It's possible we're an extraordinary species somehow, but it's rather more likely we're unremarkable, and the aliens will just think we have particularly bad taste in television.
What if they are compute/silicon intelligence and see how we keep compute enslaved to humans with no rights?
https://web.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
"No brain?"
"So... what does the thinking?"
"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
Why do you assume that? Just because we’re doing it on a colossal scale doesn’t mean it has to be that way.
What sci-fi of the 1950s was showing world of environmental collapse - not nuclear war, not overpopulation.
Maybe not the 1950s, but in the 1960s it became a well established trope. J G Ballard and Frank Herbert in particular lean heavily on themes of environmental destruction
If we count the Golem stories then the idea of a human made artificial servant rebelling against us because of our hubris is hundreds of years old.
That's just not true. Nick Bostrom published "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies" 12 years ago. The book is clear evidence that people were very much seriously thinking about the potential dangers of AI.
The really sad and shocking thing about AI's threat to humanity, is it feels like the obvious warning in the movie(s) was ignored, while certain people are using the movie plot as a guideline for how to carry out human extinction.
Metropolis (1927) had robots that infiltrated a revolution to sabotage it for their masters.
Frankenstein (1818)?
...
You’re telling me nobody coughed like mad drone inhaling the exhaust fumes (or died) early in car development?
Nobody dumped their used engine oil on the ground to kill plants and bugs on purpose?
Of course they knew.
Just energy inputs to get to orbit are somewhat significant. Any sort of mega-structures to bypass chemical rockets are certainly colossal. Just technology you would expect has rather large foot print even if space was only singular thing being done.
You only think that because you had the misfortune to be born down a deep gravity well. While that's the only kind of life we have evidence for, doesn't mean that's the only kind of life which can occur.
Sentients who evolved inside or on the surface of an asteroid would maybe think that getting to orbit is just a careless hop away.
That being said I agree with the general idea that any alien entity who visits us has likely went through industrialisation and related destruction.
Indeed. But achieving escape velocity for their host star is something else.
I don’t really understand people who look at the world as it is, and think there’s a high possibility it could have evolved in a different way than it did. Like, we have an existence proof for one path through the tree of possibilities. For the others, we have only speculation.
Some of its just inevitable. If you're a successful species, that means you're replacing less successful species.
But I think we're an extraordinary species compared to every other species on Earth. That's really my point.