[sudhirj]

Unfortunately, yes. The first thing we’re going to do as soon as we fine intelligent alien life is figure out how to kill it. And sadly we’ll have to assume they’re doing the same.

An no, settling Mars won’t help. If someone / something can launch an interstellar attack it can certainly attack more than one planet and moon.

[Pulcinella]

I have a far more charitable theory. The vast majority of human and alien life would want to be friends (or at least just leave their neighbors alone). It’s the elites who desire to destroy each other.

I also have a less charitable theory: intelligent life just doesn’t exist. A thousand years from now we will have met dozens of sentient species, but the search for intelligent life continues :P

[prox]

It’s also about how you define intelligence:

>“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”

― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

[me_me_me]

Are we though?

Universe is huge. Wars on earth are waged over scares resources. If we are capable of reaching aliens would we really be incentivized to fight them while there are so many resources available elsewhere?

[marcosdumay]

The amount of resources some society can gather increases with the square of time and linearly to its expansion speed. But life around here has an habit of expanding everything (including resource usage) exponentially with time.

There is a mismatch here that you are implicitly claiming that is solved for every space-faring civilization. Many people explicitly make this claim, what is reasonable, but it's not good to keep it implicit.

[Enginerrrd]

I think it's a cold war situation.

In the early years, sure, no problem. But conceivably the pace of resource utilization will increase as well. Eventually they will conflict. Worse, greedy civilizations would probably be selected for.

And how long before random differences and exponential growth mean the other side gets an overwhelming power advantage? Historically in human societies, that is essentially never a good thing.

[chess_buster]

Maybe civilisations will merge. I just had my double LOR'xin with extra pumpkin spice. Later I will resume work on my ansible station for the Y'norxa-Wallmart Corporation… hopefully I can push some lines of lox-lang to production today.

[ThalesX]

What if wars were waged for ideological reasons also? Beliefs, cultures etc.

[sudhirj]

Or just defensively. The US invaded Iraq because they might have had WMDs. Other planets might have WMDs too. And they might think we have WMDs. Doesn’t matter if any of the sides actually do.

[ceejayoz]

> The US invaded Iraq because they might have had WMDs.

Be careful not to conflate public justifications with actual motivations.

[sudhirj]

The point is that public justifications are more important than actual motivations. Actual motivations can be enslaving other beings, ruling / mining an extra planet or just wanting to watch the universe burn. Motivations are already present because there are millions of motivations that map on to the same result - destruction of another group of living things. I'm pointing out that it's easy to find public justification as well.

It's also possible to do this unilaterally. China or any other country could also unilaterally decide to destroy another planet. And same possibility on the other side.

[ceejayoz]

Motivations lead to the justifications.

The problem with interstellar warfare is, outside the "Dark Forest" concept of "kill everyone just in case", there aren't all that many motivations that seem to make sense.

Any interstellar species probably doesn't really need to steal planets, resources, etc.

[elihu]

This seems likely; both sides might see it as a prisoner's dilemma situation, where there isn't any basis for trust and it's safer to destroy the other civilization before they're destroyed themselves.

(I don't think Iraq was actually such a situation, but at least on the American side some influential decision makers may have believed that it was.)

On the other hand, you might have something more like a cold war situation, where both sides have the capacity to destroy the other completely or almost completely but not without an equivalent counterattack, and so both sides have much more to lose than to gain by striking first.

[sudhirj]

Habitable planets are the ultimate scarce resource. Once the earth is full we’ll have to find a way to move and there’s less than 5 good options in this solar system. In time they’ll be full too.

[ClumsyPilot]

Not at all, first our population will never exceed 11 billion, and most developed countries are in a demographic crisis. There is no sign of this trend reversing anywhere.

Second, what does 'earth is full' even mean? We have vast swaths of 'useless' land, like arctic and desert. Cities/towns/anything cover like 1% of the world. It is easier to desalinate water / build cities and greenhouses in deserts than it is to move people to another planet. We could host a lot more people if we adopted some serious geoengineering and built greenhouses /ate less meat.

Thirdly, travel to another star system requires insane amounts of energy, and could only be done by civilisations that already have enormous space infrastructure and industry. In which case you build habitats like we build skyscrapers, you can terraform, etc. In that case you don't need or want to ship billions of people to another star system.

[rsynnott]

> Habitable planets are the ultimate scarce resource.

Are they? That was once a common belief, but recent results in extrasolar planet searching would tend to contradict it, or at least cast it into serious doubt.

> Once the earth is full we’ll have to find a way to move

Will we? It's quite possible we'll see humanity's maximum population within the next century. Malthusianism didn't really survive contact with modernity; it turns out that most people don't particularly _want_ to have fifteen children, and as countries develop their population tends to become self-limiting. Wholesale emigration off earth feels like a very unlikely solution to population pressure, especially given that society seems to be automatically solving it.

And if we have the energy to lift billions of people off earth, we also have the energy to massively increase population density. Food, in particular, is ultimately largely a question of energy; we typically grow it in fields today, but given super-cheap energy there are other options.

[ceejayoz]

If we've got the technology to travel between stars, we've probably also got the tech to leave planets behind entirely, or to terraform, or to adapt ourselves to conditions.

[Enginerrrd]

The only logical path is to download our brains onto computers, which will happen before that point. Once that technology exists, that's the only form of life that will dominate. Robots, nano-machines and hyper-intelligences will blow easily damaged flesh with finite lifespans. Habitable regions would be massively expanded.

[aeonflux]

If we can live inside a computer and create our entire world what will be the motivation to explore the universe?

[Enginerrrd]

Because we'll need energy and resources to run the computers!

[LocalH]

When you can figure out how to physically attach consciousness to a machine, get back to me

[Enginerrrd]

I understand the criticism but I think that moment will come LONG before we start effectively colonizing or terraforming the other planets. Id bet a LOT of money on that.

[jcelerier]

the only thing that matters is for it to look like the consciousness has been attached.

[jessaustin]

I've never forgotten the scene in the OSC short story "Fat Farm", in which the protagonist's mind has been copied to his clone, which clone has left the facility to "continue" to enjoy his fine life, and the protagonist realizes he hasn't thought about what comes next. The answer is grim.

A consciousness might awake in the machine, but it won't be my consciousness.

[ls612]

Who says habitable to us == habitable to hypothetical aliens?