>>725089403
There have been a lot of speculative fiction that suggests that we really, really should stop doing this until we have a better grasp on space travel. Picrel suggests that the reason why interstellar civilizations are so quiet is because of them existing as a "Dark Forest full of Hunters", less inclined to simply kill whoever they see out of hatred or spite, but rather that a spacefaring civilization of unknowable age, reach, and access to resources might be just as likely to eradicate them as they are to be friendly. The logic dictating that the benefits of diplomacy (positive and negative) are worthy of consideration, but the risk of absolute and unpredictable total destruction by an unknown entity overwrites any potential benefits to diplomacy. It makes it so that the utter annihilation of other spacefaring civilizations (even simply ones where radio waves have been detected briefly from) is the only logical answer, and to suppress any and all "Lights" in this Dark Forest that could be used to detect the Hunters. There's even something in the setting called a Dark Forest Attack, where they don't do anything other than simply activating an extremely long-range beacon of light and sound near an oppositional civilization's galaxy because the presumption is that some unknown/unknowable civilization in the darkness of space will detect it, send out a weapon of incomprehensible power, and utterly and mercilessly destroy your enemy for you.

Honestly it's all really fun to speculate on this kind of thing, because the fear of the unknown can't be stifled, and the more we learn about space, the more we realize we don't know about space.