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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

To an alien without our particular brand of 21st century capital ethics, I'm not sure that the US is winning Civilization Earth.

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It likely would be the biggest threat given the weapons tech though. You generally want to study the things that pose the biggest threat for self preservation.

This is highly speculative on both of our parts. I do think it's presumptuous to assume we'd be a threat to an entity that traveled >4ly. It sounds a lot like picking which classical civilization to study based on how strong their bows are when you are traveling in a stealth bomber.

Seems a bit odd that a being that could build a craft that flies further than 4 light years would end up crashing.

It was an interplanetary endeavour. Unfortunately, some programmers encoded intersystem travel using the Universal Unit, while others used the Multiversal Metric System.

Maybe a bee got in the cockpit?

"I do think it's presumptuous to assume we'd be a threat"

You don't have to be a threat, just appear as the biggest possible one.

"based on how strong their bows are when you are traveling in a stealth bomber."

One has to know what a bow is and that they only have bows to come to that summary conclusion. If you have no knowledge of the capabilities, caution is warranted - whether we're talking about civilizations or a new species of spider.

If you somehow found a way to get a wooden arrow with a stone arrowhead on it into the engine of a Stealth Bomber at the wrong time and place, you may very well cause a big fireworks show. Less has taken down the engines of commercial airliners when a screw comes loose or something.

Advanced technology != invincibility. Actually, a lot of times the more advanced tech is, the more vulnerable it is to catastrophic failure.

We're talking about beings capable of harnessing enough energy to travel interstellar distances, possibly even harnessing (let's say for the sake of argument) strange new physics like warp drive or wormholes. They'll know at a glance whether we're a threat just by our scale of energy output, and they'll be able to tell from light-years away. No species that hasn't already colonized their solar system or started mining the plasma from their home star is going to be worth worrying about.

"They'll know at a glance whether we're a threat just by our scale of energy output,"

Except we don't use our most powerful energy source (nuclear weapons).

They would still be orders of magnitude past that. Probably Kardashev type 2 at least. A couple of nukes probably aren't going to scare them.

I think advanced aliens would laugh at our kardashev scale and say "well it's a lot more nuanced than that" especially considering we don't see a single shred of evidence that anyone out there has a dyson swarm. It's probably the wrong metric to use. If they're up there, whatever they're up to, it's probably really interesting and not just about energy consumption.

Imagine watching two beetles fight and deciding that you need to pay most attention to the stronger beetle because it's a better fighter.

You’d think that would go to the country or countries with tenuous chains of custody over their nuclear weapons, not the US.

(I’m saying that mostly for the sake of argument, not because I think your reasoning is incorrect.)

Advanced aliens may be even more capitalistic.

Someone should let the Singaporean cranks know, then!

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