If the sun goes out suddenly, it’s a pretty clear tipoff that something major is happening over here. Anyone with preferences who sees that might worry about having to compete with whoever ate the sun. They could do something drastic.
Our offspring might conclude that anyone willing to do drastic things to strangers would already be going hard on spreading and eating suns, so it would only signal meaningfully to relatively peaceful types. But I’m not sure we could be sure. Someone might be hiding and doing drastic things to anyone who shows themselves, but doing drastic things in sneaky ways.
But it does seem like quite a shame to let most of the accessible universe just burn up because you’re paranoid about the neighbors.
It will be quite a dilemma unless there’s some compelling logic we’re missing so far or observations that will allow such logic. Which could be.
I think this shades into dark forest theory. Broadly my theory about aliens in general is that they’re not effectively hiding themselves, and we don’t see them because any that exist are too far away.
Partially it’s a matter of, if aliens wanted to hide, could they? Sure, eating a star would show up in terms of light patterns, but also, so would being a civilization at the scale of 2025-earth. And my argument is that these aren’t that far-off in cosmological terms (<10K years).
So, I really think alien encounters are in no way an urgent problem: we won’t encounter them for a long time, and if they get light from 2025-Earth, they’ll already have some idea that something big is likely to happen soon on Earth.
I’m not sure eating the sun is such a great idea,
If the sun goes out suddenly, it’s a pretty clear tipoff that something major is happening over here. Anyone with preferences who sees that might worry about having to compete with whoever ate the sun. They could do something drastic.
Our offspring might conclude that anyone willing to do drastic things to strangers would already be going hard on spreading and eating suns, so it would only signal meaningfully to relatively peaceful types. But I’m not sure we could be sure. Someone might be hiding and doing drastic things to anyone who shows themselves, but doing drastic things in sneaky ways.
But it does seem like quite a shame to let most of the accessible universe just burn up because you’re paranoid about the neighbors.
It will be quite a dilemma unless there’s some compelling logic we’re missing so far or observations that will allow such logic. Which could be.
I think this shades into dark forest theory. Broadly my theory about aliens in general is that they’re not effectively hiding themselves, and we don’t see them because any that exist are too far away.
Partially it’s a matter of, if aliens wanted to hide, could they? Sure, eating a star would show up in terms of light patterns, but also, so would being a civilization at the scale of 2025-earth. And my argument is that these aren’t that far-off in cosmological terms (<10K years).
So, I really think alien encounters are in no way an urgent problem: we won’t encounter them for a long time, and if they get light from 2025-Earth, they’ll already have some idea that something big is likely to happen soon on Earth.