I hope we don’t need to worry about that.
It’s odd because you and the aliens can never know whether the others are defecting. It reminds me of Simulation Warfare (pdf) where you can change the odds that you are in a simulation just by choosing to simulate universes like yours and also change the nature of your universe by simulating types of universes you want to be in that are compatible with your universe so far. If your argument works, we would be retroactively putting ourselves into a cooperating universe… basically “causing” things to happen outside of our observable universe…
(EDIT: removed expressions of future shock)
I hope we don’t need to worry about that. It’s odd because you and the aliens can never know whether the others are defecting. It reminds me of Simulation Warfare (pdf) where you can change the odds that you are in a simulation just by choosing to simulate universes like yours and also change the nature of your universe by simulating types of universes you want to be in that are compatible with your universe so far. If your argument works, we would be retroactively putting ourselves into a cooperating universe… basically “causing” things to happen outside of our observable universe… (EDIT: removed expressions of future shock)