She recalls how he once told her his theory of why human beings had never met any aliens. “All over the universe,” he’d said, “civilizations like ours appear and grow up and get smart, and around the time they get close to really transcending their brute origins, they start inventing the means of their own destruction. Bombs. Chemicals. Viruses. Gases in the atmosphere. This triggers a planetary disaster. Anyway, when one person can gather enough power over these destructive forces that can fuck up half the planet, eventually that person will use them. It’s the entropic principle but
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