven't developed technology (with or without Capitalism)? We won't find them for a long time, if ever. It's the noisy ones - the ones intending to be heard, to reach out to others including us - that are the ones we're looking for. Because those are the only ones that we currently have the technology to hear.

Even taking your strange hypothesis as granted that Capitalism is required for technology, unless you believe we're so special that nobody else has developed Capitalism then there will be a vast number of civilizations that would have developed technology.

Another strong possibility is that the intelligent life that’s out there is so radically different from our understanding of “life,” that we wouldn’t recognize it even if we encountered it, or those life forms operate on a plane of reality that’s beyond our perception and comprehension, since we exist in such a tiny sliver of what’s possible.

@1 - Maybe try to put Trump out of your mind for a while, and dwell upon the wonders of the cosmos for a few minutes.

It didn’t fully sink in until I watched Cosmos a few years back that the interrelationship between time, gravity, and the speed of light means that we’ll never meet any intelligent alien species simply due to the insurmountable distances between celestial bodies involved.

Based on our current understanding of physics, the only way we’ll be able to explore deep space will be through hard drive-sized probes attached to Empire State Building-sized solar sails, and even then we may not learn if those probes discover anything interesting for thousands of years, and more likely never due to the infinite void of space.

I want warp speed gawdammit!!

In Arrival (no "the"), the alien's visit to Earth was a Hail Mary to arrange a scenario in which we help them save their planet in the future. They were motivated by survival. This is probably what humans believed too in the mid-19th century as Capitalist, Communist, and National Socialist nations all experienced their most technologically productive periods in an effort to dominate one another.

Also, what @7 said. Our timeline is too short for an encounter to be likely.

The holocene has been quite eventful! Wave after wave of megafaunal extinction, divergence of CO2 concentrations from the expected downward trend ~7k years ago, the similar divergence of methane concentrations ~5k years ago... all kinds of remarkable changes!

And all with one cause, of course: people. People hunting newly-encountered large prey, people starting agriculture (using slash-and-burn methods), people beginning to cultivate rice (by terracing-- building swamps).

Of course, all these anthropogenic changes to the planet's climate and ecology happened long before anyone thought up the word "capitalism," so that dog won't hunt. Range and settlement expansion, population growth, colonization of distant lands... yes to all of that, of course. But no to this figment "capitalism."

We're still in the holocene, or at most in a stratigraphic boundary layer corresponding the Rapid Carbon Release Event we're causing. This carbon release event, all of it, will happen in a scant few hundreds of years-- the blink of an eye, compared to the length of geological ages and eras.

What this event will leave behind geologically, in huge middens, will be characterized by chicken bones, not by figments of the imagination like "capitalism" or "religion." What follows, though it may be brief, would be the poultricine, not the democrocene or washingtonconsensocene or capitalcene.

aimed for irony; hit obscurity.

Perhaps when we finally communicate with Plants, they'll help us get it figured out.

IF the Capitalists haven't burned down the Planet.

I wonder how much Smoke we'll get this year.
Last year was pretty bad -- has El Prezzo
got folks tidying up those forests yet?

I know he's been awful busy, stacking the deck for his buddies,
I hope he doesn't forget all the other shit he's supposed to do, too...

aimed for obscurity, hit Infinity.

I'm pretty sure that technology development occurred well before "capitalism" showed up and took credit. Sharp-edged stone tools, spears, boats, nets, innumerable styles and types of shelter. Agriculture itself.

Technology has been furthered by war and conquest, all prior to "capitalism": The Bronze Age, trebuchets, steel, aquaducts, the antikythera device. Even money itself was a development of empire. Rulers needed a way to retain soldiers, so they melted treasure, created coins, and demanded coin-taxes from the citizenry... the only source of coins were the soldiers. But even that was not "capitalism".

Modern war (WW's I & II) created cars, tanks, machine guns, rockets, the space age, and finally, the Internet as a communication network that could survive nuclear assault. DARPA pushes robot & AI advancements today.

Seems like CONFLICT advances technology. Empires on Earth have existed completely without money. A means of exchange that requires a constant rate of bankruptcy just to maintain is hardly any sort of universal "given". Money as we know it is just an idiosyncratic tool that we've developed, and is biting us in the ass now.

Who KNOWS what alien options might be out there. The Mantis shrimp can see in 15 wavelengths of light; we can see only 3. We can't even imagine other life-forms, let alone anything involving alien social structures or impulses towards complexity.

@4: Ahhh, there you are, sugarlips. WHAP! Okay, I feel better now.

@7 Original Andrew: ....a Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away.........rest in peace, Carrie Fisher.

Capitalism is about one thing only, and until you frame it correctly you are doomed to Marxist dialectic ie circular logic such as Postone: capitalism involves nothing but capital itself.

If Hegel was wrong ie not universal, then Marx is wrong so let's agree we have dispatched logic.

Capitalism only requires one thing and it is universal. Liberty of life. It is this quality of human life that is the engine of progress, capitalism, and technology. Democracy is the mid-point of history, and Progressives want to turn back to coercion and eugenics.

It would make sense that this would not be self-evident to any Marxist, it is not within her genealogy of morals. And Hegel places despotism squarely in Africa. Liberty may have been first expressed as flight.

One of my more pedantic pet peeves is the mixing of Latin-based and Greek-based words. I think it gets under my skin because it shows the degree to which classical education has retreated, and I am an old stick in the mud.

Anyways, "capitalocene" is a linguistic abomination. "Cephalocene" works better.

@15: Obviously, you're obsessed with ruminating in your Trump anger so much that you've forgotten what "feeling better" actually feels like.

@16

Curiously, in Marx's exegesis the end of Capitalism would also be the end of the Material Dialectic; the society established after the revolution (which Marx rather famously showed little interest in describing) would be post-historical.

Of course, here we are 100 years after the revolution, but far from grinding to a halt, the wheel has come around at least another full turn (if not three) since Lenin.

The Communist Party of China is deeply Marxist, but it does not read Marx in the manner of those who cling to extinct iterations of the Dialectic. History has not stopped, influence and counter-influence have not evaporated. China understands this; Mudede (like most western Marxists indoctrinated during the cold war) does not, and will not.

@19: Which one of us commenters first suggested dipping Trumpty Dumpty and its Kabinet of RepubliKKKan minions in BBQ sauce, and feeding them to the alligators? Your triglycerides must be running a little high again, sugarlips. And troll paddling was your idea. LOL

“I will try not to make this long”
Is the first thing you said and the first thing you forgot.

But from what i did read of your post it was fun to contemplate.

It seems to me that Marxists like Mudede have a moral obligation to explain to the rest of us how his form of Marxism would be different from the one that resulted in the death of 100 million people last century, far more that the Nazis or Capitalists were responsible for. And not in the form of some word salad that sounds like it was cobbled together from a collection of Cliffs Notes pamphlets. I don't believe they, or he, can. It's really just an exercise in pedantic sophistry that's more about a self identified moral superiority than history, reason or common sense. It's quite annoying.

@21: Sure, I have fun with such banter within a thread. But it's just noise (alligators, dipping sauces, etc) to other commenters whom don't have that context.

@24: And yet here you are, still making noise as usual. WHAP! There ya go. Send my kindest regards to Wally Gator.

@25: _

@24: You need to stop engaging with them. They never shut up, it is annoying to everyone, and you keep responding to it and profligating it. Stop.

My apologies.

Yep, Auntie (it) is a lost cause. I hereby vow to never reply to her (it) again.

"I will try not to make this long."

I think you can do better, Charles. Omit needless words, etc.