802
Lmao (thelemmy.club)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/science_memes@mander.xyz
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[–] 8 points 4 months ago (3 children)

There's also the Dark Forest hypothesis - the idea that maybe many alien civilizations exist out there but stay silent because revealing themselves would make them targets/prey to a more high-tech hostile civilization.

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  • [–] 9 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    3 body problem is a good book for thought experiments, but it didn't really discuss the arguments against the dark forest hypothesis

    • assumes universal hostility.

    • Interstellar warfare is protracted and impractical.

    • Ignores potential cooperation and ethical diversity.

    • assumes aliens think like humans

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Regarding the first point, I think it just assumes the possibility for hostility, not the universality of it. If there's a room with a thousand people and I know one person in the room has a gun and wants to kill me, I'm still going to hesitate to enter regardless of the 999.

    Also, any intelligence that arises out of evolution is going to have at least the rough concept of violence.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    Counterarguments

    The 999 are going too overpower the violent 1.

    The concept of peace will be known and experience will have demonstrated that it is more valuable than war.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    Counter-counterarguments.

    That assumes the 999 are in a position to stop the 1. Assuming FTL travel/communication/detection is never possible, reaction ability is always going to be limited. A relativistic projectile aimed at a planet can be a silent civilization killer.

    This is more about cautiously reacting to the possibility of hostility in the very high stakes scenario of first contact, not the confirmation of hostility. In the room analogy, we don't know who has the gun, whether it's truly 1 person or 0 or 100 or 500, if most or all of the 999 are blindfolded or willing to defend newcomers, whether overpowering the violent one(s) is actually possible due to everyone being spread out and any guns having functionally unlimited ammo, whether other people have already been taken out for just showing up or resisting, and whether all of the above even matters if the aggressor gets a kill shot off before any of the above takes effect.

    Evolution is inherently a competition for limited resources with winners and losers, so violence innately comes with the territory. Even grass and trees are in a war for sunlight. The concept of peaceful cooperation may be common due to the individual specialization likely needed for a species to become space-fairing, but it'll be a higher level, more abstract idea, and the universality of other species applying it more broadly cannot be assumed.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    Yes. Those are the book's arguments. A counter-counter argument is a repeat of the same argument.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago*

    I'd imagine any intelligent alien life form would be intelligent enough to realize that they've reached a point at which they can simply life in a sustained utopia. Heal the planet, work less, fill time with hobbies and pursuits. Humans have this flaw, and it's that the mentally ill squander the world's wealth and use it for dick-measuring contests. A small minority of us will kill their own mother for a job promotion, and the people at the very top want to squander it all so they see another 0 in their bank account, or outrace the other 7 megabillionaires to the dick-measuring contest on Mars. I could only hope aliens aren't as as stupid. We could just litter the earth with trees, solar panels, 2 br condos, and hammocks, and have AI work for us, but nope. Every single die shrink leads to more transistor density and never any power efficiency because big numbers are better for shareholders. They sold us downstream. If any alien contacts us or leaves a trace they're most likely just as dangerous to our survival as we are. Space conquistadors

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    It's not convincing because it's impossible to hide. You always produce waste heat which would be visible (if you use 100W of solar power, you dissipate 100W in deep infra red into space)

    We would expect to see stars putting out an amount of energy for a bright star, but in deep IR as they're wrapped in Dyson spheres or swarms

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