What do we do if SETI is successful?

- Setup a massive array of antennas in space for reception only

- Try to decode their radio traffic and understand how they are exchanging information

- Steal their their knowledge and use it to advance human race forward.

- Reduce all our electromagnetic emissions to minimum to deny them the same advantage. Forbid anyone from sending signal towards them so we have time to technologically catch up to them without them noticing.

Any kind of contact will ends up in abysmal disaster as we have seen in the past, when advanced civilization shown up on shores of less advanced one.

This is going to be difficult. Immediately there would be cults that would be inviting them to earth to salvage us.

We have a saying in Holland "the innkeeper trusts his guests like himself" which seems to apply here.

There's no reason to assume their society would have developed along similar lines. I'm sure there's alien civilisations that are more aggressive than us, but also ones that are less so.

I don't think we'll ever meet any though as our lifespan is just so short on a universal scale. And FTL travel seems to be impossible otherwise we'd have seen signs of it.

Of course according to our current physics understanding it is also impossible but I don't think humanity is very smart yet. But this thing might be right.

Many animals like cats do it. Its not a human concept but one from superior smarter predators which should occur regardless from what planet they are. The greater the differences in intelligence and power the easier it is to justify cruelty.

I do think it's less likely because to actually travel space they would need to be so technologically advanced that we simply wouldn't be worth fighting or destroying. Maybe studying which could be cruel in its own way.

Presumably any alien species was also shaped by evolution, so is also likely to be similarly competitive. Maybe you can escape your evolutionary past. But maybe not.

What signs? Projects like LIGO that measure gravitational waves are still measuring cataclysmic collisions of ultra massive bodies. Maybe once the detector is good enough to detect exoplanets and smaller objects we can start drawing some conclusions.

I don’t believe FTL is possible, but on the off chance that it is, we’d be so deep into technology-as-magic territory that any speculation on detectability is totally pointless.

It is a bleak view. When I even think about the behaviors of some of the animals (e.g. seals, praying mantises) we share existence with, it seems like it could be accurate. On the positive side, the concept of the infinite game (e.g. culture) is what should give us hope.

Though I personally love the idea of advanced, civilized extraterrestrial life. I hope it exists (statistically feels likely but yet to be confirmed). Even if it turns out we humans are at a near lockstep with another civilization it'd be game changing if we could communicate especially.

All that said, maybe there's a "galactic civilization onboarding" program once a species meets a sufficiently advanced criteria independently, with no outside intervention. Perhaps the universe will turn our ideas on their head, and assumptions may not apply.

Our understanding of the world, for however great it is, is still likely full of things we can't fathom and unknowns we don't know. Its fun to speculate but the reality is we are only basing most of our knowledge on how things might be in the universe based on our singular planet's path of evolution.

It makes it truly hard to think of what alternative life forms may exist.

We would learn that they are gelatinous beings who coi5nt in base 17 and show an antenna to say hello.

What is the minimum amount of aggression necessary to evolve sentience? What is the maximum amount of aggression in an interstellar space-faring species? Where is humanity on that scale?

A super-aggressive species would likely self-annihilate before possessing sufficient energy to travel interstellar distances... So the jury's still out on us.

Lockstep evolution is extremely improbable. Even 1000 years head start is massive, a more realistic one would be tens of millions of years or more.

The space is finite, so is Milky way. Eventually, even if its far in the future, species will compete for resources and energy. The smarter ones realize that problems are easier solved as soon as possible, and we have dark forest stuff. Mankind is slowly also inching in that realization. We should work hard on improving ourselves massively and spreading out before caring whats out there. I simply can't imagine a realistic scenario where there won't be some immediate attack, ie speeding up some very dark asteroid into relativistic speeds, aimed at Earth.

Also, why should xenophoby, racism and similar perks be available only to humanity. Even we can see how deeply flawed creatures we are.

Indeed, I simply hate losing my sense of whimsy in these discussions because anything is still possible. Though realistically, yes, its worse odds than pretty much any other possibility. No disputing that.

>The space is finite, so is Milky way. Eventually, even if its far in the future, species will compete for resources and energy. The smarter ones realize that problems are easier solved as soon as possible.

Is space not ever expanding? My entire conceptualized version of what space (as in outer space) is that its always expanding, we actually have zero idea where the edges of the actual universe are, or if they even exist beyond theorizing. It may be the ultimate in lending itself to more cooperation than conflict as a result, since new resources are indefinitely being created.

Then again, if you believe expansion is constrained only to the Milky Way Galaxy (I don't see why it has to be, if we can colonize an entire galaxy I feel strongly at that point the technology for intergalactic travel exists at the same time, so we can finally see whats up in the Backward Galaxy[0]). Given this constraint, expansion over time will lead to issues inevitably but who's to say it couldn't be resolved in different capacities? Perhaps even civilizations have a natural apex expansion size (IE, its not actually infinite) and that creates natural growth boundaries. Since we aren't even a galactic species yet, we don't know how that would shape out in reality.

>and we have dark forest stuff

Or we simply don't know what stage other civilizations are in, or if they exist at all (though statistically, I've been told by people who absolutely know more than I do on multiple occasions its extremely unlikely there isn't some form of extraterrestrial life that would roughly resemble plants and animals but civilization is far less guaranteed)

We could actually be the most advanced (imagine that, it seems wild to me, but it is one possible), or it could be that indeed, it may follow the Dark Forest[1] hypothesis).

>We should work hard on improving ourselves massively and spreading out before caring whats out there. I simply can't imagine a realistic scenario where there won't be some immediate attack, ie speeding up some very dark asteroid into relativistic speeds, aimed at Earth.

I agree with the massive expansion, I don't think it should come at the entire expense of understanding what may be out there also, but in terms of resource allocation, expansion should have been paramount since the 1960s at least, IMO.

Eventually this rock, one way or another, will reach its inevitable peak and as a species we would do well to be spread around.

I don't know that we are guaranteed to be attacked. It makes alot of assumptions about how civilization evolves that is very human centric, but it is in fact the only model we have so I can't blame anyone for adopting it without question, but there always exists the possibility that there are other models of evolution that are less conflict driven and promote cooperation

>Also, why should xenophoby, racism and similar perks be available only to humanity. Even we can see how deeply flawed creatures we are.

In the same vain of this, why shouldn't they be? What purpose do those ideas even serve? They're not evolutionary constructs, they're cultural / societal ones created to justify oppressing one group of humans by another. Another civilization could have simply made better choices and evolved on a planet that trended toward cooperation and not conflict.

We only understand our version of how evolution trends, it doesn't make it law of the universe until we actually can study other non-human civilizations.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_4622

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis

This isn't quite why I wrote this, but it's close enough: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2023/alien_communication/ If we're going to argue in the form of fiction.

It's not actually sci-fi. They sent a message with Arecibo that was also encoded if not within a beacon signal. Just because it was a scifi plot does not mean its not something that could be done to good use. If humans wanted, we could send a similar beacon signal even if it's not pulses of all the primes between 1-101 with the same data from the gold plate.

At one point, flying like a bird was scifi. Traveling to the moon was scifi. Having a computer that fit in the palm of your hand was scifi. There's a lot of actual science that has been inspired from a scifi idea.