The aliens would have to be stupid to list a planet as solved for tens of millions of years after killing off the dominant life forms, because, well, a new one will just evolve in short order, exactly as has happened on earth, and they ought to know this.
The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs would be insufficient to eliminate a life bearing planet as a potential future source of a threat appearing, unless you hit such planets regularly in that manner every few million years or so. If you were really going to do a policy like this, you’d want to hit the planet hard enough to completely sterilize the place, or at least kill off everything bigger than a microbe.
Not at all, there is nothing physically impossible about someone engaging on projects that take centuries or millennia to complete, it just requires a lot of patience and effort. Finding or even attacking an alien species does not fundamentally require anything disallowed by physics, it just requires a long timescale to do slower than light. My assumption was just that any hostile aliens would simply conduct those hostilities over very long periods of time. Having interstellar travel at all, assuming no ftl, sort of implies a willingness to undergo these kinds of long term efforts anyway, and it doesn’t seem absurd to imagine that anyone with the technology to have those kinds of energies at their disposal might also have very advanced medical technology, such that they might live a very long time, which could lend itself to more long term thinking.
I’m aware the information would be out of date, that was part of my point in another response for one of the reasons I don’t imagine the scenario works, because attacks arrive at a distant point in the future. I’ve never personally heard the dark forest scenario as requiring ftl tech, making that a requirement seems to make the entire premise moot as it requires throwing a pretty fundamental part of physics out to even contemplate.
I was presuming that nobody has any ftl tech, given that it seems to violate the laws of physics for such a technology to exist. And you can look virtually everywhere, in the galaxy at least, with the right technology (and probably less advanced a tech than needed for manned space travel, what you need is a machine, capable of using the resources available in some asteroid to construct more of itself, and send those copies off towards other star systems. These probes would multiply exponentially until they’ve explored every star in the galaxy, with no further input required beyond building the first one)
The resources required to attack every life bearing planet only really becomes super expensive compared to waiting for civilization to arise if life is very common but civilization is not, which is admittedly a possible scenario, but by no means guaranteed. But consider: any civilization capable of launching an attack on another, particularly one that can be considered highly likely to completely destroy the target in a single strike (which you absolutely need, because if a target survives your attack, it now knows that you exist and even if it did not also follow your “attack everyone” doctrine, will see you as an existential and hostile threat) must necessarily have interstellar travel technology. The amount of time needed to develop this, and the amount of energy and resources this capability implies, make it highly likely that they have very good automated manufacturing as well. With those two technologies, you dont need to listen for radio signals or similar. You can send a tiny and difficult to spot or trace probe to every star out there (potentially at almost no cost if you can make a probe that can extract raw materials and build copies of itself, but even if you cant do that, the probes can be much smaller and lighter than a planet killing projectile and so if you can build one of those, you can at least launch a probe to every world with atmospheric compositions indicative of possible life, to observe from close range and tell you if civilization arises there. Thus, any civilization that wants to follow this policy is impossible to hide from, it doesnt matter if you send radio signals or not, or if you build structures that are visible or not, because your position was compromised before you even considered that there might be something to hide from. If youre a civilization that worries that aliens might be hostile, then, trying to hide makes no sense, because it wont help. What would make sense instead then is to try to grow as far and as fast as possible, in the hopes of acquiring enough redundancy that your neighbors dont have the capacity to destroy you, or at least enough that they arent sure that they do. This kind of growth doesnt seem to be the policy of anyone we see either though, because it should be visible even to us (we can see stars, and if you want to grow as much as you can and have automated manufacturing, you could start to build dyson swarms and similar structures that would visibly change the amount of light that reaches us from a given star).
Now, there are a few responses to this line of thinking that I’ve seen: The first is that a civilization this paranoid might not want to expand to other stars, because a colony in another system is so distant as to be effectively a new civilization, which might turn hostile to you, and is right at the next star over, and so civilizations might just stay in one star system and launch attacks from there. This doesnt really help them hide, as for the reasons Ive just mentioned, they should be easy to spot by anyone that actually has the ability to threaten them, but it might make it less likely for us to see, which is all that matters for the fermi paradox. But these aliens would still be able to send out probes to spy on our planet, so if theyre within around 5000 light years or so, they should have been able to see us develop civilization, and so if thats what they want to destroy, we again, shouldnt exist to contemplate this right now (and if theyre much further away then this, and theyre still worried that we might be a threat, then they really do need to destroy us before civilization ever arises, for reasons Ill get into in a moment). These hypothetical aliens must in order to make sense have a different policy than just “destroy anything smart enough to develop civilization”. The next most obvious trigger then is “destroy anyone that makes it into space”. Suppose then that you’re these aliens. Your probes report some aliens on a planet 500 light years away (given the galaxy is in the ballpark of 100000 light years wide, this is in your cosmic backyard, relatively speaking), or if youve not done the probes, you hear some radio signal indicating this. You decide to launch an attack. But, you have a problem. That signal from your probes (or the radio signals if you hear those instead) was sent out 500 years ago, and even if your attack moves at lightspeed (it wont unless its something like a laser, but you probably want to launch something at a large fraction of that speed, so lightspeed is still a decent estimate) its still going to be 1000 years between when that species started going into space, and your attack arriving. Thats almost certainly enough time to colonize a lot of their solar system, so just attacking their homeworld probably isnt enough. Do you attack every large celestial body in that star system just in case? They could also have significant habitats and industry and such in orbit of various objects, or in orbit of their sun, so even that might not be enough. Worse, that thousand years of space could be enough time to start to get into interstellar travel themselves, so you might need to target every system within a certain radius of their home star, and even worse than that, if theyre just as paranoid as you, its enough time that they could conceivably begin to launch their own interstellar attacks, and if they happen to see your home star and think “that looks like it might have life, lets attack it”, then your policy was insufficient. Youre not launching an attack against a newly space fairing civilization, youre launching one against whatever exists in that area of space when your attack finally arrives. Thus, you really need to attack well before civilizations start to go into space. If we’re anything to go by, the time between early space exploration and industrial revolution is only a matter of a couple of centuries, so something like industry or radio is also too late, unless your targets are in a very narrow window of distance. If you’re within a few thousand light years (still relatively close compared to the size of the galaxy) then you really should be attacking by no later than the first sign of early civilization, and if youre farther than that, as I mentioned earlier, you really should attack before civilized life ever even arises, because there would be time for a planet to go from having literal cavemen to an emerging interstellar empire before your attack even got to them, and once they have interstellar travel, you dont know exactly where they’re all going to be, and they have the capacity to at least try to attack you. So, you either attack before civilization in which case we shouldnt be here, or you colonize the galaxy yourself to have outposts nearby to any emerging aliens, which is fundamentally not stealthy, and which again means we shouldnt be here because our planet should have been colonized by said aliens before we could ever evolve.
The other response Ive seen before is that maybe, nobody is actually willing to engage in a policy of genocide at first sight like this, but everyone is afraid that someone might be doing so, and so everyone hides despite there being nothing to hide from, and so we see no aliens. But this assumes that everyone considers this possibility, deliberately holds back their own development by trying to hide, despite probably also realizing that hiding is futile anyway, and that nobody across the galaxy ever, or has ever, not done this and so had the galaxy to claim for itself, which seems absurdly unlikely, especially given those hiding still have the option to send the probes, and potentially discover that everyone else is doing the same and so knows of them anyway.
The TLDR of this, because I know this was a rather lot of text for just a response to this, is: The dark forest assumes that one isnt a target unless one takes action that reveals oneself, and that one can be sure of destroying any civilization one knows about in a first strike, and that these are the only options available with no way to try to make oneself a less vulnerable target. None of these assumptions seem reasonable upon further pondering, and if they do not hold, the scenario does not make sense.
Fortunately for us, this one isn’t too likely, because realistically, an alien civilization capable of travelling the relevant distance and destroying another civilization isn’t something that can be hidden from. They should be able, fairly easily, to examine every planet in the galaxy and see which ones have life on them, and wipe it out before any civilization ever arises at all. The fact that we exist at all necessarily implies that nobody in this galaxy has been committed to going this, at least for the past billion years or so.
Funnily enough the instance my masto is on also uses that motto, tho for an entirely different reason
Much, possibly most, of the lemmy userbase is just people that used to use reddit until recently or still do, so this is unsurprising
If you don’t want your posts/content to appear on other websites from the one you posted it on, why would you use a federated platform in the first place? Isn’t the entire point of these kinds of platforms that this kind of content is shared between sites?
And on a mostly unrelated side note, that bit about people trying to force the website to display CP to get the owner in legal trouble is exactly the reason why strict liability crimes that don’t care about intent are a bad idea
I’d focus less on the actual guns, and more on the ammunition. Guns don’t fire without them, so if a potential shooter can’t get ammo, the effect is the same as if they can’t get a gun, but there are a few crucial differences:
Guns are increasingly easy to manufacture at home if one so desires, with things like 3-d printed guns becoming a thing, and as such, I feel that trying to regulate the actual gun is a losing battle in the not too distant future. A gun is basically just a lump of metal, or any sufficiently strong material, arranged into a certain shape. Bullets however require explosives, and explosives with the right properties at that, and the ability to manufacture that at home is much less common, and would be subject to regulation anyway given the inherit danger of explosive chemicals.
I would not totally ban bullets, mind. Even if that could somehow be made to work constitutionally, there is still the issue that there are some legitimate and generally harmless uses for a gun (things like hunting or sport target-shooting at a safely cordoned off place like a range), and that while uses like home defense might not be particularly likely to help much statistically, they are still culturally important in the US, so if you manage to entirely ban them, people will probably vote in people later who will reverse the bans, and then you have the problem back. In a democracy, one has to try to align with what the people want, and any gun control law in the US is going to have to be made to acknowledge that, like it or not, a significant fraction of the country like guns and want to be able to have them in some capacity. This doesn’t mean that we should give up on gun control, but that the legislation needs to be more nuanced than just “no more guns allowed, problem solved”.
What I would do, is give an allowance for how many bullets one is allowed to purchase in a given period of time, and a quite small one. One would be allowed to purchase more than than this if it can be proven that the previously purchased rounds have been fired, for example, by bringing back the spent casings (I figure this would have an added benefit in incentivising people to find and clean up these when doing things like hunting or practice shooting at home). I figure that, given that hunting rifles tend to be single-shot devices that aren’t fired a whole lot in a single trip (since a loud noise like a gunshot will probably scare off a deer if one misses), and that home defense weapons like a revolver don’t get fired often at all and don’t need to have more than a couple rounds to be a deterrent, having only a handful of rounds available at once shouldn’t impact these uses too much. One would also be allowed to buy ammunition in unrestricted quantities at a licensed and inspected (for compliance with laws like this one) gun range, with the caveat that unused ammo must be returned, presumably for a refund, upon leaving, and that the range could face legal penalties if people are allowed to take ammo in exess of their normal allotment off the range. The goal of all this is to create a situation where it is very difficult to possess more than a small number of rounds at once, and thus make a mass-shooting more difficult to carry out.
hypothetically, what stops a spam group from creating their own instance to register accounts on, or several such? It’d get defederated quickly once the attack got going, sure, but it would take time for this to get done, and in the meantime the spam gets in
Ive learned a fair bit of geography from playing paradox interactive’s various games. It wont really give the best sense of modern countries borders or anything since of course theyve changed from what they were and the games diverge wildly from actual history, but the general name of certain regions, the general part of the world certain cultures are from, that kind of thing. Sometimes I’ll find interesting some small country Ive never heard of in Europa Universalis or something and go on a bit of a research tangent out of curiosity over what it actually was and what happened to it.
To be fair, the effect of stuff being cycled back into the mantle doesn’t destroy every human artifact regardless, given that some of our constructs aren’t even on earth. Though I’m not sure that the odds of anyone actually finding one of our space probes is that high, the solar system is a big place after all.
To be fair, if the standard is “literally everyone gets in”, that isn’t actually inconsistent
To be fair, murder gets a lot less horrible if the people you kill just get sent to paradise for eternity afterwards. Though of course there’s still all the torture and slavery and that he wouldn’t have thought this would happen, so it wouldn’t be much of a defense for what he did, but it would lessen the severity a bit with that information added.
I’m not religious myself let alone a Christian, but I believe there is a group that follows this kind of “everyone gets in” logic, universalists
So far as I understand, there is a common idea that Texas has the legal ability to leave it it wants, but it’s just a popular myth as far as I’m aware. Whatever their state constitution says doesn’t matter anyway, because federal law trumps state laws and as far as I’m know there’s not a legal mechanism for states to leave again, it’d have to either get the government as a whole to make legal or possibly even constitutional changes to allow it, or leave illegally, either by force or by having a sympathetic government just not press the matter and just ignore the laws in question. I can’t really see them getting enough support for the former two, they’re too weak compared to the federal government for an actual war, and the current administration is not likely to just let them go, so I don’t expect them to go anywhere unless one of those things drastically changes.
I’m not sure if it’s what you mean exactly, but every time I buy sour cream, I’m shocked at how cheap it is, compared to other dairy products
To be fair, that’s not really true for fascism. It doesn’t usually end peacefully and almost never easily, but historically it certainly has come to an end in various places in various ways. I’m not saying this to say that it’s somehow okay, but rather that should it come to pass, people should not give up trying to thwart it.
My suspicion is that it’s abiogenesis, but it’s only a suspicion that I can’t have any certainty of