What do we do if SETI is successful?

Get better camouflage so we don't get get found in the Dark Forrest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis

>The name of the hypothesis derives from Liu Cixin's 2008 novel The Dark Forest, as in a "dark forest" filled with "armed hunter(s) stalking through the trees like ghosts". According to the dark forest hypothesis, since the intentions of any newly contacted civilization can never be known with certainty, then if one is encountered, it is best to make a preemptive strike, in order to avoid the potential extinction of one's own species. The novel provides a detailed investigation of Liu's concerns about alien contact.

That's an allegory for life under authoritarian rule, not a literal alien contact plan

Bold to assume aliens will ascribe to something besides despotism

Or, both.

What would we become in such a universe? We would take a step back, it will become about survival again (I know it's like that on earth here and there), not about growing together, exploring. It's like Star Trek's mirror universe.

Sure I'd fight for humanity, but I'd be so disappointed. Maybe even enough to just give up.

(I have to admit I just could not make it through part 2 of the Three Body problem, it went to slow for me.)

You can't imagine that one single alien race anywhere will deviate from this?

Wouldn't that kinda imply that your vision on the topic is almost certainly wrong anyways?

IIRC the author said there are no meta layers of meaning, it’s just honest to god fiction written to be entertaining. I’m struggling a little myself to accept that for the entire trilogy, but that’s that.

Following that:

> The Berserker hypothesis, also known as the deadly probes scenario, is the idea that humans have not yet detected intelligent alien life in the universe because it has been systematically destroyed by a series of lethal Von Neumann probes.

Liu Cixin had to break the laws of physics -- badly, multiple times -- in order to make the Dark Forest game theory work. That's not a problem, fictional rules are good fun, but generalizing his conclusions back to the real world without sending them through a customs inspection first is a problem. See also: do the dinosaurs escape because the laws of chaos theory dictate that dinosaur zoos are mathematically impossible? Or do they escape because otherwise I wouldn't pay to see the movie and neither would you?

If we ground ourselves back in reality where the speed of light is probably law and the spooky aliens probably don't get to tamper the laws of physics, the actual game-theoretic winning move is always to grow voraciously, threat or no.

Yeah but they clearly didn't do a very good job on Earth so how systematic could they be?

Don't get me wrong, it's a wonderful premise for a book which can simply mobilize a plot device to brush this problem aside. However, if we want to bring the conclusions back to reality they have to undergo a customs inspection which flags said plot device.

But why do we think the aliens as a polity will behave in a way that fits into our own concept of competition between groups?

Couldn't they have some other way of seeing things?

Where the speed of light is probably law (our universe) there is no way aliens could reach earth. The only possibly scenario where earth is in danger is if we terraform and colonize mars (Venus would also do, or a few other large rocks), then we have a falling out and start a major war. The few survivors would not know if anyone is on Mars, but if so they might still be out to get earth so better be quiet. If you are not already in this solar system you can't get here in a useful timeframe no matter how long lived you are.

They could. However their different way might be worse than our concept.

Though survival of the fittest is likely a law and so they will have a concept of competition between groups of some form (though their definition of groups will be different) simply because those without will be destroyed by the first group that does have that concept.

We should expand our definition of Aliens visiting earth.

If we received a signal (at light speed) that described how to build a physical alien computer, and then ran a program on that computer, which happened to be AI, we would have alien visitors.

An interocitor!

"Normal view! Normal view! Normal VIEW! Normal VIEEeewwww..."

The solution is that the probes were built by a long ago technological civilization on Earth as a desperate measure in an interstellar war.

The probes are out there and were programmed never to come back to Earth.

Personally, I like the plot idea that all of the intelligent aliens know of earth life but intentionally ignore us because they visited in the time of the dinosaurs or even before. There's some material the universe values like how we value oil, and they simply extracted all of it from our solar system. This material allows for whatever sci-fi thing we think is impossible, worm holes, constant acceleration, FTL travel, Dyson sphere material, etc.

I haven’t read these books but it’s not unreasonable that this author or any other author could have reason to not be forthright about what their book is about

Explored in the Spin / Axis / Vortex series

Speed of light is a constant and law only in the 5% of the Universe that's made of Matter and Energy.

Light is energy, it is a form of electromagnetic radiation, that travels in waves and consists of particles called photons. While photons do not have mass, they carry energy and momentum, which allows them to interact with matter.

But remaining 95% of the Universe is made of Dark Matter and Dark Energy, so if aliens are made of dark matter and use dark energy technology, their laws of physics may be different, and they could be capable of interstellar travel because they may not be limited by light's speed. Their dark matter and dark energy based technology may be incomprehensible or even irreproducible by us humans.

Scientists are still not sure what Dark Matter and Dark Energy are, so 95% of the Universe is still a big question mark to us all.

The very existence of dark matter is postulated by us based on those very laws of physics that include the speed-of-light limit as a foundational axiom. If general relativity is not really true, then there's no basis to infer the existence of dark matter from our observations.

But it could also be something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics.

That's a solid plot device and sounds like a fun story! It definitely doesn't pass the customs inspection for use in speculation about the real world, though.