even if empathy and cooperative effort weren’t the obviously superior paradigm for superior adaptation and let’s pretend there’s some super powered alien civilization eager to come fuck us up, enslave and exterminate us until everything good about our planet is wiped from existence.
you know what I would tell them? take a number and get in fucking line.
:fidel-cool:
of course a :ukkk: scientist would imagine that a sufficiently advanced civilization could only want to exploit and destroy other people they see as somehow lesser beings
I don’t like Dark Forest theory, and we’re unlikely to ever see alien life, so I don’t really care all that much to change my mind… if aliens come they’ll be cool space communists, and that’s my headcanon
:posadas:
Our society is a dark forrest society. Even if we knew there were hostile aliens out there we would still be a bigger threat to ourselves than aliens would.
I don’t like Dark Forest theory
What’s your preferred explanation for why we don’t hear any alien broadcasts?
Nobody likes noisy neighbours. If you want to contact me ring my doorbell. Don’t blast Metallica loudly and expect me to understand that you ordered the songs to spell out ‘can we borrow your lawnmower?’.
The universe is 13.7 billion years old. Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago, and 1 billion years later the first life forms evolved. The first Hominids evolved about 2 million years ago, modern Humans 300 thousand years ago. 12000 years ago we developed agriculture. Humans invented the radio in 1890, 132 years ago.
So humans have had the ability to transmit radio waves for 1% of the time we’ve had agriculture. Humans have had agricultural civilization for only 4% of our species existence. We as a aspecies have only existed for 0.086% of the time life has existed on earth. And life on earth itself has only been around for 26% of the universe’s existance.
Even if we assume that life began at roughly the same point everywhere in the universe compared to earth( which is a huge assumption), that still leaves a huge margin for other civilizations on other planets to have evolved, progressed, and died out, long before we even evolved.
The odds that another planet developed sapient life which progressed to a technologically equivalent or superior level to humans at the same exact time that we did is incredibly unlikely, which I think is a far simpler explanation than the dark forest theory.
Edit: forgot to move the decimal over when converting to percentages lmao. Fixed now. Its still exceptionally unlikely, but the numbers I had were way off
I think it’s because they are much more principled than me and believe that broadcasting is a form of posting, and thus counterproductive
sorry comrade, I just don’t give this a lot of thought haha the other comments cover most of the counterarguments I like, much better than I could!
