10 ms·

Hmmm. It would be cool to discover that, but also pretty worrying. Any civilization powerful enough to build a megastructure could wipe out humanity without any

by WJW 5y ago

Hmmm. It would be cool to discover that, but also pretty worrying. Any civilization powerful enough to build a megastructure could wipe out humanity without any effort whatsoever, so we'd have to hope they are friendly enough not to do so.

SkyMarshal 5y ago
Any civilization that could build a megastructure, probably already built their own JWST hundreds or thousands of years ago, and by now has far more advanced technology for detecting other technological civilizations, and probably already knows about us.
- TaylorAlexander 5y ago
  Unless they died out before we invented radio and all that exists now are their ancient structures!
  - SkyMarshal 5y ago
    Yes, they might have all gotten "great filtered" first. Wouldn't it be interesting if all the intelligent species in the galaxy got filtered, except humanity b/c we're relative latecomers to evolution and development. Assume on most or all other habitable planets in the galaxy, the first species to develop was intelligent and capable of technology. But, all hit the Great Filter at the roughly same time and got wiped out. There was no chance for any of them to learn from the mistakes of the others, because they all got wiped out before they were able to detect and observe each other. But on Earth, the dinosaurs came first, and roamed the planet for millions of years while all these other species were developing and then getting great filtered. Then the dinosaurs went extinct, and humanity eventually evolves into a technological civilization, and is able to detect, study, and learn from the ancient ruins of the other civilizations. We get curious about why they went extinct, and then discover evidence of the Great Filter from their ruins, and thus avoid it ourselves.
    - ddingus 5y ago
      Extending that a bit... We are among, or perhaps the first of a post filter generation. We do avoid the thing, as do others and eventually arrive at a mode of existence and thought making more possible, friends possible.
- jandrese 5y ago
  At the very least alien telescopes can detect the change in composition of our atmosphere as a result of industrialization. We could do this using today's technology, so for any civilization with the ability to actually travel between solar systems it is childs play and they would easily have continuous monitoring of all nearby solar systems looking for abrupt changes in the atmosphere.
  - pantalaimon 5y ago
    We would still need continuous monitoring of the planets for decades, right? Or can we already make that out in a single snapshot?
    - jandrese 5y ago
      A single snapshot tells a lot (NASA already does this), but continuous monitoring would be almost free at that point so you would have to assume it is happening as well.
- unrealhoang 5y ago
  How? 10 thousand years ago, I doubt our civilization signature is distinguishable. So unless they have FTL probe, we are still a harmless water/oxigen ball to them.
radicaldreamer 5y ago
They probably wouldn't even care that we exist. It would be like going after some ants that are far away and not capable of bothering you.
- dahfizz 5y ago
  Until they decide they want our water / oxygen / etc and they take it all without any thought given to the the impact on a few ants.
  - inkblotuniverse 5y ago
    You're thinking too small. They'll come in and turn the solar system into a matrioshka brain. The aliens don't hate you, they don't love you, it's just that you (and the planet you're standing on, and the star it's orbiting) are made of atoms that can be used to build computers/more aliens.
- ctoth 5y ago
  This metaphor has always bugged me. If we noticed some ants somewhere that, over the last thousand years, got way better at building colonies I think we'd at least be interested, if not concerned. No matter how long we leave them, ants will not figure out how to build their own JWST. Human intelligence seems as though it is fundamentally different, in that we can preserve and build on previous knowledge. So I'm pretty sure that aliens, detecting intelligent life, wouldn't just be like "oh, just some ants." Or if they are, we better hope we don't find ourselves in their pantry.
  - mr_mitm 5y ago
    We also literally have scientists studying ants. We even put ants on the ISS. It's not like there is nothing to learn from ants.
- postalrat 5y ago
  Maybe not now but in 100k years? Who knows.
tayo42 5y ago
They would have been there the whole time, they didn't just pop into existence because it got observed. I don't think you need to worry anymore then usual
- swarnie 5y ago
  Does something exist if you can't/don't observe it?
  - carlio 5y ago
    If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
    - wglb 5y ago
      Don't know, but I have always wondered if the other trees laugh at it.
      - ddingus 5y ago
        I love that. I feel a sense of perspective change that I like. Reminds me to remain vigilant about my sense of play. Losing it happens slow, and yes I have and have noticed. Little bits add up. I like this one. ( scroll right on by, as this is one of those things we might say for the benefit in saying it, not so much value otherwise)
  - jandrese 5y ago
    > If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If you define sound as a wave of air (or any other medium) particles then yes. If you define sound as something a person had heard then no.
- pradn 5y ago
  Going from "unknown if alien civs with megastructures" to "proof of alien civs with megastructures" is new information that would change the trajectory of humanity.
sph 5y ago
Seeing them before they could see us would be ideal.
randomsilence 5y ago
Nature could act as a filter. If you reach industrial production and you destroy nature, your entire planet may die. So only civilizations that have some level of respect for life itself may pass the barrier where they can build megastructures and reach other planets.
JohnBooty 5y ago
What comforts me: A reasonably strong belief that a species building megastructures will be fairly magnanimous. I believe that warlike, short-sighted species will destroy themselves and/or their planets before reaching the point where they are able to build such megastructures. What worries me: They may not stay that way once reaching that level of achievement. Alternately, they may remain magnanimous amongst themselves and yet be deeply xenophobic when it comes to alien species such as humans. So far, the comforting thoughts outweigh the worrying ones in my mind.
- Tade0 5y ago
  My take is that everything about their lives would have to be focused and hyper-optimised towards the goal of producing such structures, so from a human perspective they would appear incredibly dull and featureless in every way.
  - JohnBooty 5y ago
    Hmmmm. That thought crossed my mind, too. Would they be like worker bees, building "beehives" large enough to be seen from hundreds of light years away? Exploring the stars would require a general-purpose intelligence that can span multiple eras: simple tool building, figuring out how to harness and store energy sources, science and math, etc. Is emotion required to achieve any of that, though? Probably, at least at first. I believe emotion is widely regarded as a valuable evolutionary aid, a crucial cognitive shortcut - at least at first, simply feeling that "predator is scary" and "sex is fun" is a hell of an evolutionary accelerant. You don't evolve to the point where you can understand predators (something that takes a lot of biologically expensive brain matter) unless you have a gut-level fear of them first (something that is biologically cheap). But at some point those emotions do more harm than good, I guess, if you're trying to build an interplanetary society. Our good old emotions are good for reproducing and being scared of predators, but aren't super helpful for managing Earth's resources across long time spans. Maybe the only way to make it past the great filters of nuclear war and environmental collapse is to discard those emotions somehow. Even if it's not the only way, seems like a valid way.
  - brooksyd2 5y ago
jandrese 5y ago
They only have to be friendly enough to not have to spend the massive amount of resources necessary to travel between solar systems simply to kill off beings you don't know for no good reason. People seriously underestimate how difficult it would be to travel between solar systems. The scales involved are so far beyond human experience that we can't properly visualize them. Short of discovering a practical FTL (which seems likely to be impossible thanks to the Fermi Paradox) it is unlikely that humans will ever visit a distant solar system.
- omoikane 5y ago
  They wouldn't simply kill us off, they would raid our resources first, if you believe Stephen Hawking. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8642558.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8642558.stm
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    There is nothing we have that they haven't got, or could get overwhelmingly more easily than getting it from here.
    - danlugo92 5y ago
      Our star is a pretty rare type, what if they want it whole D:.
    - inkblotuniverse 5y ago
      We leave resources unexploited for our own aesthetic or economic reasons- it's uneconomical to mine every ore deposit, and we might not want to, if we value pristine land. Imagine you didn't care about the pristine land- let's ignore aesthetic reasons to hold back for a moment. As technology improves, it becomes easier to exploit resources. You can dig deeper with automated robots etc. Now imagine a technologically mature civilization: one whose tech is pushing the limits of physics. If our current ideas of physics are about right, you have to build things out of matter, and there's a finite amount of matter and negentropy out there. Conversely, right now, replication is cheap. Interstellar travel times are longer than civilisational lifetimes: ergo, most entities that arrive at other stars will have relatively mature technology. If I'm a super-civilisation/large-scale AI digging in for the long haul (till the end of the universe), what do I do? I put out all the stars, if I can, because they're wasteful. Negentropy is finite: we want to eke out every tiny bit of use there, not let hydrogen atoms fuse randomly out of our control. Large corporations viciously purse 0.1% efficiency gains because that amounts to millions of dollars at their scale. At the scale of the galaxy, 0.1% efficiency gains in your conversion of stars, planets, rocks and dust into things you care about is quadrillions of lives. The high travel time means the dynamics are different. You don't have to move from star to star: you can just build (number of solar systems)*(safe number of sentient self-replicating factory probes per system) probes in your home system, and send them out all at once (or as they roll off the line). Every solar system is a massive prize, every star left burning a travesty. If I'm turning the galaxy into stockpiled resources, I'm not going to leave any out that are profitable- and with mature tech, it's all profitable. There's no labor cost, after all.
Trasmatta 5y ago
Given that they would have had to begin their journey a long time ago, better to at least know they exist before they get here.
marricks 5y ago
As soon as Europeans got big boats they ended up commiting genocide on everyone they encountered, so there's certainly reason to fear aliens behaving similarly. That said, it seems reasonable to expect any civilization that gets interplanetary technology would also develop ICBM's along the way if they wanted. Perhaps a certain amount of cooperation and kindness could be expected by anyone who makes it out into deep space. There's good reason to hope they'd be kinder than us I think.
- pixl97 5y ago
  You have it backwards. When you develop interplanetary travel, you by default have a weapon. Making any significant mass move through space fast can take a nuclear weapons worth of energy (honestly far more), if you lithobrake in the far side, that's going to be a massive explosion.
- jotm 5y ago
  Not really, they enslaved anyone they could and stole their resources. Murder only happened when the locals were in the way.
  - InitialLastName 5y ago
    You'll have to excuse me if it's hard for me to tell the difference between "a) enslave everyone, b) separate the men and the women, c) make the men mine metals with a ~1 year life expectancy, d) make the women work the sugarcane fields also with a ~1 year life expectancy, e) when you need more, take them from somewhere else" and a genocide.
jdjdjdjdjsjs 5y ago
The good news is that the sum total of your existence is the preservation of energy, and you cannot be “wiped out”. Time passes, things change, including your sense of self.
- AdamJacobMuller 5y ago
  If my energy is sufficiently changed from it's present form such that I can no longer enjoy my morning coffee, it doesn't really matter to me.
  - ndichbebe 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
api 5y ago
If we found alien megastructures I think the most logical conclusion would be that we are subject to a kind of prime directive, effectively residing in a nature preserve, and that we are not intelligent enough to bother contacting (yet). On one hand it would suggest that our neighbors are either benevolent or at least indifferent, but on the other hand we might find it depressing to realize that we might be more or less insects at cosmic scale. It would have interesting existential implications. IMHO the Fermi paradox suggests that we are either early or late. This would be the "late" option. I have long doubted the dark forest hypothesis. Earth's atmospheric absorption spectra have been advertising the presence of a biosphere for almost a billion years at least. If there were any paranoid "reaper" intelligences around why would they even bother to wait for the evolution of something intelligent enough to leave the nest? Just whack candidate biospheres at first detection. It would even be a way to avoid some of the moral concerns that might arise from whacking fully sentient intelligences. Don't even let life get that far. If this were the nature of the universe I doubt we'd be here right now. Edit: I think the most disturbing thing to find would be apparently dead alien megastructures. That suggests ugly things like periodic cosmic scale catastrophes like... I dunno... maybe the black hole at the center of the galaxy deciding every now and then to emit enough gamma rays to destroy anything more complex than microbes living deep underground. That would suck. Edit #2: Now that I think of it, this makes me remember yet another Fermi paradox idea I heard once. Maybe there is some periodic catastrophe like this and the reason we don't see aliens everywhere is that anywhere near a galaxy is actually a dangerous place. Once intelligences reach a certain level they figure this out and then pack up and head out into intergalactic space where they try to set up shop around rogue planets and stars and similar objects. Abandoned megastructures might be leftovers from the previous crop with the smart ones having left before the "event" got them. It would be an interesting thing to discover, because it would imply that there is a clock ticking. Fun sci-fi plot: there is such a clock, and we discover that the event is random. We could have anywhere from zero to a billion years left. Our first interstellar probes find two things: megastructures that are abandoned, and dead worlds and megastructures full of alien space mummies. The intentionally abandoned ones seem to be more or less launch support facilities built to harness and beam exawatts of power for as long as possible in the direction of intergalactic space, following what seems to be a trajectory toward a distant tiny extragalactic star cluster...
politelemon 5y ago
The Three Body Problem series actually covers an aspect of the terrifying nature of discovering other civilizations. It's a nice read for the sake of the concepts and the thought exercise. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20518872-the-three-body-problem https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20518872-the-three-body-...
ddingus 5y ago
They would have to care about us first. For all we know there is a space buoy of some kind out there some big units away... "Non Contact Status: Toxic Species shits where it eats, is actively killing one another, and has a basic nature of aggression and domination, and reproduce like weeds. Planned status reevaluation + 100k yearly time type units" Such a discovery could unify us in a way not possible right now. As far as we know there currently is no higher entity in play. The moment there is... hoo boy!
midrus 5y ago
Err... We're literally this close to wipe out ourselves. I'd still take the discovering of an advanced civilization any day.
wetpaws 5y ago
There is nothing wrong in alien civilization wiping out humanity.
cercatrova 5y ago
Indeed, the dark forest hypothesis (from the book The Dark Forest, the second in The Three Body Problem trilogy) talks specifically about this: > The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life—another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod—there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. If we posit that beings must kill each other, then we must also kill others, lest they kill us first. It may not even be the case that anyone wants to kill another, but simply because the possibility is there, this then becomes a tragedy of the commons, a self-fulfilling prophecy. The rational course of action, then, is to hide as much as possible, and if you notice anyone, eliminate them before they do you.
- kortilla 5y ago
  This assumes that aliens building megastructures have as simplistic thinking as us.
  - WJW 5y ago
    It might also be that they have more sophisticated thinking, that still leads to the same conclusions? I see no inherent reason why more sophisticated thinking would always be more peaceful.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  https://arxiv.org/pdf/1302.0606.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1302.0606.pdf
elihu 5y ago
I think I would be a little bit relieved to discover that alien civilizations exist and they haven't destroyed us yet even though they probably could have. (Granted we haven't had radio very long, so it's possible they're just too far away to have detected us that way and they haven't explored the universe with whatever fine tooth comb is needed to have detected our pre-industrial civilization.)
panick21_ 5y ago
> without any effort whatsoever If it was no effort, why do it? Its like, we could hunt don't people on some of the last unconnected islands and murder them. But why?

by WJW 5y ago

SkyMarshal 5y ago

Any civilization that could build a megastructure, probably already built their own JWST hundreds or thousands of years ago, and by now has far more advanced technology for detecting other technological civilizations, and probably already knows about us.

TaylorAlexander 5y ago
Unless they died out before we invented radio and all that exists now are their ancient structures!
- SkyMarshal 5y ago
  Yes, they might have all gotten "great filtered" first. Wouldn't it be interesting if all the intelligent species in the galaxy got filtered, except humanity b/c we're relative latecomers to evolution and development. Assume on most or all other habitable planets in the galaxy, the first species to develop was intelligent and capable of technology. But, all hit the Great Filter at the roughly same time and got wiped out. There was no chance for any of them to learn from the mistakes of the others, because they all got wiped out before they were able to detect and observe each other. But on Earth, the dinosaurs came first, and roamed the planet for millions of years while all these other species were developing and then getting great filtered. Then the dinosaurs went extinct, and humanity eventually evolves into a technological civilization, and is able to detect, study, and learn from the ancient ruins of the other civilizations. We get curious about why they went extinct, and then discover evidence of the Great Filter from their ruins, and thus avoid it ourselves.
  - ddingus 5y ago
    Extending that a bit... We are among, or perhaps the first of a post filter generation. We do avoid the thing, as do others and eventually arrive at a mode of existence and thought making more possible, friends possible.
jandrese 5y ago
At the very least alien telescopes can detect the change in composition of our atmosphere as a result of industrialization. We could do this using today's technology, so for any civilization with the ability to actually travel between solar systems it is childs play and they would easily have continuous monitoring of all nearby solar systems looking for abrupt changes in the atmosphere.
- pantalaimon 5y ago
  We would still need continuous monitoring of the planets for decades, right? Or can we already make that out in a single snapshot?
  - jandrese 5y ago
    A single snapshot tells a lot (NASA already does this), but continuous monitoring would be almost free at that point so you would have to assume it is happening as well.
unrealhoang 5y ago
How? 10 thousand years ago, I doubt our civilization signature is distinguishable. So unless they have FTL probe, we are still a harmless water/oxigen ball to them.

radicaldreamer 5y ago

They probably wouldn't even care that we exist. It would be like going after some ants that are far away and not capable of bothering you.

dahfizz 5y ago
Until they decide they want our water / oxygen / etc and they take it all without any thought given to the the impact on a few ants.
- inkblotuniverse 5y ago
  You're thinking too small. They'll come in and turn the solar system into a matrioshka brain. The aliens don't hate you, they don't love you, it's just that you (and the planet you're standing on, and the star it's orbiting) are made of atoms that can be used to build computers/more aliens.
ctoth 5y ago
This metaphor has always bugged me. If we noticed some ants somewhere that, over the last thousand years, got way better at building colonies I think we'd at least be interested, if not concerned. No matter how long we leave them, ants will not figure out how to build their own JWST. Human intelligence seems as though it is fundamentally different, in that we can preserve and build on previous knowledge. So I'm pretty sure that aliens, detecting intelligent life, wouldn't just be like "oh, just some ants." Or if they are, we better hope we don't find ourselves in their pantry.
- mr_mitm 5y ago
  We also literally have scientists studying ants. We even put ants on the ISS. It's not like there is nothing to learn from ants.
postalrat 5y ago
Maybe not now but in 100k years? Who knows.

tayo42 5y ago

They would have been there the whole time, they didn't just pop into existence because it got observed. I don't think you need to worry anymore then usual

swarnie 5y ago
Does something exist if you can't/don't observe it?
- carlio 5y ago
  If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
  - wglb 5y ago
    Don't know, but I have always wondered if the other trees laugh at it.
    - ddingus 5y ago
      I love that. I feel a sense of perspective change that I like. Reminds me to remain vigilant about my sense of play. Losing it happens slow, and yes I have and have noticed. Little bits add up. I like this one. ( scroll right on by, as this is one of those things we might say for the benefit in saying it, not so much value otherwise)
- jandrese 5y ago
  > If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If you define sound as a wave of air (or any other medium) particles then yes. If you define sound as something a person had heard then no.
pradn 5y ago
Going from "unknown if alien civs with megastructures" to "proof of alien civs with megastructures" is new information that would change the trajectory of humanity.

sph 5y ago

Seeing them before they could see us would be ideal.

randomsilence 5y ago

Nature could act as a filter. If you reach industrial production and you destroy nature, your entire planet may die. So only civilizations that have some level of respect for life itself may pass the barrier where they can build megastructures and reach other planets.

JohnBooty 5y ago

What comforts me: A reasonably strong belief that a species building megastructures will be fairly magnanimous. I believe that warlike, short-sighted species will destroy themselves and/or their planets before reaching the point where they are able to build such megastructures. What worries me: They may not stay that way once reaching that level of achievement. Alternately, they may remain magnanimous amongst themselves and yet be deeply xenophobic when it comes to alien species such as humans. So far, the comforting thoughts outweigh the worrying ones in my mind.

Tade0 5y ago
My take is that everything about their lives would have to be focused and hyper-optimised towards the goal of producing such structures, so from a human perspective they would appear incredibly dull and featureless in every way.
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  Hmmmm. That thought crossed my mind, too. Would they be like worker bees, building "beehives" large enough to be seen from hundreds of light years away? Exploring the stars would require a general-purpose intelligence that can span multiple eras: simple tool building, figuring out how to harness and store energy sources, science and math, etc. Is emotion required to achieve any of that, though? Probably, at least at first. I believe emotion is widely regarded as a valuable evolutionary aid, a crucial cognitive shortcut - at least at first, simply feeling that "predator is scary" and "sex is fun" is a hell of an evolutionary accelerant. You don't evolve to the point where you can understand predators (something that takes a lot of biologically expensive brain matter) unless you have a gut-level fear of them first (something that is biologically cheap). But at some point those emotions do more harm than good, I guess, if you're trying to build an interplanetary society. Our good old emotions are good for reproducing and being scared of predators, but aren't super helpful for managing Earth's resources across long time spans. Maybe the only way to make it past the great filters of nuclear war and environmental collapse is to discard those emotions somehow. Even if it's not the only way, seems like a valid way.
- brooksyd2 5y ago

jandrese 5y ago

They only have to be friendly enough to not have to spend the massive amount of resources necessary to travel between solar systems simply to kill off beings you don't know for no good reason. People seriously underestimate how difficult it would be to travel between solar systems. The scales involved are so far beyond human experience that we can't properly visualize them. Short of discovering a practical FTL (which seems likely to be impossible thanks to the Fermi Paradox) it is unlikely that humans will ever visit a distant solar system.

omoikane 5y ago
They wouldn't simply kill us off, they would raid our resources first, if you believe Stephen Hawking. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8642558.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8642558.stm
- ncmncm 5y ago
  There is nothing we have that they haven't got, or could get overwhelmingly more easily than getting it from here.
  - danlugo92 5y ago
    Our star is a pretty rare type, what if they want it whole D:.
  - inkblotuniverse 5y ago
    We leave resources unexploited for our own aesthetic or economic reasons- it's uneconomical to mine every ore deposit, and we might not want to, if we value pristine land. Imagine you didn't care about the pristine land- let's ignore aesthetic reasons to hold back for a moment. As technology improves, it becomes easier to exploit resources. You can dig deeper with automated robots etc. Now imagine a technologically mature civilization: one whose tech is pushing the limits of physics. If our current ideas of physics are about right, you have to build things out of matter, and there's a finite amount of matter and negentropy out there. Conversely, right now, replication is cheap. Interstellar travel times are longer than civilisational lifetimes: ergo, most entities that arrive at other stars will have relatively mature technology. If I'm a super-civilisation/large-scale AI digging in for the long haul (till the end of the universe), what do I do? I put out all the stars, if I can, because they're wasteful. Negentropy is finite: we want to eke out every tiny bit of use there, not let hydrogen atoms fuse randomly out of our control. Large corporations viciously purse 0.1% efficiency gains because that amounts to millions of dollars at their scale. At the scale of the galaxy, 0.1% efficiency gains in your conversion of stars, planets, rocks and dust into things you care about is quadrillions of lives. The high travel time means the dynamics are different. You don't have to move from star to star: you can just build (number of solar systems)*(safe number of sentient self-replicating factory probes per system) probes in your home system, and send them out all at once (or as they roll off the line). Every solar system is a massive prize, every star left burning a travesty. If I'm turning the galaxy into stockpiled resources, I'm not going to leave any out that are profitable- and with mature tech, it's all profitable. There's no labor cost, after all.

Trasmatta 5y ago

Given that they would have had to begin their journey a long time ago, better to at least know they exist before they get here.

marricks 5y ago

As soon as Europeans got big boats they ended up commiting genocide on everyone they encountered, so there's certainly reason to fear aliens behaving similarly. That said, it seems reasonable to expect any civilization that gets interplanetary technology would also develop ICBM's along the way if they wanted. Perhaps a certain amount of cooperation and kindness could be expected by anyone who makes it out into deep space. There's good reason to hope they'd be kinder than us I think.

pixl97 5y ago
You have it backwards. When you develop interplanetary travel, you by default have a weapon. Making any significant mass move through space fast can take a nuclear weapons worth of energy (honestly far more), if you lithobrake in the far side, that's going to be a massive explosion.
jotm 5y ago
Not really, they enslaved anyone they could and stole their resources. Murder only happened when the locals were in the way.
- InitialLastName 5y ago
  You'll have to excuse me if it's hard for me to tell the difference between "a) enslave everyone, b) separate the men and the women, c) make the men mine metals with a ~1 year life expectancy, d) make the women work the sugarcane fields also with a ~1 year life expectancy, e) when you need more, take them from somewhere else" and a genocide.

jdjdjdjdjsjs 5y ago

The good news is that the sum total of your existence is the preservation of energy, and you cannot be “wiped out”. Time passes, things change, including your sense of self.

AdamJacobMuller 5y ago
If my energy is sufficiently changed from it's present form such that I can no longer enjoy my morning coffee, it doesn't really matter to me.
- ndichbebe 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

api 5y ago

If we found alien megastructures I think the most logical conclusion would be that we are subject to a kind of prime directive, effectively residing in a nature preserve, and that we are not intelligent enough to bother contacting (yet). On one hand it would suggest that our neighbors are either benevolent or at least indifferent, but on the other hand we might find it depressing to realize that we might be more or less insects at cosmic scale. It would have interesting existential implications. IMHO the Fermi paradox suggests that we are either early or late. This would be the "late" option. I have long doubted the dark forest hypothesis. Earth's atmospheric absorption spectra have been advertising the presence of a biosphere for almost a billion years at least. If there were any paranoid "reaper" intelligences around why would they even bother to wait for the evolution of something intelligent enough to leave the nest? Just whack candidate biospheres at first detection. It would even be a way to avoid some of the moral concerns that might arise from whacking fully sentient intelligences. Don't even let life get that far. If this were the nature of the universe I doubt we'd be here right now. Edit: I think the most disturbing thing to find would be apparently dead alien megastructures. That suggests ugly things like periodic cosmic scale catastrophes like... I dunno... maybe the black hole at the center of the galaxy deciding every now and then to emit enough gamma rays to destroy anything more complex than microbes living deep underground. That would suck. Edit #2: Now that I think of it, this makes me remember yet another Fermi paradox idea I heard once. Maybe there is some periodic catastrophe like this and the reason we don't see aliens everywhere is that anywhere near a galaxy is actually a dangerous place. Once intelligences reach a certain level they figure this out and then pack up and head out into intergalactic space where they try to set up shop around rogue planets and stars and similar objects. Abandoned megastructures might be leftovers from the previous crop with the smart ones having left before the "event" got them. It would be an interesting thing to discover, because it would imply that there is a clock ticking. Fun sci-fi plot: there is such a clock, and we discover that the event is random. We could have anywhere from zero to a billion years left. Our first interstellar probes find two things: megastructures that are abandoned, and dead worlds and megastructures full of alien space mummies. The intentionally abandoned ones seem to be more or less launch support facilities built to harness and beam exawatts of power for as long as possible in the direction of intergalactic space, following what seems to be a trajectory toward a distant tiny extragalactic star cluster...

politelemon 5y ago

The Three Body Problem series actually covers an aspect of the terrifying nature of discovering other civilizations. It's a nice read for the sake of the concepts and the thought exercise. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20518872-the-three-body-problem https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20518872-the-three-body-...

ddingus 5y ago

They would have to care about us first. For all we know there is a space buoy of some kind out there some big units away... "Non Contact Status: Toxic Species shits where it eats, is actively killing one another, and has a basic nature of aggression and domination, and reproduce like weeds. Planned status reevaluation + 100k yearly time type units" Such a discovery could unify us in a way not possible right now. As far as we know there currently is no higher entity in play. The moment there is... hoo boy!

midrus 5y ago

Err... We're literally this close to wipe out ourselves. I'd still take the discovering of an advanced civilization any day.

wetpaws 5y ago

There is nothing wrong in alien civilization wiping out humanity.

cercatrova 5y ago

Indeed, the dark forest hypothesis (from the book The Dark Forest, the second in The Three Body Problem trilogy) talks specifically about this: > The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life—another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod—there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. If we posit that beings must kill each other, then we must also kill others, lest they kill us first. It may not even be the case that anyone wants to kill another, but simply because the possibility is there, this then becomes a tragedy of the commons, a self-fulfilling prophecy. The rational course of action, then, is to hide as much as possible, and if you notice anyone, eliminate them before they do you.

kortilla 5y ago
This assumes that aliens building megastructures have as simplistic thinking as us.
- WJW 5y ago
  It might also be that they have more sophisticated thinking, that still leads to the same conclusions? I see no inherent reason why more sophisticated thinking would always be more peaceful.
formerly_proven 5y ago
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1302.0606.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1302.0606.pdf

elihu 5y ago

I think I would be a little bit relieved to discover that alien civilizations exist and they haven't destroyed us yet even though they probably could have. (Granted we haven't had radio very long, so it's possible they're just too far away to have detected us that way and they haven't explored the universe with whatever fine tooth comb is needed to have detected our pre-industrial civilization.)

panick21_ 5y ago

> without any effort whatsoever If it was no effort, why do it? Its like, we could hunt don't people on some of the last unconnected islands and murder them. But why?