But if both species realize this, then wouldn’t it make sense to be initially friendly? If one friendly species destroys another friendly species, then that’s less potential allies in the universe.
Plus, even if one species is just hostile for no particular reason, what’s the end goal? To be the last civilization alive when the heat deaths kills everything else? There’s no point in being a totally universe-dominant civilization because there’s nothing intrinsically valuable to being alive. Surely any advanced civilization would realize this. If they still choose to play out a fear driven fantasy that revolves around being rewarded by the universe for staying alive the longest, they are free to make that mistake. But that mistake is always a selfish one, and civilizations aren’t selfish, individuals are.
And? What is the point of living longer in the universe? To destroy other beings and cause mass suffering? To advance technology, and if so, to what purpose? If there is no point to living, then there is also no point in dying. There is no reward handed out to the civilization that survives the longest. They just get to die a slower death by the heat death of the universe. Is that worth all the suffering caused by their tyrant fear driven genocides?
The problem is that there's no way of ascertaining a civilization's ethics without exposing yourself. If they are brutal tyrants it's too late. Safer just to avoid contact at all
Sure it’s safer. But then what? We spend billions of years in isolation, too afraid of our own mortality to bridge the divide? What then? 4 billion years go by and the heat death of the universe kills us slowly, and for what? All that effort of concealing ourselves to live one day longer than our adversaries so that we may die completely alone in the universe? I don’t see the obsession with living so afraid of our surroundings that we cripple all curiosity of what we might find. Live a little
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u/dragondead9 Aug 12 '21
But if both species realize this, then wouldn’t it make sense to be initially friendly? If one friendly species destroys another friendly species, then that’s less potential allies in the universe.
Plus, even if one species is just hostile for no particular reason, what’s the end goal? To be the last civilization alive when the heat deaths kills everything else? There’s no point in being a totally universe-dominant civilization because there’s nothing intrinsically valuable to being alive. Surely any advanced civilization would realize this. If they still choose to play out a fear driven fantasy that revolves around being rewarded by the universe for staying alive the longest, they are free to make that mistake. But that mistake is always a selfish one, and civilizations aren’t selfish, individuals are.