Hear Me Out: If We Find Life Out There Maybe We Should Kill It

I'm ignoring the depraved morality of this stance for the sake of argument. But I wouldn't ignore the depravity of it if it were something we really had to face.

This logic is incredibly flawed. Everything is indeed probability and risk, but deciding to wage war on any civilization we detect even if they don't exhibit aggression is taking the chances that they'll be hostile from something less than 100% to exactly 100%. Then add the risk that we'd lose that war, and the decision to attack in the absence of hostility becomes a much greater risk than the decision to wait until they exhibit hostility first.

Also, as an aside, if we take the author's logic as sound, then we absolutely have to destroy all genAI companies. The genAI industry has been constantly telling us about how there's a substantial risk that their product will destroy us, after all.

Somehow all those theorists imagine the space civilization that likes to kill - yet has not discovered any ways to find something killable. So the apex space predators hope that the prey will send the signals into space. That's how they became the killing machine - by never searching.

This also reminds me of the catch 22 of space colonization - the civilization whose genetics promote conquests and colonization will most likely kill itself in internal wars way before colonizing any noticeable part of the space. And peaceful civilization has time to grow to power but does not have colonization needs. The space predator civilization will most likely die in nuclear war before they have chance to gather together and make peace to pursue space colonization as one.

I'm sorry for poking fun at it, but this sort of argument is hard to take seriously and always has been. 'If we discover an alien civilization, maybe we should pre-emptively wipe it out. I mean, suppose they did something crazy, like wipe out our entire civilization???!'

As well as being paranoid, this is line of reasoning is stupid. Imagine we discover this alien species and they seem far in advance of our (near future) technology, making them horribly scary. We decide to pre-emptively wipe them out by firing a relativistic mass into their star, as he describes reading about in his new favorite sci-fi book. All good, right? But what if the aliens have already spread out from their solar system, take note of the destruction of their homeworld, and do the same thing to us? We all die anyway, and the rest of the sentient universe thinks it's justified because we launched an unprovoked effort to destroy another civilization.

If we're going to compare our interstellar FTL future with the fate of indigenous people in the Americas during the age of exploration, this is like saying 'if the Aztecs had been smarter, they would have not only killed the conquistadors, but launched a preemptive expedition against the kingdom of Spain, wiping out the Spaniards and securing their own posterity!'

Now perhaps I'm being uncharitable here and the author means we should be more like the Sentinelese, the (mostly) uncontacted tribe in the Indian Ocean that lives in blissful ignorance of the modern (world (except for aeroplanes) and reliably kills and religious or sensational entrepreneurs who attempt to land on their island. But that's much more like the scenario in the movie Predator, which the author dismisses as silly compared his preferred eschatological scenarios.

What really bothers me here is the fundamental premise that advanced civilizations will inevitably wipe out others that they come in contact with, which seems to me like an extreme case of path dependency based on a shallow reading of colonial history. Most westerners are unaware that during the 15th century China was also having n age of exploration, with admiral Zhang He sailing as far west as the east coast of Africa, making contact with what is now Somalia. Why didn't these explorers go on a rampage, wiping out everything in their path in line with the author's understanding of game theory? It's not because they were just a tiny expeditionary force that got blown off course. Zhang He led a huge fleet with hundreds of ships, a total crew of about 25000 men, and his ships were large enough that he brought exotic animals like giraffes back to China. Nor were they short of military technology; the Chinese had invented and largely perfected the crossbow 1000 years before Europeans did, and were likewise in possession of advanced tactical and strategic military doctrine.

The Chinese didn't halt their era of exploration by wiping out everyone they encountered or because they anticipated being wiped out, but for domestic political considerations; the cost/benefit analysis didn't make sense to them and they wanted to visert resources to defending against one of the periodic invasions from Mongolia.

I read this essay as an example of the Hofstader's paranoid style*, which is rooted in a combination of geography, technological asymmetry, hubris, and eschatology - a style that is going through one of its periodic resurges due to American anxieties about global rivalries, the end of US technological dominance, and fears of imperial decline. It's the same mindset that has some pundits claiming opposition to data centers is organized by communist infiltrators (rather than arising from objections to pollutiona nd infrastructural overhead), or that it's so important for the US to retain its lead in AI that we should consider pre-emptive kinetic strikes on Chinese data centers.

To be blunt, I do not think that crafting game-theoretic rationalizations for pre-emptively destroying competing civilizations is logical or sensible. It demonstrates a half-assed understanding of game theory, assuming a lot of conclusions as starting premises and neglecting to consider the possibilities of iterative rounds, multilateral actors etc. Rather than engaging with the challenges (and opportunities) of complex systems, it reders all decision-making down to an atavistic adversarialism. Approaching all risk and uncertainty as an existential issue isn't healthy.

https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-am...

https://www.heritage.org/technology/commentary/china-working...

https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/superpowers-and-ag...