this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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me_irl
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We have always feared a robot uprising that would take over the world and subjugate humans, as though robots will replace us as the ultimate alpha predators.
We've already been replaced by our own creation. Money itself is the dominant species on this planet. Capitalism is the metabolic process of the organism. The stock market is its circulatory system. Politicians are its organs. Billionaires are its reproductive system. The individual workers are the mitochondria. This is a planet scale life form that is ready to reproduce itself onto surrounding bodies in space.
If you want the solution to the Fermi paradox there it is. Once a civilization is infected with economics it's only a matter of time before it is consumed by its own creation.
Money is power in a form transferable over time and space.
Long before capitalism, people considered money to be the root of all evil. Many religions have restrictions on what can be done with money, especially asking for interest.
Weird coming from a religion that said the root of all evil was also a fruit.
Restrictions on lending can be explained by the fact that when those rules were made, almost no one knew math much better than counting on their fingers.
The metal traders and other businessmen in ancient Mesopotamia (2000+ years before your fruit) absolutely knew "math better than counting on their fingers".
Usury restrictions may have had a lot to do with the social cost of loans among tight knit groups (such as, don't loan money to your cousin, it'll cause problems) or because they were rejecting "normal" behavior from a society they wanted to distance themselves from.
Also, the fruit was an allegory, like most ancient mythical stories. Even if you reject mythology outright, try not to belittle the moral and traditional bases for religions that billions of people on Earth follow. You aren't better than them for it.