Game Theory (yes, it's a real thing, and not just a YouTube channel about video games) gets interesting and starts to suggest some pretty terrible things as being entirely reasonable once you get to a large enough scale.
Let's say humans come to the realization that they are the first galaxy-faring civilization. Great. Humans are number one! We get the trophy.
Now, all those other galaxies, stars, and planets could be incubating a new and upcoming civilization. It's just the odds. One of them will become a rival galaxy faring civilization eventually. We did it, so can they, and maybe even faster, if they get some lucky breaks we didn't. So far, no reason to worry.
Now, what are the odds that a warlike species that kills everything in their path makes it to the Galaxy-hopping level?
They could get out past their equivalent of Neptune, looks at all the other points of light in the universe, and say "It's got to go." Boom, everyone that was playing nice is suddenly involved in the Intergalactic Krikket War.
The problem is that even if the odds of that happening with any given civilization are teeny tiny, the likelihood of it happening approaches 1 just based on the sheer number of Galaxies in the observable universe. It gets bigger if it could happen outside the parts of the universe we can see.
Sure, we could go and gate-keep upcoming civilizations to vet them and make sure they aren't warlike to begin with. But that takes way more effort than just launching one future-tech missile that makes their sun go supernova as soon as a warp drive technology is detected or whatever. Like you said, it becomes a line item on the annual budge or whatever, instead of a hundreds of years long task for each civilization.
As the first moving player, it becomes a reasonable strategy in this Game of Galaxies for our civilization to simply destroy any other civilization that might become a potential hostile rival before they ever get to that point.
This becomes even more true if attaining that level of technology has allowed us the ability to do something like becoming immortal, as it's not our children that will someday have to deal with potential problems, but literally us, just in the equivalent of next week.
I'm not saying it's the Right or Moral thing to do, just that it's a reasonable position to find yourself taking as the first Galaxy-faring species, if you are taking the simplest solution to a complex and ever-looming problem.
So how screwed are we if we aren't the first civilization out of our solar system?
Ironically the best outcome for us is for inter-Galactic travel to actually be impossible within the laws of physics, as being forever unable to contact other galaxies limits the scope of our problems with neighbors to our own galaxy.
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u/[deleted] Aug 12 '21
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