this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
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Here's a list of tons of leftist movies.
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Bit off topic, but there is something really fucked up about our universe that the cold hard laws of math dictate that the best possible course of action upon encountering other sentient life is to destroy it because it might destroy you first.
That is so depressing, can't wait for heat death to end this horrific nightmare permanently.
Don't worry, Dark Forest Theory is probably total bullshit since it just assumes alien civilizations will be monolithic in nature or coordinated enough to have a singular response to the presence of any rival civilization
But if it is true we're literally already dead since we've been blasting radio waves into the aether for over a century
That's the thing that annoys me most whenever I talk to someone who can't shut the fuck about the dark forest and wants to frantically shut down all attempts to communicate with possible aliens.
And it's not even just the radio waves. Apparently they become too diffuse and garbled to detect easily after a few hundred light years anyway. The real problem is the fact that any alien civilization with both the will and resources to take us out from thousands to millions of light years away would have already known about life on Earth for the past billion years. It's no secret. Whenever the Earth passes in front of the Sun, anyone within that line of sight observing with a sufficiently powerful telescope will clearly see spectroscopic evidence of both methane and oxygen in the atmosphere. That sort of atmosphere just doesn't exist naturally in equilibrium without life constantly replenishing it. It's what astronomers call a bio-signature. So these potential omnicidal aliens have had more than enough time to throw a rock at Earth at 99% the speed of light, and that rock has had plenty of time to get here.
Maybe they only want to kill technological civilizations? Well, in that case they'd be monitoring planets known to support life, waiting for something they consider a threat to evolve. Clearly Earth would have been one of those planets on their watch list for a very long time, and by now their spectroscopy data is showing them all of the weird shit we're extremely suddenly dumping into the atmosphere, an obvious techno-signature.
So hiding from them is very clearly not a productive use of our resources. If the dark forest really is the solution to the Fermi paradox, then we have a near light speed rock with our name on it no matter what we do or don't do. Stealth does not exist in space. So we might as well just try to be friendly and open to any other alien civilizations that might be out there.
I've gone through like three different periods of trying to understand why everyone is so jazzed with tbp and my opinion of the story drops each time i try to figure it out. I have now arrived at the conclusion that it's science fiction for people who lurk on next door and call the cops on kids wearing hoodies.
If you start shooting brown dwarfs at your neighbors everyone is going to gang up on you and you're going to have a bad time. The idea that communication between critters that have all built rocket ships is so impossible that we'd never be able to communicate strikes me as more of a "STEM people don't read" problem, I odn't think Anthropologists or sociologists or linguists would ever have come up with this idea.
Uh Dark Forest Theory makes no assumption on coordination between alien species? At least the one in the book. In fact it argues the opposite, no coordination happens at all, civilizations just act the way they do because they have no other choice
Not between rival alien civs, within them. The most implausible bit is the one where there's no factions among the aliens who all agree to immediately kill everyone they detect just to be safe, and are capable of the global coordination needed to do just that
The laws don't, it's all silly techbro bullshit.the kind of weapons, communications, and sensors "Dark Forest" requires are silly nonsense. It has an enormous number of holes. It's pretty easy to detect whether planets out to quite long distances have organic life on them, so why hasn't someone used their magic hyperspace lasers to blast every life baring planet, including us? If you want to destroy a solar system you've got to be at a level where you could shoot, idk, Jupiter, at another solar system. How are you going to do that? You'd pretty well have to turn an entire solar system in to a gun and people are going to notice if you re-configure a solar system to do that. If you build a dyson swarm and use it as a giant laser folks will notice the dimming of the star and everyone near the path of the beam will notice it and be aware of it's point of origin.
Dark Forest mostly drastically misunderstands how big space is, how stealth in space can and cannot work, how probability works, how rare life is, and makes a whole bunch of silly assumptions not least of which is that it's worth anyone's time to pretend that there are magic people in the sky who will punish us for being naughty.
I compare it to Pascal's Wager for illiterate tech bros. It's exactly as worthy of consideration as Roko's Basilisk.
Thats a good point, I assumed people came up with it by drawing four squares with labels and then bringing in MatPat to do his game theory magic on it. But then if the assumptions are fundamentally bankrupt then the conclusion will be garbage too lmao
spoiler
Like I remember that in the story, the ayyys exterminatus each other by shooting small projectiles at lightspeed that somehow magically can't be tracked by anyone to find their origin and/or by hiding in little pocket dimensions and shooting things that collapse spacetime into lesser dimensions, turning people into anime IRL. Its still correct that it would be impossible for a civilization to pull shit like that off without getting noticed in turn, assuming the ayyys who shoot the small projectiles are lesser than the pocket-dimension ayyys in terms of technology.So ig at the end of the day its just a theory, a game theory.
And thus, the 69th iteration of Christianity was invented, this time, for the anprims. May we never leave the comfort of the caves.