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Everyone seems to be overlooking that the costs for this are insanely high. This has to be funded by tax dollars. Why should we use taxpayer money to try to ann

by vecter 4y ago

Everyone seems to be overlooking that the costs for this are insanely high. This has to be funded by tax dollars. Why should we use taxpayer money to try to annihilate every other single living organism in the galaxy? The reasoning that "there's a non-zero chance that if we don't, someone else will do it to us" is practically useless reasoning, especially from a policy perspective. That's like saying that the laws of quantum mechanics prescribe a non-zero probability to a planet-sized nuclear bomb materializing next to Earth and instantly exploding, demolishing all life here, yet we don't make policies based on such vanishingly low probability events. Plus is every sentient species going to be this genocidal by nature? Humans do have a history genocide, but in civilized society today, we do everything we can to avoid war. The United States clearly has the military might to invade any number of nations in the world and easily conquer them, yet we don't for a whole host of totally valid and logical reasons. Heck, we pass laws (I assume for good and justifiable moral reasons) to protect indigenous people even though we have the might to completely obliterate them. Everything about the Dark Forest is completely impractical when thought through with the smallest amount of sensible reasoning.

asdff 4y ago
I was framing it more like the aliens are the ones launching these weapons, not us, we can hardly get our act together for such farsighted planning. And sure, not every species are genocidal, but some certainly are by nature. We hesistate fighting other humans because they are humans, and we value ourselves more than any other lifeform. But people don't hesitate swatting a mosquito, or dumping bleach on a colony of mold in their shower. My cat doesn't care about slowly and painfully killing the insects it catches. The tree doesn't care if its shade blocks other plants from taking advantage of the sun. The invasive species doesn't care if it displaces the native ones. The virus doesn't care if it kills its host. Alien life might realize this, that the probability is very high that other life forms really don't care about the continued reproductive success of other life forms, unless there is some lopsided benefit involved. Maybe they aren't even consuming their own resources to act on this goal of wiping out the possibility, however low, of a danger to their species emerging. Maybe they've already sent out some AI controlled probes, that are on distant metal rich asteroids far from their homeworld, autonomously mining, building weaponry, identifying targets, and launching these weapons that will hit their targets millions or billions of years in the future. Such implementation could even outlast the species that initially created it.
- vecter 4y ago
  There are so many practical problems with doing such a thing. The first is that it's incredibly economically expensive to do so. If the aliens aren't spending their resources, whose resources are they spending? Clearly it must be theirs. Secondly, the thought of unleashing a civilization-destroying self-replicating AI into the galaxy is so dangerous that I doubt any civilization would do it. Imagine the dangers of that. All it takes is for the AI to misidentify you as "another" civilization and wipe you out, or for these AI to be taken over by another party and turned against you, or for the AI to actually just misidentify you and kill you. The dangers of that far outweigh the benefits in the miniscule chance that the Dark Forest is in fact real.

by vecter 4y ago

asdff 4y ago

I was framing it more like the aliens are the ones launching these weapons, not us, we can hardly get our act together for such farsighted planning. And sure, not every species are genocidal, but some certainly are by nature. We hesistate fighting other humans because they are humans, and we value ourselves more than any other lifeform. But people don't hesitate swatting a mosquito, or dumping bleach on a colony of mold in their shower. My cat doesn't care about slowly and painfully killing the insects it catches. The tree doesn't care if its shade blocks other plants from taking advantage of the sun. The invasive species doesn't care if it displaces the native ones. The virus doesn't care if it kills its host. Alien life might realize this, that the probability is very high that other life forms really don't care about the continued reproductive success of other life forms, unless there is some lopsided benefit involved. Maybe they aren't even consuming their own resources to act on this goal of wiping out the possibility, however low, of a danger to their species emerging. Maybe they've already sent out some AI controlled probes, that are on distant metal rich asteroids far from their homeworld, autonomously mining, building weaponry, identifying targets, and launching these weapons that will hit their targets millions or billions of years in the future. Such implementation could even outlast the species that initially created it.

vecter 4y ago
There are so many practical problems with doing such a thing. The first is that it's incredibly economically expensive to do so. If the aliens aren't spending their resources, whose resources are they spending? Clearly it must be theirs. Secondly, the thought of unleashing a civilization-destroying self-replicating AI into the galaxy is so dangerous that I doubt any civilization would do it. Imagine the dangers of that. All it takes is for the AI to misidentify you as "another" civilization and wipe you out, or for these AI to be taken over by another party and turned against you, or for the AI to actually just misidentify you and kill you. The dangers of that far outweigh the benefits in the miniscule chance that the Dark Forest is in fact real.