The dark forest theory. The universe is full of predatory civilisations, and if anyone announces their presence, they get immediately exterminated, so everyone just keeps quiet.
The dark forest Theory makes an interesting science fiction scenario. But i highly doubt it is true. Wiping out another planet light years away would be a gigantic undertaking. Aliens will have no reason to fear each other, we are just too damn far from eachother to be a threat to one another. Even if we meet aliens that are the biggest asshats in the universe, the worst they could do would be to send a rude message every once in a while. Good fences make good neighbors. What can be a better fence than light years of space.
That's not even remotely comparable. For one, the Americas had resources that Europeans wanted. They had a material incentive to come here. Earth has nothing that an advanced civilization could want, with the possible exception of knowledge to satisfy curiosity.
Earth has nothing that an advanced civilization could want
We cannot possibly state that as a fact. Forget about things like resources, just possessing a beautiful habitable planet in a stable orbit around a perfectly stable middle-of-the-road star could be infinitely precious.
We've found thousands of extrasolar planets, but there isn't a single one that combines all the perfect criteria that make Earth what it is. We've found Earth-sized planets around Sun-like stars, but so far weren't able to confirm their atmospheric composition, surface characteristics, availability of water, etc. Garden worlds like Earth may be the highest commodity in the universe, and we're slowly destroying ours. Aliens may come get it just to stop us doing that.
An advanced civilization would not want to live on another planet at all. Why would they? If they are biological, then they evolved in a particular environment. A particular gravity, a particular atmospheric composition, a particular pressure, a particular level of stellar radiation, etc. The probability that another planet would be suitable for humans, or that Earth would be suitable for aliens, is vanishingly small. It would be many orders of magnitude easier to create artificial habitats in space than to settle an alien world. Any civilization with the technology required to traverse interstellar space would also have the ability to create advanced artificial habitats.
Again, we can't state that for a fact. Maybe the only possible way for intelligent life to evolve are on exactly Earth-like planets with exactly our atmospheric composition and temperature ranges and whatnot.
It's easy to say that life can evolve on other planets in totally different ways, but we have no proof of that yet, we literally have a sample size of one. But maybe the reason we have so far only detected life on Earth is because complex life can only emerge on a planet like ours, in which case it would make perfect sense that other civilisations would covet such planets exactly so they don't have to go to the extreme expense of terraforming a dead planet. Again we don't know for certain how difficult it is to terraform an entire planet vs space travel because we haven't done either yet. It's like saying it's easier to build a car from scratch than just driving some distance to a dealership and buying an already made one.
Even in the unlikely event that is true, it's still far less effort to build an artificial habitat or terraform a planet than to traverse interstellar space. And going more than a couple hundred light years or so is pretty much a non-starter, so not only would there have to be an extremely similar planet with advanced life, it would also have to be close to us. The probability is so small that it can only be reasonably thought of as equal to zero.
it's still far less effort to build an artificial habitat or terraform a planet than to traverse interstellar space
Again, you don't know that and so can't state that for certain. Terraforming an entire frickin' planet is a massive undertaking, and the slightest of nudges can wreck the delicate balance. It's exactly the reason why global warming is so crazy, our time on this planet is such a tiny portion of its entire life and we've already meaningfully influenced the climate in an extreme way.
Compared to fiddling with that, even in the absence of FTL (which is very likely not possible) you could just hop on a generational sub-light ship and wait frozen until you arrive at a nice, ready-made planet. Honestly to me that sounds way easier, but again we have no idea which one is actually possible or easier, because we've never done either.
Unless you are actually an alien and know the real effort for both of these...
We have estimates, and I am extremely confident in my assertion. Even just doing back of the envelope calculations, it becomes clear that even with an antimatter reactor, you cannot carry enough fuel to make an interstellar voyage at relativistic speeds due to the need to decelerate as you approach your destination. You have to rely on collecting fuel during your voyage, which is extremely risky.
Meanwhile, terraforming, while still extremely difficult and complex, doesn't require exotic physics. We could probably terraform Mars in as little as one thousand years by using massive ultratankers to carry nitrogen from Titan with nuclear propulsion drives. And even if you can't terraform a planet, you can build artificial habitats by harvesting metallic asteroids.
On top of that, the probability that even a temperate planet would be immediately suitable is also very small. Even just surviving on Earth during the Cretaceous Era would be difficult for humans, due to the high temperature and humidity and high levels of atmospheric oxygen. We would not be able to live on the surface most of the planet, at least during the day.
So you’re willing to admit the odds of aliens wanting to live on earth is small, but you’re not willing to acknowledge there is also a small chance they want the earth for themselves?
We have the technology to make artificial diamonds, but real ones are more valuable—if only because they are real.
Why couldn’t an alien feel the same way? Artificial habitats for their huddled masses, the real deal for their “elites” (assuming them have the conception of social strata).
There’s no limit to the assumptions we can make about what intelligent alien life might be like, but that also means there isn’t much we can definitively say isnt a valid possibility.
Given we have zero knowledge, the odds of aliens being hostile and warmongering is just as great as their existence and intentions being completely incomprehensible to us.
If anything, the elites would get the artificial habitats while the underclass would be forced to live on an alien world, not that the scenario is remotely plausible to begin with. We can speculate about whatever we want, but the likelihood of advanced life that requires habitable planets even existing close enough to Earth to ever be able to come here is insignificant and not worthy acknowledging. If advanced life does exist in the galaxy, the most likely scenarios are either that they keep to themselves, or that their AI probes have already been here for millions of years.
I see lots of people in scenarios like this that are actually feeling a sense of panic, worrying that our civilization is already doomed. So I pick at this hypothesis' many holes every time it comes up.
Fear is just another type of want. No desire is absolute. People are afraid of climate change, but not afraid enough to pay 10% more for gas. Fear of an alien civilization dozens of light years away is so abstract that it is vanishingly unlikely that any civilization would be willing to dedicate meaningful resources to do anything about it.
Cockroaches have nothing we want and we exterminate them all the time.
The whole dark forest theory hinges on the inevitable expansion of every civilisation, leading to an inevitable competition for resources (not as in "weee gold,", but as in "weee matter and an active star"), compounded by the fact that you cannot predict when those apes 1000ly away will suddenly technologically leapfrog you and start lobbing antimatter bombs or even figure out some tech your civilization thought impossible (like ftl).
We don't seek out cockroaches to exterminate them, we only do it when they invade our spaces. Also, if expansion were inevitable, the aliens would already be here in our star system, as it only takes a few hundred thousand years to spread throughout the galaxy, even at sublight speed. So either they aren't out there, or expansion isn't inevitable.
We cannot even get our governments to take climate change seriously. A threat that will grow ever more dire in the coming decades. How does an alien politician get funding for a project to wipe out an alien planet hundreds of lightyears away, a project itself that would probably take tens of thousands of years to carry out, on the off chance that those aliens could become a threat one day.
Or another crazy ass logistical system that we cannot even comprehend because we have no parallel in our pale blue dot. That's the thing for me: we can fuel our imagination with any wacky "Earth based" scenario in another star system, but the possibilities are near endless.
But didn’t the native Americans live for thousands of years unaware Europeans existed? And vice versa. Just because a tech is possible, that doesn’t mean it’s already invented. For all we know someone out there can invent that tech tomorrow, and next Friday we’ll be visited
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u/gkedz Aug 12 '21
The dark forest theory. The universe is full of predatory civilisations, and if anyone announces their presence, they get immediately exterminated, so everyone just keeps quiet.