But not necessarily due to the fact you can detect a 02 planet from long distances. Because the chance of a 02 planet having a dangerous civilization is less than one in a billion. I extrapolate from the fact that we have had life for several billions of years, and we still arent a danger to any starfaring race. You were the one that argued with ME about To planets within 2 billion light years actually, as was explained earlier in the thread. Multiple times. which is also bunk.
So yeah I concur the Dark Forest Hypothesis is bunk. But the idea of wiping out all random planets with 02 life is also bunk.
I did use that term in one of my posts. Let me assure you that was a bit of a poetic term that could also refer to relativistic kill missiles, von Neumann probes, hungry hive mind critters, black holes, whatever this advanced xenocidal civ wants to toss at us.
If you’re the sort of civ that goes around wiping other civs just in case, you aren’t putting up with a one in a billion chance (which you have no cite for I may add, since a cite is impossible with our current knowledge). Especially when, according to your earlier post, you’re rolling the dice billions of times.
Not yet, but even if that were the case, that’s not a very good extrapolation, as you neglected to take into account all the other oxygen rich planets. Please catalog the danger that each of them pose (you can do so statistically, rather than individually) before continuing your extrapolation.
That would be how long we have been observable as a life bearing planet. There is nothing bunk about that.
It does seem unlikely.
The fact that we are still here is decent evidence of that.
Can you please explain what it is that you are arguing here? It seems as though you are trying really hard to disagree in such a way that you come to the same conclusion as those you are being disagreeable to.
Not today, but if they’re 10,000 light-years away, if we DO become dangerous, they’d get no sign of it until it was too late. When you detect radio waves, they’ve been broadcasting for 10,000 years. That’s the length of our entire history as a sedentary species.
Much safer to wipe them out long before you hear the radio if you plan on wiping them out at all.
Give us 10,000 years. I’m sure we could build out own solar space laser in far less than that, if we were properly motivated.
That’s the whole point here, with the distances involved, by the time you see them attacking you, you are thousands if not tens of thousands of years too late to do anything about it. So, it would pay to be proactive, and eliminate threats before it’s too late to do so.
You see any neanderthals around here?
Not in nearly the same context that you are using it.
Once again, what exactly is it that you are are arguing here? Please answer this, as it is starting to seem as though you are just disagreeing for the sole purpose of being disagreeable. If that’s the case, then I don’t see any purpose to continue to involve you in this discussion.
Can you please explain what it is that you are arguing here?
You seem to be arguing just for the sake of arguing. Unless you bring up some arguments that show you do think there is a xenophobic super advanced civilization destroying all 02 planets, then I dont know what or why or how you are arguing.
I take it that you just jumped into the middle of the thread, and didn’t bother to see the context or the discussion that had been made before you came in and started telling us that we were wrong.
I mean, things were pretty interesting and congenial, playing with different scenarios and possibilities before you came in and started declaring that you were the only one with the right answer.
For the record, I am claiming that xenophobic alien civs probably do not exist, and our continued existence is proof of that. The argument that you seem to be making is that there are logical or technological reasons why they cannot exist, and you have done nothing to back your position, other than to make the unsubstantiated claim that everyone else is wrong.
The possibility that this exchange turns productive or interesting is slightly less than being wiped out by a space laser in the next 5 minutes.
Modnote: I’m going to bounce this up to the modloop but it appears DrDeth is trolling this thread. That will be a one day suspension pending a review of his posting privileges. He does this to far too many threads and far too many GD thread especially.
He can think over reading a thread before coming in blazing with derailing posts. I’m going to suggest a one week suspension. We’ll see what happens.
Anyway, I guess the question becomes, should we become these genocidal aliens that wipe out any hint of life that may arise to challenge us? After all, as we determined, if we wait too long, it may be too late.
An interesting question. I suggest there’s not a real reason to make the decision until we have the means to implement the decision.
Right now we have the tech to almost wreck a small asteroid nearby as long as it’s in a convenient orbit. We don’t have a ready-to-fire system today, but we do have the ability to build one. All we ve need is the will ze vill to do so!
Whacking a planet at interstellar range is as far beyond our grasp today as spaceflight was to the ancient Egyptians. Maybe even 10 or 100x farther than that.
A mild approach to the precautionary principle would suggest we knock off risky shit like METI. And think twice about how our few highly coherent emitters may signal our presence and what we could do to make them less conspicuous.
Which hiding-lite may be the thing that buys us the extra millenia to perfect our own planet-killers.
No.
Quite aside from any ethical considerations, it doesn’t make sense strategically.
Destroying a harmless “slimeball world” could be the thing that attracts the attention of a big fish civilization. It could put us at risk a heck of a lot sooner than the slimeball would have.
Note that one of Ball’s premises is that advanced civilisations can fall into three categories; one that decline quickly, ones that stagnate and do not continue to develop and innovate, and those which continue to develop and become more sophisticated. If there are examples of the third type nearby, they may have decided to declare our planet a ‘wildlife sanctuary’ where we can develop in peace.
Brin (1983) lists a number of variations on this hypothesis; Kuiper &Morris suggested that the aliens might allow the Earth simply to ‘lie fallow’, in order to see what emerges from our ongoing evolution; other variations include a quarantine, perhaps because we are dangerous or not yet sufficiently advanced. Brin also lists the ‘crackpot’ idea that there is already contact between ETs and Earth; his words, not mine.
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One problem with this hypothesis is that these super-advanced, ancient aliens also appear to have the ability to remain invisible, despite their super-advanced technology; we haven’t seen any bizarre alien infrastructure or giant artworks filling the sky yet, so they are surprisingly and consistently discrete, all across the Galaxy (and have been for at least 100,000 years in the past, since that is the light-travel-time from the distant reaches of the Milky Way).
Perhaps all advanced civilisations find a way to pursue their hobbies in a perfectly discreet way, that can’t be detected by our instruments (yet); they might show us how to do it, one day, or let us find out for ourselves. But whatever it is, it needs to be more attractive than building visible castles in space, so attractive that the entire population of the galaxy outside of Earth follows this discreet and quiet lifestyle consistently across vast swathes of time and space.
This, precisely. If you cannot completely hide your existence from potential advanced civilizations - and we have established that you cannot unless you happen to be first on the scene (but it’s very doubtful that the first galactic civilization on the scene would KNOW that they are first) - then acting aggressively is exactly how you’d paint a target on your own back.
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