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Comment by jjs | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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."

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