Hacker News Reader

Comment by AdamJacobMuller | Hacker News Reader

> for no good reason

Why would it need to be a good reason? Especially why would it need to be a good reason, from our perspective?

Hardly an original thought but it's entirely possible that an alien civilization pro-forma sends out an unmanned planet-killer-scale weapon at every alien civilization they detect, simply to avoid the possibility that we might grow up to be hostile to them, or even compete with them for resources.

An unmanned bomb like that wouldn't take many resources and it's possible they would view us as primitively as we view stomping on an ant hill in africa.

Now that's a depressing thought.

View on HN

Or, they send out probes for science, because only humans have the insatiable appetite for destroying each other.

>"because only humans have the insatiable appetite for destroying each other."

Chimpanzees 'go to war', and so do some non-great ape species like ants and termites. Interestingly, some ant species conquer other colonies and essentially 'enslave' the defeated worker ants using pheromones. It stands to reason that belligerence would arise elsewhere in the universe because it has on Earth several times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War

Any life on Earth basically is and behaves the same. We're all cousins here.

It is unreasonable to assume aliens are anything like us.

When you're sample size is 1 it's wrong to assume that the general population is exactly like your sample. Of course, it's slightly more wrong to assume the general population is nothing like your sample.

It's entirely reasonable to assume that any life that evolves under resource constraints will have violent competition somewhere in whatever means of intergenerational data transport they use.

Unless we are some true outliers, like way the hell off the farm, we are likely to share with them some basics in terms of continuing to exist amidst neighbors and ignorance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com