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Comment by mxcrossb | Hacker News Reader

> The galactic center, according to the scientists, “provides an ideal” central location for “advanced civilizations to place a powerful transmitter to efficiently send beacons across the entire Milky Way,” in what is yet another advantage to this strategy.

Can anyone comment on this? What is the idea of such a beacon?

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Whenever I hear about putting beacons in space I'm always reminded of the plot of the book The Dark Forest. I remember too about a decade ago that it was decided the idea of broadcasting our location in deep space might be a bad idea.

A book that could reinforce this idea is "Those Gentle Voices" by Gorge Alec Effinger.

The Three Body Problem trilogy also leans heavily into that theme.

It's a good series at first, but gets very woo-woo by the end.

Spoilers:

All aliens are actively hostile to others. Any civilizations they find, they destroy.

The Dark Forest is book 2 of Three Body Trilogy

Crumbs! Not enough coffee this morning, sorry!

Again, spoiler alert:

The books don't really specify that *all* civilizations are actively hostile to each other but hints that the best chance for survival is basically being quiet since there are unknown civilizations that yield tremendous power and are in fact actively hostile to any signs of other intelligent life which they can destroy with relative and terrifying ease. It's that sort of status-quo that makes the dark forest theory so scary and why everybody that eventually reaches that conclusion would want to remain hidden and/or silent. Throughout the story we only ever get to see from the point of view of two civilizations so who knows if there wasn't something like a star-trekian federation at some place or time since we do eventually get to know that there were many many civilizations in the end.

It does get really crazy, but I personally found the whole trilogy really awesome. It would be hard to build such a story relying only on our current understanding of physics and technology and even some of the crazier parts are still kind of based out of real theories and hypothetical developments or discoveries.

I still highly recommend this trilogy to any sci-fi/first contact fan.

I had an even darker interpretation.

Because there is a non-zero probability that some civilizations are, or will become, hostile predators, the most effective survival strategy is to:

1) avoid detection at all costs, and

2) exterminate any civilisation you detect before they can invite the attention of these predators, or worse, evolve into one; meaning

3) become the predator

See also: history, evolution of the state. The system we live in has self-preservation as it's main interest and it's absolutely terrified of dying.

I thought Death's End was incredible myself, although The Dark Forest just edges it out.

The Dark Forest is the sequel to the Three Body Problem which is part of the trilogy Remembrance of Earth's Path

If a civilization has sufficiently advanced technology, then I would imagine they would be scouring the cosmos for more resources.

Ultimately, every species is biologically trained to propagate itself, consuming resources and expanding presence, unless there are other external factors governing (for example, long gestation periods, limited offspring, etc)

So, advanced civilizations might put communication mechanisms in convenient places to contact inferior species.

Or an advanced enough civilization might on the contrary use their resources efficiently with long term planning and population control and stay on their planet / solar system - "advanced" and "ever-expanding" don't have to come together.

INT and WIS are different stats, and sadly, one does not imply the other, at least in the only being we can yet study

>If a civilization has sufficiently advanced technology, then I would imagine they would be scouring the cosmos for more resources.

Stable elements are not scare, life is scarce. I would hope that any civilization advanced enough to travel the verse would be able to strip mine the elements it needs from lifeless rocks and leave planets with life alone.

Bezos is right that we should ultimately move resource extraction to space.

Also extracting resources from astroids avoids the problem of getting them out of the gravity well. Sure they could mine Earth, but they would have to haul it off Earth too.

> Ultimately, every species is biologically trained to propagate itself

Grouped by planet, we have a sample size of 1.

> every species is biologically trained to propagate itself, consuming resources and expanding presence

It's not obvious to me that this would apply to xenobiology.

(It's not even totally obvious that it applies on Earth - other species live a much more synergistic lifestyle than humans do)

I should think any civilization capable of producing, operating and placing such a beacon would be able to detect us on their own and might have the same interest in communicating with us that we have with ant colonies. WE think everyone wants to find and communicate with us but there is no reason that we should assume THEY feel the same way.

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