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Given enough civilisations, it's likely that a few will eventually manage to not wipe themselves out (at least for long enough to become fairly redundant).
by osmarks 8y ago
Given enough civilisations, it's likely that a few will eventually manage to not wipe themselves out (at least for long enough to become fairly redundant).
- lisper 8y agoYes. The $64k question is: how many is enough, and do we actually have that many close enough in space and time that it matters?
- Semirhage 8y agoExactly, and how many want to be found, or find other species? Of those, how many are so far away that communication is a pointless enterprise? Not to mention that the more difficult and costly communication becomes with distance, the further out in time you are. All in all, using a ton of high tech and energy to say “hi” to us from 10,000 ly away and 10,000 years of time seems... weird. At 100,000ly it starts to be a really exotic proposition, and at a million ly you shouldn’t assume your message will even reach the same species. Unless your fellow technological life is within a few hundred light years, communication of any kind starts to look like throwing messages in bottles. Of course the closer your target is, the less wistfully academic it is. If Proxima Centauri had a planet with a civilization like ours, you’d have to consider what they could do other than just talk. At that point, the issue switches from insane time scales rendering the whole process moot, to potential forms of dark forest detente.