Individually doing atmospheric analysis for every planet in the galaxy is probably an impossible task for a civilisation confined to a single solar system. Listening for signals is something our civilisation already does. If we discover radio signals from a primitive civilisation in the next star system over there’s a non-zero chance we’d panic and try to wipe them out.
That’s the risk that dark forest theory is talking about. Maybe the threat comes from a civilisation dedicated to wiping out intelligent life that just hasn’t found you yet, maybe it just comes from your nearest neighbor. Maybe there’s no threat at all. The risk of interplanetary war is still too great to turn on a light in the forest and risk a bullet from the dark.
And while knowing this, why do we still not choose to just observe and be as quiet/ non existant as possible?
Here is my take on it. It all depends on if there is some sort of hard limit on how much we can accelerate an object with mass in space.
If we are capped at say, 25% of the speed of light we will most likely never meet our intragalactic neighbours. The times scales and distances involved are insurmountable and economically they would have no reason to attempt travel to another inhabited planet. The journey is too dangerous on many levels to be worth attempting. No reason to contact, no reason to fight, many closer resouces in our respective solar neighbourhoods that wont shoot missiles at us.
If we live in a universe that allows for FLT or even just 99.9999 percent of c then the alien overlords are already aware of us and are chill enough to leaves us be for the most part. So it really almost doesnt matter in my opinion.
I did love the 3 body problem trilogy, Liu Cixin is a master story teller.
Unless they have been actively and vigorously scouting for us with FTL travel, our earliest radio transmissions, even if we assume they’re somehow still recognizable and not totally lost in the background noise of space, have only made it about 126 light years or so from earth (and honestly our very earliest ones probably wouldn’t be recognizable from very far at all, Marconi’s radio was of course pretty crude, it was our first time playing with radios, so we can probably chop a good 20+ light-years off of that easily if we’re being realistic)
Now that encompasses some 60,000 or so stars, which is a tiny speck of the observable universe, and depending on how you fill out the Drake equation that could be a whole lot of aliens out there listening, or literally no one. And only about half of them, assuming no FTL travel or communication, would have had a chance to get a response to us by now (if they even wanted to) since their response would have to travel at or below C.
If they’re in the Milky Way or nearby intergalactic space and have bothered to point instruments at us that are far beyond the capabilities we have on earth now today within the last 300,000 years, they may know that homo sapiens exist, but they’d need to be within 3000 light years to know that we entered the bronze age, and within about 200 to know that we’ve even started playing with electricity (and counting on them looking specifically at us is a real long-shot)
Parts of the Andromeda galaxy, at best, is maybe aware that Australopithecus evolved. Any further out and no one has any clue that anything really resembling humans at all is here.
Now that sort of isolation does give us a bit of security in case there is a xenocidal race that would like to wipe us out somewhere in the universe, unless we’re very unlucky we probably have a long time before we have to worry about them even knowing we’re here, and at least that long again until they can do anything about it (unless they do have FTL travel) so probably not something we actually need to be concerned about, again unless we get really unlucky the sun dying in a couple billion years is probably a more pressing concern.
I think it’s likely we’re the first and oldest advanced civilization in the universe, which means we’ll likely always have a technological advantage to the tune of 100+ thousand years head start. It’s entirely plausible that we are the future’s xenocidal species.
But why would evil aliens wait for intelligence to evolve and be a potential threat when they could just destroy every biosphere before life can produce intelligence?
We can’t really pretend to understand the thoughts or motivations of aliens, after all, they are completely alien to us.
We can’t understand their culture, but we can understand their reasoning. Assuming their technology doesn’t break physics and they evolved via natural selection then they will have had the same universal pressures shaping them that we did. Namely that one individual can’t know and do everything so at least some cooperation is necessary to reach space and they will use math and logic to solve technical problems.
Starting with the assumptions that they use math and aren’t suicidal you can eliminate a lot of the proposed fermi paradox solutions because they propose in some form or another that an advanced race that’s also stupid just appeared fully formed. Or the whole race suddenly gets a case of the stupids.
I mean, we’re talking from the position of a race where a whole lot of us have evolved to have a serious case of the stupids and in a frightening number of cases we’ve put some of the biggest stupids in charge of running the show.
Looking at ourselves, it’s not too hard to imagine a race of religious zealots who view other intelligent life an an abomination to be destroyed but are fine leaving lesser life forms alone.
A good point, and the fact that we dont see evidence of solarsystems being wiped out when we look into space makes me hopefull that super high intellegence is fundamentaly incompatible with agression
Our nearest intragalactic neighbors are no closer than 4.25 ly. We’re not going to get out of our solar system with a manned mission. You can forget about intergalactic.
Not with that attitude.
I also loved The 3 Body Problem. I got chills during the first book when >!the first message said DO NOT ANSWER! !<
Did you agree with her decision to send the second message? Why or why not?
Haha absolutely not! When she replied, I think I might have said out loud “oh you bitch!”
It was super reckless of her to be like, “well my life has sucked so far so I’m going to make this huge monumental decision unilaterally on behalf of all humanity.”
With that being said, had she not done what she did, I’m sure it would have happened otherwise. Still was reckless as hell!
You see, I myself was conflicted.
On one hand, I can see how repeated frequent personal tragedies of violence can break a person to the point that they hate everyone they see. I can sympathise with that, growing up I was the arbitrary target at school and at home most of the time. It brought me to some really dark places in the past. Things are much better now but it leaves a stain, it lurks.
On the other hand, she was explicitly warned that Trisolarans were looking to conquer a new planet and just flat out ignored it. I get being angry and depressed but willfully stupid in an otherwise smart person is much harder to forgive. I mean, she discovered ETI… become famous? Naaahhhh lets doom everyone because I’m mad at the government.
That scene really stuck with me
Have you read The Locked Tomb series?
No I haven’t read that one. Oddly enough, I’m reading another series - the Silo series by High Howey - that could almost be called that same name! What’s it about? I might have to check it out next.
Space necromancers, memes, lesbians, swords, skulls, gore, ‘one flesh one end’
I’ve been looking for a new series, Ill check out Silo
Haha nice. I can’t say that Silo has anything that crazy, but it’s still with checking out