What do we do if SETI is successful?

This is referenced in a sci fi book "The dark forest" of the series "The 3 body problem". It sets a convincing narrative that because of time taken for observation and response and development speed of society it is most likely that all civilizations that announce themselves would likely be a threat in terms of technological supremacy eventually to observing civilizations. In other words, we don't hear anything because any sufficiently advanced civilization would not want to risk being discovered. I.e., the "dark silent forest".

I never did buy the dark forest argument. I mean, even in the books, there were smidgeons of humanity left over. And then all the dimension collapsing strangeness. You just can never be sure.

I dunno, it just reeks of the culture of suspicion in communist China. A product of that place and time.

My own idea is the 'used car salesman' idea of the universe. (Reeking of my own mind and place and time). To me, economics will rule in the galactic community. In that water, metals, energy, it's all cheap and everywhere. No need to have any competition over it. No, the only scarce thing is life and then even more it's intelligence. Any other civilization will be desperate to get rights over us and our history.

So, to me, the aliens will come to us loud and proud. Balloons and banners.

And of course, a contract as long as a the rings of Saturn, with print as small as the atoms.

We shouldn't be wary of the weapons, but the lawyers

I agree, the dark forest argument seems rooted in a kind of paranoia bordering on the insane. No sane culture says “we better just exterminate anyone else we come across just in case,” which is essentially the threat that the dark forest is guarding against. And a culture that does act that way is likely to end up exterminating itself.

And yet we see nations like Russia (well, leaders like Putin) acting as if the world is a zero-sum game. The war in Ukraine vaguely looks like the Borg trying to assimilate every resource (geographical or human) in sight.

China (well, Xi) seems to be eyeing a similar path. I feel like there's something worth noting about the Three Body Problem being a product of its culture.

I sincerely hope aliens dont end up being space americans. earth has oil and wmds.

Contracts are useless without a way to enforce them and any aliens that already have the means to enforce them won't bother having us sign contracts.

The reason for the paranoia is that the risks are maximal. Any planet can destroy any other planet by accelerating a small projectile at it, so long as it achieves sufficient kinetic force. The projectile can be so tiny as to be effectively undetectable until it’s too late. So you have a situation where everyone you meet is carrying WMDs, and you can’t guarantee you’ll be able to get revenge if they fire first. Finally, every actor knows the predicament and nothing else about the other actors. If you don’t know who is on the other side of the radio transmission, but you do know they can destroy you immediately and without consequence, and you know they know you can do the same to them, the only rational choice is to shoot first, because you’d better not shoot second!

But the reverse it true too. You can't be sure you got every one of the other species. Especially with the transmission times at light speed. In the books, they use these dimension collapsing bombs to eradicate everything, but, um, those don't actually exist. Even in the books, humanity still survives in little groups, some bent on vengeance.

Much safer to make friends or coinvestors, slaves at the very least. Get them all to buy in and police themselves. Better yet, you take that one rare thing, life, intelligence, and put it to work for you. Make the aliens you've just contacted be a part of the pyramid scheme

I really have a hard time understanding this train of thought.

One could say these sentences are also a product of "its culture".

The world is not black or white, good or evil. Things are more nuanced and complicated than advertised to be.

I'm not the single source of truth either, but I think there are lots of resources for people interested in avoiding propaganda and trying to understand things more deeply.

In that scenario, there is a galactic community. Galactic community is going to have something like contracts, and a way to enforce them. It might be a problem for Earth since we would have to get to planet with court, and we don't have FTL.

Galactic community might have rules about developing species, but we can make agreements once "escape".

how is the same thing not true of every creature on earth. Or every tribe? and yet here we are

>So, to me, the aliens will come to us loud and proud. Balloons and banners.

Charles Stross' Singularity Sky seems the most reasonable to me. Superintelligent computers trade unimaginable technology (their infintely replicable trash) for their most sought after asset (new forms of entertainment) and then just piss off to another world having completely bent our cultural development.

Either life really is extremely rare (most likely), or intelligent life is, or it isn't actually trivial/correct to destroy alien planets. If the galaxy were actually like that we would have been toast a long time ago. In reality dark forest is a generate thesis since it implies we're alone, so no aliens anyway.

> slaves at the very least

If you think that's a relevant upside, then some of them think so too. Well we better just start shooting up all the exoplanets as soon as we can. Not take any chances.

Read up on colonial history. The stronger civilizations have always exterminated or exploited & subsumed the weaker civilizations.

We really don't know much about the universe and it is too vast and unfathomed. Scientists computed the mass of all matter and all energy of this Universe, but their calculations told that all this stuff comprises merely 5% of the Universe, the remaining 95% of the Universe is said to made of anti-matter and anti-energy, about which not much is understood.

So there's a good chance that aliens may be made of anti-matter and using anti-energy. But even if they tried to communicated with rest of universe with such anti-energy-based technology, we humans simply may not be detecting it or interpreting it yet, and we may still be waiting for that elusive signal (energy-based) indicating advanced intelligent life.

I didn't consider dimension collapsing bombs realistic either. It is the objects sped up to a fraction of light speed which were more scary. The cylons carpet bombed the planet with nuclear bombs which was plausible.

The dark forest is such an obviously false theory to me. Its axioms are:

1. Survival is the primary goal of all civilizations.

Agree.

2. Resources in the universe are finite.

True in the theoretical sense, but false in the practical sense.

3. Civilizations cannot be certain of others’ intentions.

Not obviously true or false.

4. Communication is dangerous.

This is such a strong axiom and is almost certainly false.

Its conclusion from applying the four axioms is that preemptive annihilation is the rational strategy.

As an alien civilization, if your strategy for survival in the cosmos is to "immediately and totally annihilate any sign of life", then that is almost a surely losing strategy. If intelligent life is prevalent, and the cost of annihilating a species is so low that they can just do it willy-nilly, then all it takes is one surviving colony to use the same superweapon against you and you're finished. Oh, you'd also have to be annihilating species left and right across the galaxy without revealing your location. And in the worst case, you've just pissed off all the known alien entities in your galactic neighborhood. Good luck to you.

It makes for fun writing, but I don't understand how anyone can take it seriously.

Nuclear carpet bombing is only sensible for short-range attacks. On longer ranges, fast projectiles are the way to go, because you need to accelerate your weapon anyways. And by just putting all the energy and resources into acceleration, you do recycle the motion energy as destructive energy.

Nope, not "anti-". The 5% are visible "bright" mass and energy. "Bright" meaning that we can see it through telescopes, by various wavelengths of light, particle emissions, gravity waves. The rest is "dark matter" and "dark energy", which just means that we see signs of it being there, because the bright matter around it behaves differently. But we don't directly see it in a telescope of any kind. Those "dark" things are stand-ins for our not understanding: Those could be real matter and energy that we just cannot see for some reason. Or those could be problems in our cosmological theories, like gravity working differently on large scales, the expansion of the universe being different, or physical constants changing over time. We just notice that things are off and that we should see more matter and more energy than we do.

Most theories that involve "dark matter" being ordinary matter like tons of neutron stars, huge clouds of dust, bazillions of asteroids or dark planets have been checked for and excluded. So if there were "dark matter" aliens, they really would be completely strange in that they aren't even made from the same kind of matter, but from maybe particles that we don't even know about. But if those hypothetical dark matter particles were capable of this kind of organisation, like clumping together into stars or planets, we would have probably seen those by now. So extremely strange, and improbable imho.

Btw. anti-matter is not "dark matter" in this sense, and dark matter being anti-matter was excluded very very early on by a simple observation: anti-matter and matter, when they come into contact, react in an annihilation reaction. E.g. an electron and anti-electron annihilate into two photons of a characteristic and exact 511keV energy. All other particles and their anti-particles also do this and exhibit their own characteristic energy. Any contact between a region of matter and region of anti-matter in space would radiate in these energy signatures, something which is very easy to detect. Dark matter is known to exist within galaxies, even within star systems, so this kind of contact zone would have to be there, and would be extremely visible to us.

Anti-energy doesn't exist in our current understanding of physics. Energy is always positive, and in quantum theories energy cannot even become zero, always slightly above zero.

> 3. Civilizations cannot be certain of others’ intentions.

> Not obviously true or false.

"Intentions are uncertain" is true, though.

If you are claiming that it is possible to be certain of other civilisations intentions, I am very skeptical.

Anyone you encounter in the street might be packing a weapon and planning to shoot you. The only rational choice is to shoot everyone you see first.

This is an example of how rhetoric can hijack people's ability to reason logically.

Sometimes the bully just wants your lunch money.

Distance and time. Time is a weapon for a civilization to develop

in the book it's literally called the "chain of suspicion", pretty sure it's quite culturally colored

Maybe, but at least I believe there's plenty historical evidence for a different interpretation than: "russia and china big bad, their values are wrong/not aligned with the west"

The only values that matter from a moral principle are the values of the people living in Ukraine and Taiwan.

Oops, yes, you are right. I meant "dark matter" and "dark energy" (comprises 95% of Uinverse), not "anti matter" and "anti energy".

At best that tells you that humans are like that for the past 10k years or so, which is a blip even in our own species' history, never mind some more advanced aliens.

I can't speak for China, but when it comes to Russia, take it from a citizen: yes, it is that bad, and the reason is that it's an empire that can't stop being an empire without falling apart (much like Ottoman Empire -> Turkey did).