“The earth was simply too good. Too easy. Too comfortable to demand the intelligence we might otherwise have developed. So what happened was that, much like the spoiled teens of wealthy magnates who cannot manage fortunes, we laid waste to the anciently conserved living assets from which our own minds and bodies are composed and derive their organismal natures. Almost as if we felt threatened by that unthinkable living abundance. We burned it down ‘because we could’. And now, well — now we are going to start to get a taste of what it is like on other worlds: worlds where survival is expensive and life is cheap.”