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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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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?

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.

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.

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."

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!

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