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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   3254 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 29, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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If there were highly advanced and malevolent civilizations lurking out there, barring truly out there technologies and an implausible ability to cover their tracks in terms of emissions and signatures from before they knew how to start hiding or even the ability to do so, then there is simply no sense in trying to hide.

There are seriously powerful civilizations in that universe, powers that could snap the Xeelee like a twig. At one point they suggest that the fundamentals of mathematics were weaponized. I think most of the big players were never even biological, they were born when the universe was young, in higher dimensions.

If they RKV you, so fucking what,

The primary danger doesn't come from relativistic kill vehicles, it comes from one of the higher powers saying 'hey, these guys are behaving a little oddly and might become a future threat, let's stomp them to paste. We're not going to use sunbusting RKVs, we're going to utterly flatten them.' You don't want to draw attention to yourself. Fire off too many RKVs and you might draw the ire of the bigger fish. Outposts past the Oort won't save you from them.

I'm not just talking about the in-universe justifications about the Three Body Problem, it certainly takes its liberties with physics or at least goes hard on the speculation aspect of hard scifi.

I'm talking mostly about our own universe, and to the extent that we have no real reason to think that most of the 3BP tech we see has any basis in reality, my explanation for why the Dark Forest Hypothesis doesn't work is grounded in reality ad we know it. While it's not a bad book, it certainly popularized the notion, and has many people taking it seriously as an explanation for the Fermi Paradox IRL, which it absolutely isn't.

I think it's useful in showing a deeply weird equilibrium which can only be explained by knowledge they don't yet have. The humans thought they were so smart with their fusion drives and railgun battleships...

We also observe a deeply weird equilibrium. Where are the grabby aliens??? Are we the first? I think we're not, I think we shouldn't extensively theorize on these issues till we understand dark matter and dark energy. It's no good getting all up in arms about the Fermi Paradox when we don't understand 95% of the universe.

What could a planetary scale superintelligence achieve in physics? What can stellar scale particle accelerators reveal? We're nowhere near the finish line and are not in a position to judge alien capabilities.

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