[ggffjhgftg]

If you reduce down your idea to an animals in the woods you will quickly see why.

Humans become a rabbit, the malicious species a fox, the benevolent species humans.

If the rabbit is injured, making noise and hoping for humans to help is a fools errand as the fox is more likely to hear and eat the rabbit.

This is engrained in our evolution.

[beambot]

You've described a predator-prey dynamic.

How does this play out with two apex predators...? When you travel in bear-infested woods, the common refrain is to make your presence known -- better to let the other apex predator aware of your existence so you can both give one another a wide berth. Or the Teddy Roosevelt style - walk softly, but carry a big stick.

[yreg]

Fox obtains value from hunting a rabbit (food).

What value is there to get from going into interstellar war (provided such a thing is even practical).

[rizzom5000]

The theory is that there may be civilizations, or remnants (AIs), that have a vested interest in removing possible competition for resources, or in the case of the AIs, have been instructed to snuff out signs of life for the same reason.

[yreg]

There are plenty of unclaimed resources.

If you are the first one and want to make sure to prevent all future advanced civilizations from evolving, you send out von Neumann probes. You can tell them to build relativistic kill missiles and destroy all planets. No planets = no new civs, probably.

[bufferoverflow]

> There are plenty of unclaimed resources.

You don't know that. Maybe our planet once had some amazing high-energy isotope/mineral that was completely mined out.

[Intralexical]

There is no such thing. I think physics and economics dictates that you can't really be advanced enough for interstellar industry and yet backwards enough to have the type of resource scarcity which would compel interstellar resource competition.

If these aliens can not only travel but do resource extraction at interstellar distances, that implies having highly advanced fusion or annihilation reactors.

Minerals are just chemical reaction products, and therefore necessarily cost negligible energy to synthesize compared to interstellar travel. It's easier to just make the minerals you need.

Isotopes are finite in number, and we already know and largely understand all the ones are likely to ever be useful. "Island of Stability" nuclei may or may not be possible beyond that, but even if they're not only possible but also useful, they will almost certainly have halflives short enough that they will also have to be synthesized rather than mined. So, there's no competing over planets either way.

At the lower end of the tech levels where you can have interstellar industry, the only "amazingly high-energy isotope/mineral" is hydrogen fusion fuel. There's nothing in the Earth's crust or core that could be useful for them, because terrestrial planets are made out of spent nuclear detritus. Though maybe they can bring a big fusion candle and just run off with Jupiter, if they forget about their own gas giants and stars.

At the higher end of the tech scale, even hydrogen stops being a resource. Matter annihilation (e.g. via microscopic black holes) means that it doesn't matter what element or chemical your fuel is made out of when you're converting it directly to energy.

I think any resource competition argument for "dark forest" exopolitics really undersells how vast space is, and how abundant resources are. A single Jupiter with basic fusion reactors could easily sustain quadrillions of humans in enormously inefficient utopian living conditions for trillions of years. [1] It's going to need to get a lot more crowded before fighting over minerals is something that any sane interstellar civilization would worry about.

---

1: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%28jupitermass%2Fpro...

[bufferoverflow]

> If these aliens can not only travel but do resource extraction at interstellar distances, that implies having highly advanced fusion or annihilation reactors.

No, it doesn't. You don't know what you don't know. Aliens can have tech based on some rare isotope/mineral/whatever.

> Minerals are just chemical reaction products, and therefore necessarily cost negligible energy to synthesize compared to interstellar travel. It's easier to just make the minerals you need.

Unless these minerals require special rare isotopes or some other material we're not yet aware.

> Isotopes are finite in number, and we already know and largely understand all the ones are likely to ever be useful.

No, we do not. Google "island of stability".

> At the lower end of the tech levels where you can have interstellar industry, the only "amazingly high-energy isotope/mineral" is hydrogen fusion fuel.

That statement isn't a fact. Unless you magically synthesized all possible isotopes and materials. Which you didn't.

> There's nothing in the Earth's crust or core that could be useful for them

But maybe there was, that's the argument.

> Matter annihilation (e.g. via microscopic black holes)

Again, you're talking about known science. Not everything. You don't know what you don't know.

> A single Jupiter with basic fusion reactors could easily sustain quadrillions of humans in enormously inefficient utopian living conditions for trillions of years.

Yes, but that has nothing to do with the argument we're having. It doesn't disprove that there might have been some rare resource (or maybe it's still here, we just didn't get to it).

[causality0]

Offense is easier than defense. How do you know some other civilization isn't going to, say, get angry at their own decline and unleash destructive Von Neumann machines on the galaxy?

[stouset]

By the time you know whether or not another civilization is hostile, it’s probably too late. “Interstellar war” sounds like a long dragged-out set of engagements when it’s more likely that one random day without warning your planet intersects a sizable chunk of tungsten traveling at 0.9c.

Better to strike first than gamble.

[perilunar]

Another reason not to confine your civilisation to one planet, or to planets generally.

Much harder to wipe out a civilisation that's dispersed among hundreds or thousands of smaller space colonies. Especially if many of those colonies are hidden in an asteroid belt of millions of rocks.

[stouset]

Take out Earth, Mars, and Venus for good measure.

Whatever scattered remnants that are left of humanity hanging out in the asteroid belt are going to have a hell of a time finding food to eat or oxygen to breathe.

[perilunar]

Why?

Do you think they'll be reliant on planets for food an oxygen? That's daft — they will be growing their own food and mining their own oxygen.

Also, I doubt they will be "scattered remnants" — there's likely to eventually be a far larger population off-planet than on.

[deepsun]

Oxygen is highly toxic for most materials. I'd expect advanced civilizations to avoid oxygen.

[DistractionRect]

Resources. Perhaps their star will soon (on a cosmic timescale) consume their planet and they're looking for another solar system to inhabit. Labor for their Dyson sphere. Who knows. But, if something goes out of their way to make contact, odds are it won't be a friendly hello.

[yreg]

There's an abundance of resources in the countless uninhabited systems.

[dotancohen]

Mineral resources, possibly. But how about labor resources? Or food?

[yreg]

I’m convinced that interstellar travel is incredibly difficult or even totally impractical.

If you are a civ who is able to do it, surely you can grow whatever food you need at home and have advanced AI/robotics that can provide labour.

That being said, Harry Turtledove wrote a great story about interstellar travel being easy and humanity somehow missing that branch of the tech tree.

Road Not Taken: https://www.eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf

[dotancohen]

  > If you are a civ who is able to do it, surely you can grow whatever food you need at home and have advanced AI/robotics that can provide labour.

That's about as reasonable an argument as "if you drive a Tesla, surely you can afford to donate to my cause". Maybe they are way over-invested in their FTL technology and really have no choice but to look for external labour. Maybe they painted themselves into a corner with the FTL tech that can get them here, but they need our labour to enable their drives to restart for the trip back. Or maybe whatever reasoning they have is so _alien_ to us that we simply can not comprehend it.

[Intralexical]

Ah yes. The interstellar aliens want human slaves and cattle to compensate for their failure to invent bucket excavators and hydroponics.

[dotancohen]

Yes, it is possible that whatever FTL tech they are using will work with a living creature but not with some machine. Maybe they just encode human DNA to clone for slaves because their culture does not allow them to use their own DNA for slaves, and DNA is easy to send over their FTL tech.

When discussing aliens you have to consider that their reasoning, their culture, their motivations, their technology, their customs, their values are all _alien_ to us. You have to be open minded, for every excuse we can come up with for "why not" there are infinite explanations for "why so".

[ceejayoz]

I mean, maybe?

People still eat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ortolan_bunting despite the illegality, low nutritional value, and the ready availability of other options.

[bufferoverflow]

The value is that no other civilization will rise to wipe you out.

[Intralexical]

Tell that to Space NATO.

[Intralexical]

> If the rabbit is injured, making noise and hoping for humans to help is a fools errand as the fox is more likely to hear and eat the rabbit.

> This is engrained in our evolution.

Literally the exact opposite?

> Recent research has also shown that the acoustic properties of human screams can be reliably detected within noisy environments, something presumably indicative of having evolved in noisy environments, such as dense forests, where there is a strong adaptive pressure to reliably signal danger (Nandwana et al., 2015).

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014976341...

> Rabbit Basic Science: The only vocal sounds that are made are a loud high-pitched scream of terror or a range of growls and hums that denote pleasure or defence. Apprehensive or frightened rabbits will thump the ground with their hind feet. The loud thumping sounds acts as an alarm signal to other rabbits in the vicinity.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7158370/

> Screaming among rabbits indicates alarm associated with fear, pain, and psychological distress. Your rabbit may scream because it is scared of being attacked or dying. Rabbits also scream when they’re in excruciating pain, or when they’re having a seizure. …it is a sign of extreme pain, terror, or calling out for help.

https://www.rabbitcaretips.com/why-do-rabbits-scream/

> Lima beans release volatile chemical signals that are received by nearby plants of the same species when infested with spider mites. This 'message' allows the recipients to prepare themselves by activating defense genes, making them less vulnerable to attack, and also attracting another mite species that is a predator of spider mites (indirect defence).

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

IMO "Dark Forest Theory"— The idea that (1) nobody would ever help anyone else and (2) nobody could ever understand anyone else because (3) we're all dumb forest animals capable of nothing higher than survival, so we may as well (a) hide and (b) kill anyone that tries to talk to us­— That probably says more about the people arguing for it, or about our own providence, than it does about any probable intestellar ecology.

> Humans become a rabbit, the malicious species a fox, the benevolent species humans.

In fact, if anything, using humans as the example of a benevolent society points out the absurdity of assuming that more technologically advanced polities must necessarily be malicious.

Killers don't prosper in civilized societies. And technologically advanced societies ruled by killers don't last long.

[stoperaticless]

> that more technologically advanced polities must necessarily be malicious.

Europeans came to Africa, India and Americas with some better tech. How benevolent were europeans?

[TrnsltLife]

Relatively benevolent. They ended human sacrifice in the Americas and widow burning in India.