the ones who prospered were the most aggressive ones, even conquering the whole world by force, it’s a survivorship bias situation.

this is my fundamental gripe with the problem, yes it's technically a survivorship bias, but how do you remove it, that's the hard question.

If 10 people in a group agree to leave 10,000 USD on a table, such that after 20 minutes, they can all split it amongst themselves, and then turn off the lights in the room and plug their ears in the meantime, someone if not multiple people are going to try and take it all for themselves.

Evolution has fundamentally programmed in a form of survivorship bias within basically every species. I don't think you can separate it unfortunately.

not every group of humans is aggressive, but those eventually get conquered by the agressive ones, military power always ends up winning.

exactly.

It’s unscientific to say that any country, given the chance, would do the same as the europeans or the US empire did to the world.

i wouldn't say that they would explicitly, but i would argue that being in a position of that much power, over that much of the world, in that much of a volatile position, there is a very high likelihood that they would influence some amount of the world, in a similar manner.

At least the Chinese century will prove or disprove this theory, given it’s the first significant power shift in the last 500 years, let’s see if they will be so brutal as the US and its allies (you know who) are to the world.

if we're talking about modern day china, they already do a lot of power projection in the sea, illegally, same in the air. I don't know if they're doing any predatory lending to other countries, but that could very well change in the future, so we can't say anything about it now. It's highly likely that china at least wants other countries to be dependent on themselves at the minimum, which i would argue is a form of this power projection.

They are 100% in a position to do things that are more predatory, time will tell, i predict they will, it's inevitable, but i could be wrong. Either that or china itself implodes before we get to that point, so who knows.

personally i know nothing about their military presence outside of the previously mentioned stuff. So i can't really say anything about it, but there's probably at least one bad thing they've done. Again, time will tell.