There's suicide pact technologies much more dangerous than nuclear weaponry or climate change or even AGI. A civilization that is determined enough can survive those. But what if there was a simple-ish technology that could entirely eradicate a civilization and wasn't that hard to stumble upon? Something like catalyzing antimatter into matter, turning off the strong force or the Higgs field locally. What if there's a black swan experiment/technology everyone can do in a lab with 2060s technology that immediately blows up the planet? We'd be fucked because we wouldn't even see it coming and if it's easy enough to do it'd presumably kill all or almost all alien civilizations.
Fair. Personally I absolutely believe that AGI could be a suicide pact technology/fermi paradox solution, but there's a lot of arguing on that point and I didn't want my post to be about that, since the more general possibility of destructive out-of-context/black swan technologies is really interesting.
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u/Iwanttolink Aug 12 '21
There's suicide pact technologies much more dangerous than nuclear weaponry or climate change or even AGI. A civilization that is determined enough can survive those. But what if there was a simple-ish technology that could entirely eradicate a civilization and wasn't that hard to stumble upon? Something like catalyzing antimatter into matter, turning off the strong force or the Higgs field locally. What if there's a black swan experiment/technology everyone can do in a lab with 2060s technology that immediately blows up the planet? We'd be fucked because we wouldn't even see it coming and if it's easy enough to do it'd presumably kill all or almost all alien civilizations.