Uhh aliens would be inevitably universally omnicidal just in case some other aliens are omnicidal, shut up nerd

  • WeedReference420 [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I didn't know what this was so I googled it and read "The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches..." and this already sounds like the dorkiest bullshit ever

    • posadist_shark [love/loves]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      For me its really cringe, I prefer the solution that says we are likely the first aliens because of the age and lack of (any) neibors in the universe but how its interesting is how they use a statistical model to prove that.

      • communism_liker_69 [he/him]
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        2 years ago

        I'm fully UAP-pilled at this point and I think that it's actually Fermi's non-paradox. Where are the aliens? Why don't we see them? Well, they're here, but not particularly interested in talking to us, and people have seen them flying around, but we've all collectively put up cognitive blinders and decided that talking about them means risking our careers, so I guess we've just been ignoring them for the past 80 years.

        I suspect that probably hundreds of millions of years ago someone sent out Von Neumann probes into the Milky Way and set up a listening post at every solar system. I'm pretty doubtful of FTL travel, it's probably really difficult to move any significant amount of mass around the galaxy, but these probes are low mass and can operate on very long timescales. But that's why you don't see alien colonists or invaders here. And the fact that they've been here for such a long time means that they're probably very aware of these monkeys down here who just learned how to turn chemical energy into heat energy and again into mechanical energy but might not be that interested in talking to us until we can do something a little bit more interesting than that.

        • posadist_shark [love/loves]
          ·
          2 years ago

          I see this as really plasable, if you got a link I want listen to this theory more, one fear I have is life is so common human life becomes meaningless to any advanced species, which it probely already is but idk I wouldn't want to leave people in the mud but I guess the material conditions of being advanced would probley say it doesn't matter and isn't a good Idea to uplift or save any doomed planet.

          • communism_liker_69 [he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            I've been enjoying John Michael Godier's content recently

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HldbkIydeXc

            For the stuff about Von Neumann probes and the Fermi Paradox just do your own reading on what interests you there. Generally speaking it's just deep time stuff. Human civilization is about 12000 years old, anatomically modern humans emerged a few hundred thousand years ago? I think between 100,000 and 300,00 years ago. We don't really know when humans first started using language but it's assumed to be before they left Africa 60,000 years before now.

            The dinosaurs died 65 million years ago, so 200x the length of time since the first humans. The Earth is 4 billion years old, or 60x longer than the time since the dinosaurs died, and the universe is 14 billion years old.

            The Fermi Paradox, Von Neumann probe stuff is that a system of self-replicating spacecraft could colonize the entire galaxy in half a million years or so. Even if it took 10 million years, that's fairly short in terms of the history of life here. So like why hasn't it happened?

            Also I'd recommend looking into the UAP stuff. It's objectively pretty weird. I wrote a comment about this the other week, but the US government basically has said that there are mechanical flying objects of unknown origin performing crazy maneuvers in the atmosphere. I'm not super inclined to take the US security state at face value, but it's also a weird thing to claim.

            https://hexbear.net/post/200168/comment/2519901

            • bort_simp_son [she/her]
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              edit-2
              2 years ago

              One hand, of course the US military is lying about UAP's to justify more funding.

              On the other hand ... they wouldn't need to lie about anything to get more funding. And there's a lot of military personel insisting on these unexplainable air craft being real. There's reports of hundreds of encounters and near-misses going back decades. Obama and Clinton have basically said there's something inexplicable showing up during navy piloting exercises. So why? They could already get all the money in the world by going "China China China!!!" So why orchestrate such a massive and sprawling conspiracy?

              I'm kinda gripped by the UAP thing because it doesn't seem like the usual lies our government and media come up with. It ... kinda seems real. But what the fuck is it then?

              ON THE OTHER HAND ... if Americans are worrying about space aliens infiltrating the government then they're not worrying about capitalism being the actual cause of our problems. So maybe it really is just a way of muddling peoples material worldviews with pure hokum.

              ON THE OTHERRRRR HAND .... again ... it would be the most successful fabricated conspiracy ever if that were the case. If George Bush fully orchestrated 9/11 from a bunker, that would require fewer people involved in a lifetime of lying and silence compared to the number of air force pilots and navy personnel and politicians and three-letter-agency contractors all insisting something is defying the laws of physics right off our coast every day for decades.

              ... I genuinely don't know what to think about it.

              I don't think China or Russia or even the US has technology that could pull off what the UAP's are shown to be doing. Maybe China has found a way to scramble American sensors and radars and cameras to trick them into detecting something that isn't there .... but for several decades now? It just doesn't add up.

              There's no obvious answer to this.

              • communism_liker_69 [he/him]
                ·
                2 years ago

                i KNOW. It kinda makes me insane.

                I just don't really get it for justifying funding. Like if you take the Nimitz encounter (which was like 15 years ago) there's no way you can look at that and think it's the Chinese, just based on the capability they're claiming.

                I put this in my other comment, but it's like skipping the WMD fabrication and jumping to "we need to invade Iraq cause Saddam Hussein has Santa Claus held hostage"

                  • bort_simp_son [she/her]
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                    2 years ago

                    If they're genuinely ET propes, they might not exist to make contact at all. They might only exist to monitor and/or test military capabilities. I don't think first encounter is going to involve little green men walking out of a saucer in DC, it's going to be a downed automated surveillance device from a civilization that might not even exist anymore.

                    Assuming these things are real at all...

            • sooper_dooper_roofer [none/use name]
              ·
              2 years ago

              they did fuck it up though. That's why we "know" about them (plenty of unexplainable sightings pre-deepfake era, testimonies from at least somewhat credible people, mysterious and coincidentally lining up legends from various cultures, Sumerian Ubaid figurines, etc)

              Like, if we're talking about it and loads of people actually believe it, then they fucked up. They couldn't cover it up.

              now, if aliens DON'T exist, then it means the believers are wrong and there's a bunch of weird shit happening out there in terms of weather phenomena and hidden military tech that we can't even dream of, and other stuff.

              • communism_liker_69 [he/him]
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                2 years ago

                there's also a lot of UFO activity that's happened outside the US's borders. I was just watching something on UFO culture in Japan, the Brazilian and French governments both have their own investigations of UFO/UAP stuff, there's some crazy stories from the Soviet era about UFOs messing with their nuclear weapons.

        • TheLepidopterists [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          This feels the most likely to me. Universe is sooooooooo big, can't be empty, but it's also sooooooooo big that Marvin the Martian isn't doing a pop in on us.

    • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Change the framework and it sounds very stupid too.

      "The protean environment is a dark forest. Every prokaryotic cell is an armed hunter stalking through the magma vents like a ghost, gently pushing aside clouds..."