What a silly thesis. I always find theories based on deep assumptions about extraterrestrial psychology bunk.
The beginnings of social rather than biological evolution on earth are fantastically recent on a geological scale. 10,000 years, give or take. And it's only been in the last 100 that anything that we've had anything that would be detectable from space.
On the sorts of timescale that the universe functions on, we simply have a tiny, tiny sample of what a technological society looks like in the one instance that we are aware of. It's such a recent thing that we can scarcely predict what it will look like in 1000 years, much less 100,000 or 1,000,000 and even 100,000 years would be a small sample to start generalizing upon.
In other words, we have no idea what we're looking for when we're looking for extraterrestrial intelligence. The odds of finding another society that is exactly in this first 100 year sliver we're at are vanishingly small.
In the middle of reading it I wanted to reply by saying that the framing in terms of extraterrestrials was just a device to get across the real warning of obsession with virtual realities, but then I got the end and the essay dissolved into incoherence.
I see no evidence that Christian and Muslim children are less prone to addiction. The high-minded Puritan work ethic attracts some, sure, but "the family values of the religious right" are in reality just a thinly-veiled excuse to be the mean, hateful, narcissistic, exclusive bastards they already are (why yes, I do have issues from my upbringing, thanks for asking, but it's still true).
In any case, the essay says that we haven't met aliens because they wiped themselves out in an evolutionary dead-end, but then the religious assholes' descendants (sorry, the super-duper-moral humans) will be the future of humanity meeting other such dipshits. Which is it?
In any case, to sum up, there's no there there. If you haven't read the article yet, it's really not worth it; if it's too late, I'm sorry.
The beginnings of social rather than biological evolution on earth are fantastically recent on a geological scale. 10,000 years, give or take. And it's only been in the last 100 that anything that we've had anything that would be detectable from space.
On the sorts of timescale that the universe functions on, we simply have a tiny, tiny sample of what a technological society looks like in the one instance that we are aware of. It's such a recent thing that we can scarcely predict what it will look like in 1000 years, much less 100,000 or 1,000,000 and even 100,000 years would be a small sample to start generalizing upon.
In other words, we have no idea what we're looking for when we're looking for extraterrestrial intelligence. The odds of finding another society that is exactly in this first 100 year sliver we're at are vanishingly small.