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I dunno I think if it were an alien spacecraft we should just keep our heads low and not draw any attention to it. Our first window of opportunity might be our

• wasx 9y ago
  I've gotta disagree with you on this. Personally I think intelligent life is probably very rare in the universe, the sheer number of factors that need to go right for it to arise, and then the sheer number of factors that need to not go wrong for it to continue to exist mean any intelligent life out there is probably going to find us way more valuable and worthy of co-operation and interaction than say destruction of us for the measly resources of Earth, or enslavement (although I guess enslavement could be possible). I do also have faith in the "humanity" of any interstellar life that may exist out there, after all a society based on oppression tends to be rife with conflict, and societies rife with instability and conflict don't tend to last. And in my view it would be very unsustainable for any life to maintain that sort of conflict, and at the same time hope to extend a society out into the universe. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I think it's worth the risk.
  • on_and_off 9y ago
    The last thing I would want for an alien life is to be humane. We have not really been great in our interactions with other cultures throughout history and they were of the same species as us.
    • 0xdada 9y ago
      I think you're not interpreting the word "humane" correctly. It's possible for humans to behave in an inhumane manner. In fact it happens a lot to this day. That doesn't mean GP's definition of "humane" is wrong.
      • on_and_off 9y ago
        I am aware of this. I am not a native speaker, so the dichotomy between the sense of this word and our most common behaviors as a species has always felt unsettling to me. I kind of like this word, I would love to live in a world where this is a perfect descriptor for our species. Back to the topic at hand, while it would indeed be marvelous to find benefactors from the stars, all the other possibilities are chilling. From cosmic horror to simple warmongering, there are so many ways it could go irremediably wrong.
    • wasx 9y ago
      I put humanity in quotes because I didn't really know what else to name it when talking about some other form of intelligence. I guess I'm talking about that part of our society that craves peace and stability, that has enabled our continued development up to this point. Certainly throughout history we've seen unimaginable cruelty inflicted on "less civilised" societies by colonial and imperialist societies. Hopefully any intelligence which has reached the development of an interstellar society would have those same qualities, frankly I don't see any other way for it to sustain itself. Imagine we came across anew form of intelligent life on Mars, would we exploit and enslave it? I'd like to think living in a global society would prevent such atrocities, at least in the modern era, and hopefully beyond. And I think any society in an interstellar context would behave the same
      • pm90 9y ago
        We probably wouldn’t exploit it as long as access was hard. Once space travel becomes more common though, I think we might have a situation like Star Wars where the far away worlds are basically left to their own devices since it would be a huge pain for an earth centered society to enforce laws...
  • rlkf 9y ago
    But the society need not be based on internal oppression, to be an adversary to us: I don't think the kingdom of Castille in 1492 necessarily was a beacon of stability and lack of conflict; yet it financed an expedition westwards.
    • wasx 9y ago
      That is true, but I don't think fair parallels can be drawn between a southern European empire in 1492 when humanity was still discovering itself and it's place within the universe to an interstellar society. Society matures in much the same way as an individual does, albeit on much longer, slower time spans. Can you seriously imagine an interstellar society (which I truly believe would be a democracy, as I see no feasible way an imperialist dictatorship would be possible with that sort of decentralization of society) having the same ambitions as a pre-enlightenment imperial society? I think the goals, desires, hopes and pursuits of that society and the individuals that compose it would be fundamentally opposed to that sort of expansion and enslavement.
      • pm90 9y ago
        Democracy isn’t something that automatically makes you a space faring civilization, neither is it necessary. The Roman Empire got pretty far while enslaving millions of people. It’s not a stretch to think that the Age of Science could have happened under Roman tutelage had it not met its unfortunate demise
  • dv_dt 9y ago
    What if intelligent life is rare because at some point some other intelligent life set up a systematic process of keeping the universe clear of it?
    • andrepd 9y ago
      You've been playing too much Mass Effect 2 :^)
      • dv_dt 9y ago
        I've actually never played any Mass Effect...
    • raverbashing 9y ago
      People are fixated on that, but it's not the only solution to the Fermi paradox
    • wasx 9y ago
      Then we'd certainly have evidence of this genocidal society no? They'd definitely be actively looking for other intelligent life forms, and if they were systematic in eliminating it, they'd have to have the infrastructure to do so which we'd be able to detect. After all you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, any life form like that would have the interest in finding and eliminating intelligent life before it becomes to big to be a threat, which would probably lead them to coaxing other intelligent life forms into making contact. No, I don't think this is feasible in reality, nor is there any evidence beyond "but what if" for that possibility.
      • dv_dt 9y ago
        Maybe the only cosmic infrastructure required would be listening stations and the ability to steer big rocks to sources? The listening stations would be hard to pick out. They could run a 'reverse' fermi equation of sorts and figure out how fast you need to detect and extinguish signals to keep the universe clear. Would the extermination look anything more than unfortunate random collisions? Do we actually have enough data to calculate if collisions are above some noise floor of random happenstances?
  • manicdee 9y ago
    On the flip side, the conditions required for life to reach interstellar technology are so rare that life-bearing worlds like Earth are highly coveted. A planet where you can set up a city and not have to worry about micrometeoroids, radiation, atmospheric composition? Just sleep out under the stars without a suit repair kit handy? That’s worth killing for!
    • wasx 9y ago
      Wiping earth clear of humans and still having a habitable planet left over would require far more resources, risk, lives of your own and time then simply building a few colonies on planets like Mars.
      • swombat 9y ago
        Pfft! Smart aliens just send a couple of stealth probes, figure out our biology, and in short order program a simple virus that is dormant but highly contagious for about a year and then when incubation is over kills within 24 hours. Ironically it’s not far off what was done to the Americas. War is only an option when the sides are more or less evenly matched. We would not be anywhere near evenly matched with an interstellar civilisation.
    • XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
      If you can make the trip you can probably survive in space definitely. I'd be surprised if truly space faring civilizations really like gravity wells. Getting up and down them isn't cheap (although with plenty of effort it can be made cheaper). Everything is all stuck together, if you can find an asteroid of the material you want mining it and moving it for sale/manufacturing should be so much cheaper than dealing with moving a bunch of unrelated materials away under gravity. In space you'd be able to move arbitrarily large objects with just an accelerator, map of the solar system and a transponder. In a gravity well you need a lot more and way more $$$ if you want to get it up the well. Then again I have no training in the subject.
  • sandworm101 9y ago
    Rare per-star or per-planet, but in our galaxy there are an untold number of stars. In the "universe" as a whole, whatever numbers you throw at the Drake Equation the answer is billions of civilizations.
  • Klathmon 9y ago
    As a counterpoint, I'd argue that conflict can act as a "force multiplier" of sorts. Every large war in our history has caused leaps in technology. Even on a smaller scale we treat conflict and competition as a good thing that promotes innovation. Life as we know it "craves" and thrives on conflict. And if that's a universal truth, then any other civilizations we meet could as well.
    • pm90 9y ago
      Excellent point. Wars have (albeit morbidly) allowed for drastic changes in all aspects of human society as well. But maybe a war based society can only progress until it invents planet destroying WMDs. After that the cost of war becomes intolerable to progress
  • Houshalter 9y ago
    It doesn't matter. No matter how convincing your argument is, we can't afford to risk the entire world on you being right. The stakes are too high. And I think you are very wrong. Aliens don't need to be anything like us. Don't anthropomorphize them. They might have nothing like our morality or care for other sentient life forms. And just see us as a pest and potential future competition to snuff out. Or if they do have morals, they could be completely alien. When the Europeans discovered the New World, one of the first things they did is try to forcibly convert the natives to their religion. They justified conquering and ruling over the natives to stop their savagery and impose their values and laws on them.
    • pm90 9y ago
      One Important thing to note was that while religious undertones certainly existed the main goal of colonizers was economic. So I wouldn’t be surprised if the first alien ship to arrive on earth would be an exploratory mining ship trying to basically mine earth for water/minerals and would wipe out anything inconvenient such as existing life.
  • blacksmith_tb 9y ago
    You might be entirely right, but the universe is a big place. Estimates of the number of stars (called Sagan's Number[1]) are on the order of the 3 x 10^23 (300 sextillion[2]). Even if only a tiny fraction of a percent of them had worlds with intelligent life, there'd be a lot of it out there. The bad news, though, is that it's still hard to travel, or even send transmissions, so it's just as likely we're doomed to stay lonely. (I tend to share your optimism about the odds of other intelligent life being good-natured; we've come a long way in the last 2,000 years, by the time we're out in the stars, I'd like to think we'd all be Bodhisattvas). 1: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Sagan%27s_number https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Sagan%27s_number 2: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2010/12/01/131730552/-trillions-of-earths-could-be-orbiting-300-sextillion-stars https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2010/12/01/131730552...
• vvanders 9y ago
  Good luck with that considering how much RF we're blasting out into space(you can make contact with the ISS/AmSats on a 5W handheld + yagi antenna).
  • mirimir 9y ago
    In The Killing Star, it was Star Trek that sealed Earth's fate. Humans came off as dangerous know-it-alls :(
    • QAPereo 9y ago
      In the Dark Forest, we could get lucky given how faint and brief the peak of our RF emissions have been. We’d probably have to be close to “someone” looking for signs of life to give ourselves away now. Still for all that we know the relativistic bombardment is already en route, or a dual-vector foil.
      • mirimir 9y ago
        Maybe that "cigar-shaped" rock was a near miss ;)
• yoodenvranx 9y ago
  This reminds me of Liu Cixins "The the body problem"-triology. If you haven't read it yet you should have a look.
  • Unbeliever69 9y ago
    Dark Forest Deterence. I'd be interested to find out what % of HR readers HAVEN'T read this trilogy considering how much it comes up in conversation on these forums. I'm willing to bet it is a VERY high % compared to the average reading population.
    • swombat 9y ago
      I started reading it and found it fairly poor quality sci fi so I stopped somewhere in the first book. I think the bit where they slice a passing ship with newly invented nanowires smacked more of a comic book or 50s golden age sci fi than the sort of “proper” science fiction I’m used to these days. That and the way the characters seem to have such simplified motivations. It’s just not good fiction - and science fiction has to also be good fiction. Edit: wow, downvoted within a minute for not liking the same sci fi books. That’s a new low in HN groupthink.
      • Unbeliever69 9y ago
        It wasn't me! Personally loved the series! I'm always on the lookout for more "proper" sci-fi, so please share! I've been binge reading hard sci-fi this year and can't get enough. And yeah, HN is a tough crowd.
        • swombat 9y ago
          There’s so much awesome SF out there... it depends what you like! Personally, in very different styles, I found pretty much everything written by Iain M Banks excellent (start with Excession or Player of Games), I enjoy John Scalzi’s humourous sci fi space operas a fair bit too, Peter F Hamilton’s Reality Dysfunction trilogy was pretty decent... I’ve loved most of what I’ve read from Charles Stross but particularly Accelerando, Greg Egan’s Diaspora was awesome, like a modern day Childhood’s End (read that too if you haven’t, though it’s aged badly). Cloud Atlas is sorta science fiction and amazing. I’ve yet to not enjoy any book by Cory Doctorow - start with Pirate Cinema. The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi was excellent. This should be enough to get you started!