Also the late Stephen Hawking's fears.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revelation_Space_universe
In Blindsight, humans are the only intelligent lifeform in the Galaxy that are conscious. Thus, they're the only ones that produce art, entertainment, or just talk to each other for "no reason."
Other intelligent life in the Galaxy does communicate, but only to exchange resources in a mutually beneficial way. So when a bunch of Earth transmissions of War of the World's or talk news finally make it out there, one set of aliens begins receiving and decoding this information. As it becomes clear the information is meaningless and worthless, it becomes obvious to the non-conscious aliens that humans are waging an information attack on the entire galaxy. They are essentially ddosing the Galaxy with worthless em radiation. So, the aliens come to kill them.
Luckily the space vampires beat them to it.
Isn't that just an assumption though? As short as 1000 years ago traveling to the moon seemed impossible.
Afaik nothing in current physics prevents FTL from being logically possible. Nothing predicts it either but that doesn't mean it's impossible.
General relativity says that maybe you can get something equivalent by taking non-linear paths through space-time but those sorts of things require very radical types of matter to avoid collapsing into a black hole. And realistically, it's IMO very unlikely that these sorts of things would remain in a more complete (e.g. quantum) theory of gravity.
Also, its one thing to go the speed of the light, its another to slow down from it!
That said, I'm not particularly worried about it either. I suspect we will either have scientific value (independently evolve intelligence, which appears rare) or never pose a real threat to them, assuming learning curves remain exponential for civilizations.
What is the reasoning behind this statement?
> and there's no reason to expect the ants:humans ratio to extend to humans:aliens
the same is true of the inverse, being that there's no reason to expect that humans are at the limit of complexity, so for the purpose of speculation as to the likelihood of far more intelligent life, there's no good reason to exclude the possibility.
That said, we're several orders of magnitude away from that, and even we have a theoretical way of FTL travel[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive
The premise of the series is that the Universe is like a dark forest. A civilization is like a hunter wandering through a dark forest. Any sound is likely to first be met with a bullet and then curiosity. At galactic scales, by the time you first communicate with a civilisation, they might have advanced immensely from when you first detected them, and the slightest miscommunication could cause war at massive scales with high probabilities of losses on both sides, so you shoot at the first noise you hear with extremely low effort weaponry that will definitely kill an underdeveloped civilization.
The universe will end some day, but there's no point in letting your civilization end before that just because someone else decided to kill you when you were being generous.
To be clear though, I would rather be optimistic and say that civilizations can learn to work and live together, but the game theory explanation of this situation does make a lot of sense, and is backed up by a fair amount of historic data.
But that's a philosophy of life that, taken to its logical conclusion, means that you should be doing your best to kill everyone that isn't you just in case, for instance, their progeny could hurt yours.
It is, frankly, very silly.