And now for something really different. If you are tired of national politics, maybe its time to talk about the extinction of all life in our solar system. Just for a change of topic, of course.
The Cool Worlds Lab has an interesting video titled “Why I Don’t Buy The Dark Forest Hypothesis” that picks apart this idea that technologically advanced species throughout the galaxy are hiding from one another out of the fear that once detected they may be destroyed. You may remember the term Dark Forest from a book of the same title by Chinese writer Liu Cixin.
Its a good discussion of the hypothesis, with plenty of diagrams mapping out a civilization’s decision to either reply to, ignore, or attack a newly discovered civilization trying to communicate.
I don’t want to spoil everything, but the bottom line is that it is probably too late for us to worry about this anyway. First, we have already sent out plenty of electronic messages as well as messages intended for alien civilizations. But more importantly, the James Webb Space Telescope is showing us that a silent civilization on a distant exoplanet can still be detected as we investigate that exoplanet’s atmosphere. So if a dangerous distant civilizations was seeking out other planets with life that it could destroy, the Earth has been telegraphing life for more than 3.5 billion years.
Check it out and learn more about the hypothesis and the arguments for and against it.
Our Awesome Universe 