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Comment by Ftuuky | Hacker News Reader

I see you're also a proponent of the "Dark Forest theory".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Forest

It doesn’t really matter who’s a proponent of what - if life is not singular then you have to assume it’s relatively common, and then you have to assume that messages like this will reach aliens on a wide spectrum of hostility and advancement.

Unless some unknown physics makes space-opera style fast travel possible, what would be the meaning of hostility? Based on what motive? Expressed how? Space isn't tribes of chimps in adjacent trees.

If we find aliens it will be more like "Don't let the Great Filter get you and maybe we'll have a really slow conversation."

Relativity muddles things a bit. If any civilization lives on a ship that can get near the speed of light, coming to destroy us would take only a few hours or days in their time, even if it took hundreds of years in hours.

But why bother using all that energy? And It will be a huge amount to get light years down to hours.

What threat would we be to them?

We're always a threat. All we need today is a closet Hitler type rising to power in any of the nuclear countries - and that's just today. No idea what socio political landscape will be when the world is hot, water and food scarce, and we know there are aliens out there.

I suppose there will be more people thinking about it now, after Cixin Liu published his book about it.

For sure. It was the first time I saw it articulated so well.

It was articulated so well in the dark forest that I have trouble seeing it any other way now.

There could be many explanations for us not hearing from extraterrestrials. I think you are falling in a cognitive bias trap of having learned too much about one of the reasons and thus assigning it higher probability. Memory is associative, so the more you know about something, more likely you are to use that concept when trying to solve problems or explain mysteries.

To ameliorate that I would suggest reading up on other theories. For example great filter or simulation argument.

Those theories are also too exciting (and hence likely to be overbelieved).

A more mundane reason might be that interstellar travel and communication turns out to be impossible (or near enough).

This is actually Central Park theory from The Killing Star.

Also described in xkcd:

https://xkcd.com/1377/

SMBC has covered Fermi’s paradox a few times. I prefer this answer: http://smbc-comics.com/comic/monkey .

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