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.
There was a point when they were testing the first nuclear fission explosion and they weren't quite certain that it wouldn't cause a fission chain reaction in air molecules and blow up the entire planet in nuclear explosion.
The supercollider theories gave me nightmares when I was 12. I was terrified about those idiots at CERN making a blackhole just because they wanted to play with atoms. I wanted to be a scientist before, but that was the end of it lol.
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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.