[bob1029]

> The relevance of this is that had the object indeed been discovered earlier, then there would have been some possibility that humanity could have mounted an intercept mission, a recourse that was out-of-the-question by the time 3I/ATLAS was actually detected

The only kind of intercept mission that would make sense to me from a game theory perspective is a totally blind, large scale thermonuclear weapon strike. The first thing that it wakes up to shouldn't be a harmless probe that can only phone home the bad news.

[tzs]

Here's an interesting PBS Space Time video [1], "Dark Forest: Should We NOT Contact Aliens?", that goes over some of the game theory that a civilization might want to consider when deciding how visible to allow themselves to be to others.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXYf47euE3U

[nine_k]

It's not all the dark forest; sometimes it's the shine of a a warm welcome!