Universal explainers and constructors

"Hawking’s proposal also overlooks various dangers of not making our existence known to the galaxy , such as being inadvertently wiped out if benign civilizations send robots to our solar system, perhaps to mine what they consider an uninhabited system. And it rests on other misconceptions in addition to that classic flaw of blind pessimism. One is the Spaceship Earth idea on a larger scale: the assumption that progress in a hypothetical rapacious civilization is limited by raw materials rather than by knowledge. What exactly would it come to steal ? Gold? Oil ? Perhaps our planet’s water? Surely not , since any civilization capable of transporting itself here, or raw materials back across galactic distances, must already have cheap transmutation and hence does not care about the chemical composition of its raw materials. So essentially the only resource of use to it in our solar system would be the sheer mass of matter in the sun . But matter is available in every star. Perhaps it is collecting entire stars wholesale in order to make a giant black hole as part of some titanic engineering project . But in that case it would cost it virtually nothing to omit inhabited solar systems (which are presumably a small minority , otherwise it is pointless for us to hide in any case); so would it casually wipe out billions of people? Would we seem like insects to it ? This can seem plausible only if one forgets that there can be only one type of person : universal explainers and constructors. The idea that there could be beings that are to us as we are to animals is a belief in the supernatural ."