They are dangerous and reckless. They were also done in the name of humanity, but without humanity’s consent.
I despise the naive scientists who did them as much as those who brought the damocletian sword of nuclear weapons on us.
I despise the naive scientists who did them as much as those who brought the damocletian sword of nuclear weapons on us.
We have literally no idea what technology the alien could have.
Show a spacecraft to someone from the middle ages and they would think it's magic.
There is physics that has not been discovered. Lots of things are still unexplained.
> no, the aliens are not able to collect radio waves from below the noise floor
Before we had quadrature modulation and quadrature phase shift keying, we thought we had hit the noise floor for wireless bandwidth. After we thought we really hit the ceiling, we had beamforming. There's stuff that hasn't been thought of. We don't know the unknown unknowns.
We are already using spectroscopy to gain insights into the chemical composition of exo-planets, and we have barely begun doing this kind of research. In even just a few decades we'll be massively better at this.
Analogue TV has always felt so much more clever than digital TV to me, at least from a purely technical standpoint. I guess that's because we're mostly digital natives now, so video codecs seem ordinary and programmable electron rayguns do not.
There are no material goods that can justify the material and energetic expense of any interstellar travel. You'd be far better off just using a particle accelerator to forge any chemical element and then assemble them into molecules using nano-replicators.
The best you can do is to send information, possibly with the help of gravitational lensing.
Sci-fi mode on: given that the potential galactic civilization is going to be information-based, who's to say the Earth is not already under attack? An interstellar fleet of large invasion ships with soldiers is not feasible, but a small drone with an AI that connects to terrestrial networks and steers the civilization towards collapse is possible. I'd start investigating if TikTok algorithm developers got some nudges from a weirdly knowledgeable source.
Material, no. but we know with absolute certainty that Earth will stop being habitable for humans at some point. So assuming any intelligent race, human descendent or otherwise, still exists on this planet, it will have to eventually move. It's just pure luck that we evolved when we did. But there are valid reasons for interstellar travel(other than you know, pure curiosity).
And if you can do that, then why bother with the interstellar travel? Just move to a higher orbit to survive the red giant stage. And then move closer to the stellar remnant, white dwarves will provide plenty of energy for trillions of years.
And if you manage to transcribe yourself into some kind of computing-based device, then why bother at all?
Or just terraform Mars.
Scifi usually bypasses this by breaking the laws of physics, for the sake of storytelling.
Dark Forest isn't about hiding from invasion. It's about hiding from getting preemptively sniped by someone else, worried that one day you may find a reason and a way to snipe them.
For this to work out you don't need interstellar colonization to be plausible - merely the ability to accelerate a rock to a significant fraction of the speed of light is enough, and that's definitely much closer to science than fiction.
Dark Forest also assumes aliens aren't curious and thrilled about other life existing out there. The one civilization we are familiar with wouldn't react like this. And we're talking about a very warlike civilization!
I'm sure you do understand it. I mean, sure, the other things you mention are also interesting, but mankind has been awed by a starry night's sky since we were able to look up. We gave names to the arrangements of bright things in the skies and imagined gods in them, and navigated by them. The are awe-inspiring.
It's really a human thing, not a scifi nerd's. It's impossible not to look at the stars and wonder. It's human nature.
Judging by social media, half the population has an unhealthy obsession about travel and tourism. It's not hard to connect dreams of space to interests of most people here: most stars you look at have planets around them, now imagine some of those are like Earth, and now suddenly this is a place to on a cruise to, to have new pictures to post to Instagram.
It's the same as with sailing stories and reality - the interesting parts are everything that isn't the open blue sea.
Dark Star is one film that directly addresses the long voyage insanity of deep space;
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Star_(film)
Similarly with sailing films, particularly documentaries, there are films that focus more on the journey than the endpoints. eg: (IIRC) the Kon-Tiki (1950) doco had a lot of mid ocean time.
Wrong. Dark Forest isn't about conquest, it's about preemptive strikes.
The Dark Forest hypothesis assumes that travel between stars is hard - more importantly, that even communications at those distances is hard - specifically, that it takes a long time, which prevents building trust. This, combined with one other assumption: that technological progress makes unpredictable jumps ahead, makes the conclusion fall out straight from basic game theory.
So per the Dark Forest hypothesis, if you spot a primitive agrarian society sending a "hello" to you with smoke signals, you're better off lobbing a nuke at them in response - because otherwise, should you send a friendly "hello back" instead, you may discover that while that message was in flight, they underwent a triple industrial revolution, and shot a magic proton bomb at you.
Why would they do that, you ask? Because from their POV, at any moment you can have a sudden technological breakthrough and start dragging black holes at them or whatever. Point being, it's best for them to get rid of you, while they still can.
(People get too fixated on the forest metaphor XOR the sci-fi parts, but it's really neither; the second book of the trilogy pretty much spelled out the whole rationale like a math textbook, in case anyone missed it after half of first book making analogies to it with ants and history of modern China and such.)
(ETA: what's the justification for "sudden technological jumps" assumption? History. Humanity had ~all the ingredients for the industrial revolution for centuries, and it's not clear why it happened when it did, and not a century or two earlier (or later). Then it happened, but the outcome wasn't "evenly distributed". Then the 20th century saw several large nations jumping all the way from pre-industrial agrarian societies to post-industrial peer superpowers, in a span of merely a few decades. The author writes extensively about living through that transition in the first book.)
Or maybe pre-emptively sterilize everything to make sure your eventual expansion encounters no issues.
Moreover, if your first instinct is to strike while hiding, then your equilibrium state would be a civilization that is the most successful at wiping out everything around it, spread all over the habitable universe. Dark Forest just doesn't work from the game-theoretical perspective.
Theres no hiding that fact. If they're within about 100 light years they'll be watching the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the atmosphere. Even if they're don't know the exact cause the spectra of pollutants and rates of change will give hints the changes are unlikely to be from random natural processes.
Outside of 100 light years but pretty much anywhere in the galaxy (assuming interferometers capable of getting spectra of Earth) will know there's some sort of life here. Even if you want to assume some aliens don't recognize life as we understand it they'll at least see extremely interesting and varied chemistry.
The idea you're going to hide Earth's biosignatures is silly. Trying to hide our technology signatures is pointless. At about 70 light years any interested aliens will start seeing isotopes resulting from above ground nuclear testing.
While telescopes indeed are not magic, an alien species at least as advanced as us could have telescopes capable of not only finding Earth but gathering spectra from it. It's certainly no guarantee Earth would be found but there's no hiding from anyone looking. There's no masking the chemistry of life on Earth and likewise no masting techno-signatures in the atmosphere.