by no_wizard | 2025-10-22 00:33:36+00:00
>Star trek-ish idea of massive cooperation between species is desperately naive though. Its secondary-school level of hand-holding and singing kumbayah around fire, and yet it still couldn't evade massive wars that sometimes wiped out entire civilizations.

Indeed, I simply hate losing my sense of whimsy in these discussions because anything is still possible. Though realistically, yes, its worse odds than pretty much any other possibility. No disputing that.

>The space is finite, so is Milky way. Eventually, even if its far in the future, species will compete for resources and energy. The smarter ones realize that problems are easier solved as soon as possible.

Is space not ever expanding? My entire conceptualized version of what space (as in outer space) is that its always expanding, we actually have zero idea where the edges of the actual universe are, or if they even exist beyond theorizing. It may be the ultimate in lending itself to more cooperation than conflict as a result, since new resources are indefinitely being created.

Then again, if you believe expansion is constrained only to the Milky Way Galaxy (I don't see why it has to be, if we can colonize an entire galaxy I feel strongly at that point the technology for intergalactic travel exists at the same time, so we can finally see whats up in the Backward Galaxy[0]). Given this constraint, expansion over time will lead to issues inevitably but who's to say it couldn't be resolved in different capacities? Perhaps even civilizations have a natural apex expansion size (IE, its not actually infinite) and that creates natural growth boundaries. Since we aren't even a galactic species yet, we don't know how that would shape out in reality.

>and we have dark forest stuff

Or we simply don't know what stage other civilizations are in, or if they exist at all (though statistically, I've been told by people who absolutely know more than I do on multiple occasions its extremely unlikely there isn't some form of extraterrestrial life that would roughly resemble plants and animals but civilization is far less guaranteed)

We could actually be the most advanced (imagine that, it seems wild to me, but it is one possible), or it could be that indeed, it may follow the Dark Forest[1] hypothesis).

>We should work hard on improving ourselves massively and spreading out before caring whats out there. I simply can't imagine a realistic scenario where there won't be some immediate attack, ie speeding up some very dark asteroid into relativistic speeds, aimed at Earth.

I agree with the massive expansion, I don't think it should come at the entire expense of understanding what may be out there also, but in terms of resource allocation, expansion should have been paramount since the 1960s at least, IMO.

Eventually this rock, one way or another, will reach its inevitable peak and as a species we would do well to be spread around.

I don't know that we are guaranteed to be attacked. It makes alot of assumptions about how civilization evolves that is very human centric, but it is in fact the only model we have so I can't blame anyone for adopting it without question, but there always exists the possibility that there are other models of evolution that are less conflict driven and promote cooperation

>Also, why should xenophoby, racism and similar perks be available only to humanity. Even we can see how deeply flawed creatures we are.

In the same vain of this, why shouldn't they be? What purpose do those ideas even serve? They're not evolutionary constructs, they're cultural / societal ones created to justify oppressing one group of humans by another. Another civilization could have simply made better choices and evolved on a planet that trended toward cooperation and not conflict.

We only understand our version of how evolution trends, it doesn't make it law of the universe until we actually can study other non-human civilizations.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_4622

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis