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Any species that is advanced enough for interstellar communication will almost certainly be a highly aggressive apex species. You don't get to the top of the food chain by being nice, you get there by murdering all of the competition and plundering all of the resources. And if you were trying to be nice, someone else would have just wiped you out.

The big question is if a species can eventually reach some point of collective enlightenment where they leave these primitive impulses behind. But based on the current state of humanity, I'm not to optimistic.

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Alternatively, advanced megaprojects are only achievable through sophisticated large-scale cooperation. Aggression leads to infighting; infighting wastes resources on zero-sum conflict.

>based on the current state of humanity, I'm not to optimistic.

Which version of Earth culture has a better shot at building e.g. a megastructure for an interstellar beacon: Earth culture during the post-nationalist 90s moment, or Earth culture during the current dysfunctional moment?

"Earlier this year, the White House proposed a nearly 24% cut to NASA's 2026 fiscal year budget, primarily aimed at the organization's fundamental science research. If the cuts come to fruition, they would be the largest in the agency's entire history." https://www.npr.org/2025/07/22/1266983866/trump-science-spac...

Not advocating for this approach, but maybe a fascist oligopoly will get the job done. Or something entirely stranger like a corporate theocracy. There's plenty of room for aggressive, murderous, backstabby species to achieve incredible things. We have a great existence proof right here on Earth.

EDIT: Maybe even a future culture that reveres aggression and has achieved some success in their warlike ways will look back on the peaceful post nationalist 90s as an age of decadent sloth. It could be that massive sustained conflict actually drives humans to achieve greater technical heights than peace.

The world wars drove more technical progress than the world has ever seen, before or since. (Making your iPhone better at doing the same thing worse and slower so the end result comes out basically the same isn’t “progress”.)

>Alternatively, advanced megaprojects are only achievable through sophisticated large-scale cooperation.

Alternatively, megastructures are only achievable through massive amounts of low wage workers with terrible working conditions.

Consider: Panama canal, most large railroads, Snowy hydro.

As time rolls forward we appear to lose our ability to do large things, and in part that's because we are less and less accepting of risk.

There's no reason to think that megastructures are only achievable through slavery, but I think it's fair to say that it's a lot cheaper if you're willing to disregard the humanity of others and abuse them until you get what you want. The alternative is that you pay workers what they're worth and use enough of them that they aren't being overworked, but that eats into profits.

I think we still take plenty of risks, still do big things, and still enslave and abuse a lot of workers. It's increasingly seen for the evil it is, but that hasn't stopped it from happening. I think the biggest reason you don't see as many massive projects these days is because we've already got a ton of infrastructure in place, major technological advances are getting harder to come by as we've covered a lot of the "easy" stuff already, and the emphasis on short term/immediate profits.

When we suddenly need a massive structure to house a major sporting event like the world cup or Olympics where a small number of people are basically certain to make a fortune you'll find we're still perfectly willing to construct it on the backs and corpses of forced labor and migrant workers suffering abuse, only to abandon it afterwards until it's time to build a new one somewhere else.

Advanced aliens (and we 'almost') will have robots for that. And they would also have less resource issues than us, so, they would have trillions of them.

I remain unconvinced of the viability of robots, as much as I love scifi renditions.

Have you seen a modern car manufacturing plant? Many parts of the production pipeline are fully automated. Granted, most of these machines are not ambulatory but they're still considered robots. Or consider modern freight shipping: many ports rely on intelligent automation for container handling. The development path of 3d printing is also leaning more heavily into robotics, featuring freely-moving articulated arms controlled by cameras and sensors.

I'd say robots are entirely viable, and we don't need science fiction to validate them.

... and we are very early on in human-robot development still... We don't know yet if the current push will speed things up or leave it stagnant; I would say it's definitely not a stretch to assume it will speed up...

Yeah so the tradeoff appears to be size vs utility.

The problem is that, at best, that means a lot of the world would have to be redesigned to cater to robots. Thats why they excel in auto plants. Space already isnt a concern, so you can make them huge. Huge robots are capable of tremendous strength dexterity and speed.

But in an environment built for humans they suck. Redesigning a data center to be 100% robot operated will probably happen, but thats going to be an extraordinarily unfriendly place for a human to be. The amount of space you would lose getting a robot to be able to retrieve a crud rj45 connector, or a stuck sfp module, from any one of 200 racks, at multiple heights, would make the robot massive. So the entire concept of the data centre will have to be rebuilt from the ground up to make it robot friendly. The full tech stack too. Robot friendly connectors etc. Thats a huge capex outlay for something with dubious utility.

Imagine ubiquitous robots on the street. Machines capable of tearing humans to shreds. The liability issues are huge on their own. If LLMs are the pinnacle of artificial intelligence, you would probably have a death a week in most cities.

Space is worse because the robot has to be launch economical, or built up there. Whats he doing up there without humans. Back to accidents again.

Once I had well paid job at American company in Germany which paid nice salary. Consider Apple’s iPhone. You have it, I have it and it’s a technical mega project. When you do a teardown, there are hundreds of different components. There was dozen engineers working on the smallest part. Hundreds if not more on the processor. Thousands on manufacturing, logistics and retail. These people don’t dig dirt all day long. But trust me, design, build all the parts on time, assembly and ship the phones to stores on time is absolutely a mega project. But outsiders don’t see this. Imho that’s real large scale global project.

Iphones are created by low wage workers with poor working conditions

I am to my dorsal-most heart muscle cell what society is to me. All my cells mostly cooperate. Certainly they cooperate long enough to build a megaproject called a human, so large-scale cooperation is possible.

But there are also lots of bacteria in the world. Way more than animal cells. And they're doing okay on average.

Indeed. Some of those bacteria would love to consume your megproject. As you soon as you lose power to resist, they get a banquet of a lifetime!

> Alternatively, advanced megaprojects are only achievable through sophisticated large-scale cooperation.

In that sense, war is a megaproject. War organized the Manhattan Project, which is still the metaphor we use for any massive scale, sophisticated project. The space race was a cold war endeavor to make ICBMs that weren't obviously ICBMs, and the Soviets were terrified that the Space Shuttle was a nuclear dive-bomber (actually it was for deploying and returning recon satellites) [0]. Cooperation does not necessarily imply peace or post-nationalism: war is strong cooperation on each side of the war, with competition between the two sides. In fact, the cooperation is so strong that actions taken against that cooperation end up being punished as treason much more strenuously than in peace time.

[0] https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3855/1

The Space Race was partly a Cold War propaganda program but it diverged almost completely from the ICBM programs. ICBMs have to be solid fueled to minimize launch time. But manned orbital launchers have to be liquid fueled (for the core) for efficiency and safety.

obviously the space race was about weaponizing space in many people’s minds

On a species level, you can imagine an aggression/cooperation "species personality" axis. Humans are in the middle, with chimps more on the aggressive side, and bonobos to the cooperation side.

Being in the middle, humans have a bit of a split personality. We cooperate on a large scale during warfare. But consider the Cold War. Both the US and the USSR were continent-spanning countries with multiple ethnicities. I would argue that cooperation on that scale just isn't that different from cooperation on a planet-wide scale. A species that's capable of one is very likely to be capable of the other. That's part of why I'm not terminally pessimistic about humanity, or starfaring species more generally.

I don't think we can rule out starfaring for a species that's a little more bonobo-like, and defaults to a post-national outlook.

Humans are emotional, and have other attributes so aggression is a possibility, wasting resources is part of the world.

How is it not obvious that a one-world empire ruled by totalitarian futurists would have been vastly more motivated and funded to do Big Engineering Stuff than 1990s liberal late-capitalism?

> Any species that is advanced enough for interstellar communication will almost certainly be a highly aggressive apex species.

How can you estimate likelihood of behavior when currently N=0 (or N=1 if you count humans)?

There is no baseline, no control; it's just complete speculation, a roundabout way of saying "this is what I think humans would likely do, therefore, all advanced life forms must also be like this".

Projecting behavior onto a phantom is just a venue for reflecting a personal worldview onto something else. "Being short-sighted and selfish worked for the aliens, so it would work here too".

Evolution favors highly competitive individuals and collectives

Not necessarily true! I think this interactive game applies: https://ncase.me/trust/

Depends who got to the top first. If the most advanced was peaceful but eliminated threats. I’d assume they could create a collective empire.

Apex ruthless only gets you so far verses a collective.

On the other hand they could still see us as a threat to the collective due to our levels of aggression, and eliminate us to protect themselves.

It's a safe bet that if they know about us at all they'll just stay away from us. Our media is filled with depictions of us killing aliens. There's little reason to think we'd accept them. We can't even get along with/accept other humans. Some people's first instinct will be to shoot them. Others will want to lock them up and experiment on them.

If aliens did come here they'd have to be very brave, powerful enough not to worry about what we'd do, or unaware of what we are.

I'm not too worried they'd kill us to protect themselves though. At the rate we're going, we'll kill ourselves off along with every other living thing on the planet long before we get out of our own solar system.

The most horrifying aspect of the hypothesis as depicted in the Dark Forest book is that it was simply the job of a low-level bureaucrat to identify "low-entropy entities which lack the hiding gene" within their region of the galaxy and allocate a basic bottom-shelf munition to "cleanse" it.

However, humans were aware of this possibility and had spent centuries reorganizing the solar system to have a measure of resilience to it. So, to humanity's great credit, he had to go get permission from his supervisor for to deploy a next-tier solution.

"Why would anyone travel across town (i.e., the galaxy) just to step on an anthill?" We have a whole industry dedicated to exterminating any other life that invades "our" living space. It's considered an unremarkable necessity.

>If aliens did come here they'd have to be very brave, powerful enough not to worry about what we'd do

If aliens had the technology to visit us right now, the latter is a given.

You don't have to assume anything crazy. You can create a planet killer by simply accelerating a decently massive object at relativistic speeds and firing it at earth.

> a highly aggressive apex species

I won't pretend that I'm some expert but I find this and similar approaches very anthropocentric, stained with pop-culture of image of aliens namely from the Independence Day and Alien (sic) series.

Why extraterrestrial life has to be aggressive at all? I'd rather imagine that if something exist out there it either have similar fears that we have or don't bother with rest of the universe and prefers an isolated existence because it already discovered that own survival is more important. And perhaps it doesn't resemble humanoids at all. Hell, maybe it even takes form of giant organisms that can freely roam through the space and just exists.

Perhaps the most boring and obvious truth is that we're alone and we exist because of sheer series of weird and improbable accidents. Pretty sure some people who work in this field believe that we're first to emerge as a sentient intelligence. So perhaps it's up to us if should reach out to the stars and explore, spread across the space. Or it might be possible that we're in a fine-tuned simulation ran by our ancestors who evolved beyond physical form and who decided to study us as we study microorganisms in a Petri dish.

I think you are wrong and the more humanity has become intelligent, the more empathy and love we have displayed. I think it’s a hallmark of intelligence. The most intelligent people I know are the most kind and understanding. It’s the ignorant that are cruel and uncaring.

Sadly, we're becoming less intelligent with time I doubt the trend is going to get better before it gets worse.

You have a really bleak and limited view of the far future. Species that have the means to cross interstellar space probably have found ways to alter themselves and removed their need to grow exponentially as they realized it is unsustainable, and are now perfectly content to chill on their homeplanet.

You're thinking of cancer cells with spaceships, not highly advanced beings who have mastered matter and physical reality. I recommend reading Dispora by Greg Egan, it could potentially expand your mind on what the future may actually look like.

Bears most likely out-ruthless you, but, uh, I don't sed them building Dyson spheres anytime soon.

Aliens probably aren't this edgy, nihilist caricature. Most likely, they're kind of like us- Curious about us, hoping for the best, but irrationally fearing we're an "highly aggressive apex" or whatever self-absorbed nightmare the less enlightened individuals of their species dreamed.

Seriously, you think anyone is gonna cross 50 light-years to kill a bunch of featherless bipeds and plunder some common rocks?

At this point, I’m terrified some spacefaring AI is going to come over and relentlessly interface with whatever systems they can find while screaming “IF THIS BOT IS TROUBLING YOU PLEASE BLOCK ME AT THE PHYSICAL LEVEL” and self-replicating millions of clones.

I'm sad that I get this joke, but I'm sadder it sounds less and less like a joke every day.

Von Neumann spam.

The somewhat counterintuitive rules for the best expected strategy to repeated conflicts:

- Nice

- Friendly

- Retaliatory/provokable

- Clear

https://youtu.be/mScpHTIi-kM At 15:00 in.

Largely depends on the parameters. I believe it also assumes infinite resources. In general it's a very simple model not meant to explain all and everything.

The interesting thing here is that it breaks assumptions that to be "alpha" you MUST dominate to win. Even if within only these parameters, it suggest there are conditions where being "nice" isn't just a nebulous ethical thing, but it's an optimal conflict strategy.

I think it carries two different messages to two different groups. If you're a "lets all be friends" type, then it's important that you also guard the resources that allow you to be nice. Being provokable isn't "being mean" its the thing allowing you to be nice. If you're a "take advantage of the rubes" type, it's a hint that there might be metaphorical money left on the table by being too greedy.

> not meant to explain all and everything.

That it's not true ALL the time, is less interesting than the fact that it's true some of the time. At least to me.

Here's a related thought experiment for those hoping for interstellar kumbaya:

On planet Jung dwell the Jungians, sapien-like beings who need only a single cup of a rare liquid to live an entire lifetime. For humans, that same cup grants twenty extra years of healthy life.

Human just landed on the planet Jung and discovered the liquid--what happens next?

The "2 sentients 1 cup" thought experiment?

If your point is to prove that the patterns of domination and conquests that exist here will necessarily exist in the stars too, then I'm afraid your thought experiment is deeply flawed.

If ever we are able to journey through the interstellar medium, we ought to have achieved immortality by then. We'll probably live as deincarnated beings in virtual worlds, free from any desire to grow exponentially, having realized this is deeply unsustainable and pointless once you have mastery over physical reality.

Read Diaspora by Greg Egan, perhaps it can cure you from this simplistic vision of the far future we have inherited from the 50s pop SciFi books.

The counterpoint to immortality is generation ships -- and as witnessed by today's society, humanity can't sustain peaceful coexistence across even a few generations. I would bet that by the time such a spaceship encounters new life, the most domineering and conquest-happy in humanity will have outwrestled curiosity and desirelessness.

The violence we do is a choice we make based on circumstances and conditions. It is not inherently part of us nor is it inevitable. In your scenario it is easy to imagine making the choice you imply. But that's all it is.

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

I just don't agree with this at all.

How aggressive do you feel towards ants and ant hills? Do you feel an urge to murder ants to show your dominance over the competition?

I would suspect we are more in competition with ants than aliens would be with us.

I think we really underestimate how uninteresting we would be to an advanced alien civilization.

I think if you develop to that point, you don’t really need to have a competitive scarcity mindset anymore.

My thought exactly. The universe has near infinite resources. There is nothing in our solar system that needs conquering.

Can a highly aggressive species plundering all of the resources avoid self-suicide by destroying the very conditions of its existence?

Considering multiple invasive animal species, and past and current humans societies fate… the answer seems not very positive.

> Any species that is advanced enough for interstellar communication will almost certainly be a highly aggressive apex species.

Well we could always be pets. That wouldn't be so bad.

Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/1732/

@13,500 BCE

> Well we could always be pets.

Porno for Pyros has you covered

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgPeP_pfjp4

Under a scientific economy like socialism you dont need to be "apex male who exploits the workers under him to get yachts and tax breaks." The workers co-operate and thus the "apex predator" capital owner becomes dismissed the same way our towns and villages in the developed West don't pay fees to warring bands of gangs but instead we've unlocked the Republic and the system of representation and taxes and such via democratic action.

You absolutely can have utopian beings. In fact, I'd argue the greed-based societies get caught in the great filter and if there is a space faring race, its absurdly ethical and fair and, to me, explains the Fermi paradox. They're out there and maybe they see Earth but it would be hugely unethical to intervene here. The proper thing to do would be to only observe us from afar.

If this was a movie or novel maybe the Wow signal was them messing up, or a defector amongst their midst who disagrees with full isolation policies. But most likely it'll end up being something simple. The last good theory I heard was it domestic and was reflected off orbiting space junk, but who knows.

I think any species that reaches that level of advancement without having some kind of collective enlightenment and leaving those primitive impulses behind will destroy itself within a fairly short period of time, making the chance of noticing them quite small.

J. Posadas wrote a bit on this: https://www.marxists.org/archive/posadas/1968/06/flyingsauce...

However, the current trajectory of humanity seems more likely towards total destruction than what Posadas envisioned (and perhaps saw as inevitable).

Certainly if they're like us, and travelling to new worlds, they'll be imperialistic and colonial. They'll plant a flag, because we obviously weren't really making use of the planet, not _really_, and attempt to civilise the natives through something between cultural erasure and genocide.

On Earth, in the grand scheme of things, it took a very short time for colonies to a) diverge politically or b) fail. It's not something that stopped happening (much) because we became more cuddly. It's just boring old economics.

So I think it's unfeasible to maintain a society that rules with an iron fist over interstellar distance and time.

Colonialism isn't profitable for the same reason slavery isn't. We did it because we hadn't invented economics yet.

In space it seems like it'd be even worse; something would have to be very valuable to be worth taking it out of our gravity well.

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