/sci/ - Science & Math

>>12529692
Realistically though, what is there even to gain from contacting other civilizations? If you're at the point where you can travel from star to star, you've already got things pretty good. At that point I picture everyone would just try to stay clear from other societies. Like unless you're 100 percent sure you could kill them first when things get out of hand, it just seems like a huge risk to come in contact with another interstellar society. You already have all the means to prolong your existence for as long as you need by mining resources from wherever the speed of light permits you to get in a reasonable time frame. You don't need their help, and if they're even a thousand years ahead of you, they have a massive upper hand as far as destroying your entire civilization goes. And a thousand years is nothing in the grand scale of things. Scientific curiosity only goes so far. Three things we can assume about any intelligent species:

1) Any specie that is in control of their entire planet needs to be totally ruthless when it's necessary
2) Their existence will be more important to them than ours
3) They will assume the same thing about us

Look at what bears do, if they wander into somebody else's territory, there's just a huge standoff where they're telling each other to get away. Only when nobody is backing off, do they start fighting because they both know they can do massive damage both to themselves and the other party https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEG-w2YI7hQ

So that's my nihilistic take. If anyone's beaming radio signals toward us, they're just letting us know that

a) they know we're out here, and
b) we should stay away from them