Comment by elihu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by elihu | Hacker News Reader

This seems like the most controversial bit here:

> There’s a strange contradiction revealed by the naïveté and kindness demonstrated by humanity when faced with the universe: On Earth, humankind can step onto another continent, and without a thought, destroy the kindred civilizations found there through warfare and disease. But when they gaze up at the stars, they turn sentimental and believe that if extraterrestrial intelligences exist, they must be civilizations bound by universal, noble, moral constraints, as if cherishing and loving different forms of life are parts of a self-evident universal code of conduct.

> I think it should be precisely the opposite: Let’s turn the kindness we show toward the stars to members of the human race on Earth and build up the trust and understanding between the different peoples and civilizations that make up humanity. But for the universe outside the solar system, we should be ever vigilant, and be ready to attribute the worst of intentions to any Others that might exist in space. For a fragile civilization like ours, this is without a doubt the most responsible path.

I think his books a good reminder that even the interstellar equivalent of saying "howdy neighbor" is incredibly risky. And I agree that we should behave better towards each other even if I don't look forward to "a day when humanity will form a harmonious whole" if that means world government and suppression of "non-harmonious" opinions. On the other hand, I don't think that alien species are doomed to be adversaries. Populations don't need to grow forever exponentially, and empires don't need to always expand.

For my part, I think we should be careful about announcing our presence and should be very careful around any alien civilization, especially those that are more technologically advanced than ourselves. But we also could learn a lot from each other, and so initially being friendly and abiding by a tit-for-tat strategy if they become aggressive seems like a good approach.

I can think of a few simple (maybe simplistic) reasons for the dichotomy:

* We imagine theoretical "people"/beings to be good, but are confronted with the complicated reality of our neighbors. Non-human entities remain strictly theoretical, untainted by the same reality.

* We see spacefaring beings as advanced beyond ourselves, and aspirationally believe that goodness accrues with advancement. Or at the very least, that our trivial little human problems are beneath the concerns of sufficiently-advanced societies.

* We believe that much human conflict is driven by resource scarcity, and that a spacefaring culture surely does not lack for resources.

The opposite conclusion can be drawn from one of the other major drivers of human conflict: religious/etc ideology.

We humans have no (widespread) ideology that is so nihilistic as to advocate for the elimination of all humans, but we are pretty good about constructing ideologies that would eliminate large percentages of other humans.

If we made contact with another civilization (or were made contact with), I would be shocked if some major religion didn't declare the aliens to be apostate/devilspawn/etc -- because how else could a non-Earth-based civilization fit into the mythology?

Christianity has been fairly responsive to modern reforms. Logic notwithstanding, you sweep a hand and say "God created them too, they are siblings from another star."

Granted, that'd be a really hard sell for most mainstream branches of any religion.

But, to your point, you said some major religion, and there are already some major religions that declare Christians to be OK to kill.

Definitely going to depend on the religion, and even the sect. Catholicism already has doctrine to deal with it developed back when there were stories about inhuman dog people inhabiting the continent of Africa.

Can you be more specific?

Another idea, maybe a certain type of person is the one pondering intergalactic relations. I'm not sure all humans would be so friendly if they came to think about it.

Tit-for-tat assumes a relatively equivalent level of negative outcome for each. There's very little reason to assume an alien civilization would be, and a few reasons to assume they would be quite a bit more advanced and with more resources.

Responding in a friendly manner to a direct communication is a good idea. Telling your whole tribe to run to the beach and look at and call to the large wooden boat passing by on the other hand...

One can imagine a scenario where the only way our species survives is to detect an alien civilization before they detect us, and to nuke their homeworld preemtively because they would do the same to us. Tit-for-tat doesn't really work when a first-strike can kill everyone. Or to put it another way, tit-for-tat only works in iterated prisoner's dilemma. If an encounter with aliens is more like a single-round prisoner's dilemma, we're in a bit of a bind.

(Even more likely is the scenario where we're so far behind technologically that the best we can do is hope they're friendly; if they aren't, there's nothing much we can do about it.)

However, even if alien races aren't constrained by anything we would recognize as morality, we are (sometimes) constrained by our own morality. I think that's a good thing.

> Or to put it another way, tit-for-tat only works in iterated prisoner's dilemma. If an encounter with aliens is more like a single-round prisoner's dilemma, we're in a bit of a bind.

The only way the dark forest scenario is not an iterated prisoner's dilemma (albeit an odd one) is if no information about the encounter can leak to subsequent first encounters.

In other words, if you're going to eliminate anyone you encounter with a preemptive first strike, you had better hope that you have the means to prevent your victims from sending distress calls and warnings so no one ever hears about your actions before they encounter you.

That's only a problem if your own location is revealed. In the dark forest, everyone is hidden and attacks are anonymous.

Yeah, the anonymity aspect seemed a bit unrealistic, it only works in the book because of huge gulfs between the technology levels of civilizations (like literally unraveling subatomic particles and spacetime) that allow the use of weapons that cannot be mitigated by any means available.

I'm not sure that given such a disparity, the first-strike strategy makes sense.

Once you're experiencing an exponentially acceleration of technological progress, why bother wiping out anyone just starting out? They can't catch up. And if you're worried about civilizations more advanced than yours, why give them a potential clue to your location by attacking anyone else?

Clearly, only civilizations that are quite close to your own capabilities can be a credible threat, and those are ones you don't have such an overwhelming advantage over.

The aliens in Cixin Liu's books don't blow each other up because they're trying to expand. They do it because there's no defense against getting blown up, so the only safe option is to blow up the other guys as soon as you detect them. There's no possibility of a tit-for-tat if you're dead as soon as the other side defects.

I once read an article that calculated how much warning we'd have, if we could detect an incoming projectile at the edge of the solar system, and it were approaching the Earth at .99c. Since it would be traveling just behind the light we see from it, the answer was eight seconds. Cixin Liu might have a point.

I suppose one could apply the same argument to say that it would be a bad thing for humanity to become a multi-planetary species. If it did, the same logic would apply; once at a certain level of development, either planet could destroy the other as a first-strike. It doesn't really matter from a game theory point of view whether the planets are both human or one human and the other alien.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com