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Comment by hugh3 | Hacker News Reader

Heck, screw oxygen. Rationally, defense-oriented civilizations should smash all habitable-zone planets just to be on the safe side.

But you're right: the fact that our suspiciously life-supporting planet has been sitting here for billions of years unmolested does appear to indicate that there aren't any planet-destroying game theorists in our neighbourhood.

Alternative scenario: instead of a relativistic projectile, they sent a starship, which will leave us alone unless we develop enough technology to be a threat to its home planet. If we think that's a likely scenario we should all be sitting around worrying about how to not piss off the starship.

On the other hand, since knowing about the starship is a threat to the starship, we should try to avoid even thinking about whether there might be a starship.

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"Heck, screw oxygen. Rationally, defense-oriented civilizations should smash all habitable-zone planets just to be on the safe side."

Yeah, good point. If nothing else you reset the clock to zero, and that buys you an awful lot of time even under the worst case scenario.

"instead of a relativistic projectile, they sent a starship,"

A starship is a relativistic projectile that bothers to slow down. If you're going to smash a planet that acts up, you might as well just cut to the chase. All even-remotely-physically-plausible forms of interstellar travel are also intrinsically planet-busters, including the various exotic FTL drives that hover on the edge of plausibility.

Sure, but they might not be complete dicks. They might not want to kill us unless we're a threat to them.

The more I think of it the more unlikely the kill-everyone-immediately strategy seems. Suppose you're Robinson Crusoe. You've been all alone on an island for five years. One day you're out hunting and you see another human. Do you pull out your gun and shoot him in the head before he can do the same to you? Or do you take the calculated risk that he isn't a homicidal quick-draw champion?

Clearly the only correct answer is to camp your starting location, occasionally peeking around an obstacle to see if anyone's out there, and turtling like there's no tomorrow.

It's worked so far. No possibly-homicidal-quick-draw-champion aliens encountered today! Good job, Team!

That shouldn't be overlooked. A species that is social enough to cooperate and build a civilization, and curious enough to develop science, might stay their hand out of loneliness or curiosity.

Or perhaps this is a grim answer to Fermi's Paradox: the galaxy is quiet because someone preemptively wiped out the competition a long time ago.

Or perhaps this is a grim answer to Fermi's Paradox: the galaxy is quiet because someone preemptively wiped out the competition a long time ago.

Except us?

I think the implication is that we're (possibly alone) among the first crop of life to spring up since this hypothetical galactic holocaust.

Maybe it was so long ago, "we" (meaning life on Earth) weren't considered "competition."

The metaphor doesn't work because there are too many dissimilarities between meeting a human on an unknown island and meeting another species in space, under the conditions that life is forever planet-bound. You could slightly improve the metaphor if you meet the guy and he has a gun pointed at the head of everyone you ever knew or loved and behaved like an unpredictable raving lunatic (or at least someone that you fundamentally can not understand the motivations of). But you're still better off just dealing with the issue directly; metaphors will lead you very astray here, if only because metaphors are intrinsically populated with humans and human things in a problem domain that is most emphatically not human.

Your alternative scenario boils down to "who cares if other people are watching, let's go develop warp drive so they will feel right talking to us." As the Prime Directive of Star Fleet tells us.

The Prime Directive is a way of writing exciting television shows that allows you to put characters that ought to be far too powerful to actually be in a dramatic bind into a dramatic bind, not a model for actual interstellar behavior. For that to actually "exist" would require that every species in the galaxy not only has a "human-like" mind, but one of a very particular and unusual bent, most of which probably comes from watching a particular show. This seems unlikely.

(Far, far more likely in my mind would be the uplift scenario, that helping these civilizations would be seen as a moral duty once that was actually a real possibility. And it also sort of requires Star-Trek-like limits on technology as well; the Federation lacks the capability to rewrite a primitive civilization from the gene level up, but that seems an unrealistic limitation in real life. And that's not even what I consider the "most likely" scenario; I'm just saying that anyone who tried to instantiate the Prime Directive would probably break down into this moral duty idea pretty quickly. Why sit and wait for them to develop when you can just make it happen? Artificiality of development is a small concern next to potentially billions of unnecessary deaths. Whoever is out there, watching us war and burn and die and doing nothing, is not being an upstanding moral citizen.)

Whoever is out there, watching us war and burn and die and doing nothing, is not being an upstanding moral citizen.)

Really? Do you go out of your way to stop fish and insects from killing each other?

edit: I admit this was a badly phrased example. Fish and insects rarely kill each other.

Human history has shown that just dropping technological advancement on human cultures leads to trouble. If their culture is one of tribal warfare rather than modern civilization, there's a very good chance that all your aid will just be used to support their efforts to kill the other guy.

It could be that to aliens, our planet's shared culture is still too close to tribal warfare for them to be comfortable raising us to their level. It wouldn't be quite the same as the Prime Directive as a motive, but it would have the same effect in a lot of situations.

False dichotomy. You are not limited to writing a blank technological check to a civilization or leaving them utterly alone. A false dichotomy that demonstrates your thought is still far too shaped by viewing Star Trek, IMHO. I grew up with that show but I've come to understand it is really an incredible memetic hazard when it comes to trying to understand the universe as it truly is. If your concept of the universe includes anything that looks like Star Trek still in it, examine it immediately and prepare to discard it.

Am I limited to either putting my child immediately in the driver's seat of my car or tossing him out into the wild and letting him fend for himself? My point not being that we are metaphorically children; I don't like metaphors like that, we are what we are and we have no idea whether we are or are not like children. My point is that we are not limited to such constrained choices.

It's not influenced by Star Trek. As I said, my reasoning is completely unrelated to the Prime Directive — the effect just happens to look the same in the context of an advanced, peaceful culture meeting a more primitive, tribal one.

It actually comes from my observations of politics on earth. Countries with closely shared cultures and correspondingly close levels of advancement in certain areas tend to be more trustworthy with the technology they create than countries that were previously poor and balkanized. Most of our intrusion in Africa and the Middle East, even when it's intended to help, tends to just get more people killed. This is not to say that everyone there is a savage, but their culture just isn't at a point where it prepares the citizens or the leaders to handle elements of our culture properly.

I don't see how a parent and child relationship is applicable here either. It doesn't tend to happen that way in international politics, so I see no reason to believe it would be more like that on a galactic scale.

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