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by hazeii 1872 days ago
...or because they're out there, and when they notice us they'll splat us like we'd splat an ant nest with no more thought than that.
4 comments

I vaguely recall a story to that effect? Scientists finally receive a brief interstellar message of intelligent origin. After painstaking study, a breakthrough and finally they decipher it:

Be quiet! They'll hear you.

I was about to comment that it's somewhat similar to The Three Body Problem that's often discussed on hn's comments sections from time to time but decided to search for that last phrase and apparently it's from a /r/nosleep story:

https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/2j3nxz/radio_silen...

...or the intelligent life in the universe is so beyond us that, even though they have the capability to communicate, or even visit, they don't see us as worth contacting. Perhaps them talking to us would be like us talking to a tree stump or a bucket of plankton.

Perhaps it's not even a conscious decision on their part. Perhaps all our achievements, everything we are, isn't recognized amongst alien-kind beyond a short 1 line entry in an alien log file,. Perhaps their monitoring system detects and discards a thousand worthless blips like us every day.

What if we're just not that special

Let's just count the number of movies where we kill the aliens versus where we get to live with them.
The speed of light is too slow for them to pull that off. They are limited by the same physics as us. There are some possible loopholes like wormholes, but even they are limited.