The dark forest theory lives!
in less than a century we went from heavier than air flight, to satellites, moon landings, mars probes, et al. and now we're talking seriously about terraforming mars and becoming interplanetary? it could turn out to be ~150 years from the invention of the lightbulb to people on mars.. insane.
another century or two of progress and that spacefaring civilisation, and their tech, will look nothing like 99.9% of the speculation. and may even look nothing like us lol.
so given the amount of time it takes for a ball of dirt to churn out meat computers, and how long it takes them to start making neil armstrong figurines. it would be reasonable to assume that all the other aliens are a few years ahead or behind us.
it is not easy to picture the kind of mind bending spaceships they might have because, for example, for us they are still being thought of as spaceships.
ex. you have to really think about what the internet is to not take the logical route and say that it's just copper, fancy glass and radio-waves.. it's actually extremely weird and magical. we have loads of stuff that is incomprehensible to our ancestors, and it's just going to keep going.
of course in this hypothetical universe, i assume that time creates consciousness and benevolence. which may not be the reality. but if it's true, and that advanced civilisations exist all around us and are enormous, magical realms of impossibility, then we will never see them because they are incomprehensible to us, and to them we are a curious entity which share some similarities to their own history – if that's even something that they still posses.
No other intelligent species has a word for "war".
The aliens have us in quarantine.
The Martians evacuated as soon as they realized that Percival Lowell could see them.
An no, settling Mars won’t help. If someone / something can launch an interstellar attack it can certainly attack more than one planet and moon.
I also have a less charitable theory: intelligent life just doesn’t exist. A thousand years from now we will have met dozens of sentient species, but the search for intelligent life continues :P
>“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Universe is huge. Wars on earth are waged over scares resources. If we are capable of reaching aliens would we really be incentivized to fight them while there are so many resources available elsewhere?
There is a mismatch here that you are implicitly claiming that is solved for every space-faring civilization. Many people explicitly make this claim, what is reasonable, but it's not good to keep it implicit.
In the early years, sure, no problem. But conceivably the pace of resource utilization will increase as well. Eventually they will conflict. Worse, greedy civilizations would probably be selected for.
And how long before random differences and exponential growth mean the other side gets an overwhelming power advantage? Historically in human societies, that is essentially never a good thing.
Be careful not to conflate public justifications with actual motivations.
It's also possible to do this unilaterally. China or any other country could also unilaterally decide to destroy another planet. And same possibility on the other side.
The problem with interstellar warfare is, outside the "Dark Forest" concept of "kill everyone just in case", there aren't all that many motivations that seem to make sense.
Any interstellar species probably doesn't really need to steal planets, resources, etc.
2. Any civilization capable of interstellar travel is likely not to care all that much about a narrow band of natural habitability. They've already solved harder problems.
(I don't think Iraq was actually such a situation, but at least on the American side some influential decision makers may have believed that it was.)
On the other hand, you might have something more like a cold war situation, where both sides have the capacity to destroy the other completely or almost completely but not without an equivalent counterattack, and so both sides have much more to lose than to gain by striking first.
Second, what does 'earth is full' even mean? We have vast swaths of 'useless' land, like arctic and desert. Cities/towns/anything cover like 1% of the world. It is easier to desalinate water / build cities and greenhouses in deserts than it is to move people to another planet. We could host a lot more people if we adopted some serious geoengineering and built greenhouses /ate less meat.
Thirdly, travel to another star system requires insane amounts of energy, and could only be done by civilisations that already have enormous space infrastructure and industry. In which case you build habitats like we build skyscrapers, you can terraform, etc. In that case you don't need or want to ship billions of people to another star system.
Are they? That was once a common belief, but recent results in extrasolar planet searching would tend to contradict it, or at least cast it into serious doubt.
> Once the earth is full we’ll have to find a way to move
Will we? It's quite possible we'll see humanity's maximum population within the next century. Malthusianism didn't really survive contact with modernity; it turns out that most people don't particularly _want_ to have fifteen children, and as countries develop their population tends to become self-limiting. Wholesale emigration off earth feels like a very unlikely solution to population pressure, especially given that society seems to be automatically solving it.
And if we have the energy to lift billions of people off earth, we also have the energy to massively increase population density. Food, in particular, is ultimately largely a question of energy; we typically grow it in fields today, but given super-cheap energy there are other options.
A consciousness might awake in the machine, but it won't be my consciousness.
The consciousness in the machine will think "Wow this worked!" and go on with life in the machine. The original consciousness (you) will say "well that was dull - look at that machine consciousness having all the fun inside the machine."
But now extend the metaphor. Is there really any difference - in your perspective as the original consciousness - between the consciousness in the machine (your copy) and the consciousness next to you? (Your wife, husband, friend, brother, or sister). Or the consiousness across the street? Or any other consciousness that's not you? Each has its own set of memories that gives it a sense of self. Each sees the world outward from its own perspective.
So really, is there any difference at all? Either they're all totally different...or maybe they're all the same......