There’s something so funny about extrapolating modern human behavior up to hypothetical alien civilizations. It’s a part of our science fiction that hasn’t changed much from the days when life on Mars or a water-rain soaked Venus was still Hard Since Fiction. Like, they even admit 99.99% of the video is imaginary – but they can’t imagine anything else? Silly.

At 5:32 they show this stylized progression from hunter-gatherers, to agrarian settlements, to modern cities. What’s telling is that the agrarian settlements are bleak beige and yellows and oranges; poop and skeletons piled up everywhere. The modern city is a pristine and healthy green, with roads and airplanes and clean water. If there’s any consideration to the consequences of present day life, it’s a footnote. A bug to be ironed out in the next technological rollout.

They just love to end videos on a sort of ‘Cosmic Call to Arms’, where humanity goes on to colonize the stars. Never any consideration of what may need to happen before, the work and organization necessary to facilitate such a lofty undertaking. Modern problems are barely worth considering, because we’ll just engineer our way around it, by Jove!

If it was just Kurzgesagt, I probably wouldn’t bother to write this out. But it’s the most prominent and competently produced version of a narrative that seems to be everywhere. There’s also a lot of lefty analysis and breakdown of these tropes. But I think that’s only half of the work necessary. You can’t just shoot down a story and call it a day. You have to fill that space with a more compelling story, give people something to think about and contemplate instead. Otherwise the old story just hangs around, getting bigger and more silly with each refutation it survives.