I’d been vaguely aware of SETI related x-risks before, but this post summarized both some past work and introduced new considerations in a fairly compelling way.
I don’t know that I buy the set of fermi-calculations towards the end about how risky SETI is, but each of the considerations listed throughout the article made sense as a thing-to-consider.
I also appreciated two comments that helped crystallize this for me: RedMan’s note that “Passive SETI exposes an attack surface which accepts unsanitized input from literally anyone, anywhere in the universe. This is very risky to human civilization”, as well as Ben’s note that it’s a bit weird to single out SETI when we have tons of astronomy labs listening to the universe all the time for all kinds of reasons which could also be attack vectors.
Curated
I’d been vaguely aware of SETI related x-risks before, but this post summarized both some past work and introduced new considerations in a fairly compelling way.
I don’t know that I buy the set of fermi-calculations towards the end about how risky SETI is, but each of the considerations listed throughout the article made sense as a thing-to-consider.
I also appreciated two comments that helped crystallize this for me: RedMan’s note that “Passive SETI exposes an attack surface which accepts unsanitized input from literally anyone, anywhere in the universe. This is very risky to human civilization”, as well as Ben’s note that it’s a bit weird to single out SETI when we have tons of astronomy labs listening to the universe all the time for all kinds of reasons which could also be attack vectors.