Comment by GMoromisato
1 hour ago
Imagine you're an alien explorer. You visit Earth 25,000 krugs ago (51,304 Earth-years ago) and see a pretty standard ecological milieu: a wide variety of species, each adapted to its own little environment, no different than it was 50 million krugs before.
You return today and see that one previously unremarkable ape-like species has spread out to all parts of the world and is even orbiting in little tin cans around the planet. Almost all wild terrestrial megafauna is gone and the megafauna that remains is raised by the "humans" in massive farms. They've converted forests and jungles into farms and cities, and they're spending vast amounts of energy to make silicon think.
The fact that aliens have not nuked us from orbit out of sheer panic is, I think, strong evidence that we are alone in the galaxy.
Add to that, the previous species you identified as a particularly clever pack animal formed a relationship with the monkeys and now looks like this:
https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/200...
At a bare minimum, yeah, you quarantine that whole fucking species.
Do we really want to make contact with meat?
For anyone unaware: https://terrybisson.com/theyre-made-out-of-meat-2/
Does that strike you as an unusual path for an intelligent species to become space faring? We have yet to unlock the Singularity shortcut that leaves us with replicators and free energy.
I would expect any civilization to exterminate or at least cull the creatures that pose a threat and to cultivate those that are tasty or useful.
>We have yet to unlock the Singularity shortcut that leaves us with replicators and free energy.
That leaves our successor species, the machine minds, with replicators and free energy, I think you mean.
Read Children of Time for a great exploration of this theme.
Or the aliens did the same thing we did?
More likely just not seen yet, our furthest reaching signals are maybe 50 light years away at best... and that's if anyone's looking for the faintest of faint traces.
The Milky Way is 100,000 light years in diameter.
So don't worry, maybe someone will blip us out of existence someday.
> More likely just not seen yet, our furthest reaching signals are maybe 50 light years away at best
This is the key. On interstellar scales, things move very, very slowly and you have to plan on time scales measured in millennia. IMHO we are doomed simply because we can barely think beyond the next election cycle. (At least that's true for Americans. The Chinese seem to think in terms of decades and, occasionally, centuries.)