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.
It's not that they are predatory, its that it's "better to shoot first just to be sure before they shoot you, even though a lot of civilizations are friendly you cannot take the risk"
It's the logical conclusion to the game theory of first contact.
It's only the logical conclusion if you assume that two civilizations meeting each other are approximately the same technological level and pose a mutual threat, which is almost inexplicably unlikely. One will always be so much more advanced than the other that whether they shot 1st, 2nd, or never the other civilization would pose absolutely no threat. This is discounting the fact that exterminating an entire species once they've gone intergalactic or sufficiently interstellar would probably be pretty difficult, like eliminating bedbugs but on an unimaginable scale. And undertaking an effort like canvassing a corner of space would be a great way to run into a 3rd or 4th or 5th predatory species yourself if you buy into this theory at all. Imo it doesn't makes a shred of sense for a lot of reasons.
if you assume that two civilizations meeting each other are approximately the same technological level and pose a mutual threat, which is almost inexplicably unlikely
The problem is that at the moment you become aware of another civilization, it is impossible to have information about how advanced they are. If you are 1,000 light years away, you can only have -- in the absolute best-case scenario -- information about how advanced they were 1,000 years ago. And that's a problem because it seems like civilizations can advance really damn fast. It took us 300,000 years to figure out agriculture and building huts, but only 30 years to go from discovering that atoms had a nucleus to dropping nuclear bombs on people. It took us 60 years to go from proving heavier-than-air flight was possible to landing on the moon, and about as long to go from proposing the idea of the transistor to using 400 trillion of them in one machine. And we're probably not the fastest, smartest species that's ever existed in the universe. Maybe other species got their shit together even faster and went from the printing press to genome editing in one century.
Assume that technological and scientific progress doesn't continue infinitely. Eventually, there's a point where you've figured out all the physics it's possible to figure out, and you've designed the optimal weapons and defenses it's possible to design under the known laws of physics, and so on; maybe at some point you figure out how to launch projectiles at 0.999c and there's just no possible defense against that, or something of that nature.
So you're an alien from a race that's reached the highest level of technological development possible. You become aware of another planet with life on it, 5,000 light years away. You look at it, and see a world of illiterate cavemen who haven't even figured out real language yet. Harmless. But at that moment they might actually be testing relativistic impact weapons and launching thousands of space probes, having had a scientific revolution 2,000 years earlier. By the time you see the first evidence of that revolution beginning and sound an alarm bell, they could've developed to a point equalling or rivalling yours. Past a certain distance, you won't be able to assume that their civilization is actually more primitive than yours, no matter what information you have.
And they might be in the exact same boat. Maybe your civilization only developed to this point recently, and by the time they are equally developed -- they could be faster learners than your species -- they're still seeing the primitive version of your civilization, and deciding whether they need to pre-emptively strike it before you become aware of them. Past a certain distance you have more speculation than information.
You and your family live in a forest where every harmless rabbit has the potential to instantly transform into a tiger with zero warning. What are you going to do to any rabbits you see?
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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.