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Imagine you are an FTL space alien in search of other FTL civilizations. Would you parade your FTL tech around? Allow others to study your capabilities? I'd probably send something that could plausibly be identified as a rock. If there are other FTL civilizations out there, I'd like to know everything about them before they know anything about me.

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> Imagine you are an FTL space alien in search of other FTL civilizations. Would you parade your FTL tech around?

The first thing you discover when you invent FTL is that you’re the last civilisation to invent FTL.

is it reasonable to assume an FTL civilization to be so dumb to mistake a spacescraft for a rock?

I don’t know if ours is an FTL civ or not, but I do think a large number of us are mistaking our own spaceship[0] for a rock.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceship_Earth

We have aircraft today that other nationstates are "so dumb" to assume is maybe a flying ping pong ball based on radar signature, not a delta wing full of thousands of pounds of bombs.

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