Here are some of the things I've been thinking about.
I'm sure you've heard of the Fermi paradox. Life appears on Earth almost as soon as we have liquid water. Since life appears so quickly here, most likely, it happens easily. If life happens easily, it should be everywhere but when we look out into the night, we are alone.
To ease this paradox we have come up with an idea we call The Great Filter. Something that stands in the way of every civilization and prevents them from successfully leaving home and making their presence known. Several things have been proposed for this filter, from the simple: Technical civilization is very rare and we just happen to be the first. To the sinister: The galaxy is a dangerous place and anyone who makes too much noise gets snuffed out by more advanced civilizations trying to protect themselves from competition. Let me suggest that the truth is much more banal.
I love to wander in the wild places of the American Southwest. Over the years I've noticed something interesting. In the 80's and 90's the number of people I encountered slowly increased. This made sense as the population of the West was increasing as well. Then something happened. Starting in the late 90's but really becoming noticeable in the 2000's, the number of people I encountered started to decline. Now, if I meet anyone outside of developed attractions it's a surprise. I know anecdotes are not the same as data but lets consider why I love to explore. It's the same thing that drove our ancestors over the horizon and should send us to space. We are hardwired to crave novelty. We get a hit of dopamine every time we experience something new. In the past, one of the best ways to get this was to travel. Now we all carry dopamine boxes in our pockets we can get our fix whenever we want.
Fans of the Fermi paradox will often tell you that, even at sublight speeds, a civilization could colonize a whole Galaxy in a couple of million years. This ignores the reality of space travel. Space travel is ridiculously dangerous while simultaneously being incredibly tedious. Our simulation technology is already pretty good. Imagine where it will be in a hundred years. Why would anyone choose to spend 20,000 years crawling to the next star only to discover that it's planets are barren balls of rock when they could visit a beautiful simulation of a distant world in an afternoon?
So, where is everybody? They're at home on the couch where they already have everything they need.
I'm Still struggling with how to write this, so I'm just going to throw it on the site. I'll refine it later (or not). The surface argument for Cultural Appropriation is that it's the way human culture has always worked. That's one of the things that makes us so successful. We take technological and cultural elements that are helpful and roll them into our daily lives. Cultivation of wheat spreads from the near east across the world, zero from the Yucatan across the rest of Mesoamerica. Heck, the machine you're reading this on uses a script from Phoenicia, numbers from Arabia all tied together by British mathematics.
On a deeper level, the battle against cultural appropriation casts culture as a static thing which can be owned. While this is "on brand" for the terminal stage of capitalism in which we live it doesn't take to much thinking to see that this both wrong and dangerous. Not only is culture constantly changing but even the language we use to describe culture and the moral lens through which we view it are in flux. Beware of people who long for a time in the past when their culture was pure, this one of the cornerstones of fascism. If we imagine that culture can be this monolithic thing, who gets to decide which people can participate? We've been moving and mixing for so long it's not always obvious who's Italian and who's Javanese. Do we carry a racial or cultural ID? Sounds pretty creepy.
So, my straw man says, does this mean that you're OK with some bro putting on a warbonnet and going as an Injun for Halloween? Nope. This one of the other big problems with calling out people for cultural appropriation. It's a cop out. A way for white people to feel better about themselves. Call it what it is. Racism, pure and simple.
So, there you have it. Eat a taco, listen to Hip Hop, don't be racist.