>>64510144
What I loath about the dark forest and similar theories is the hubris of assuming every advanced interstellar civilization behaves the same way we do, and that they behave the same way we did +75-100 years ago. Hawkings makes a comparison of aliens meeting us = the spanish meeting the Aztecs. As if Aliens will be gold-snatching religion-converting fiefdom carvers.

If an alien race can travel the stars easily then terraforming is easy, then they don't have to seek out preciously rare habitable planets (let alone that our planet would be habitable for them - all life we know of requires water, that's it. Not oxygen, not the temperatures we live at. Just water.) and can turn any odd rock into it. India is a filthy, overpopulated shithole - yet they aren't going to seize and colonize the Sentinelese despite their being much more primitive. The United States is much more advanced than most countries but to solve our housing crises we aren't going and colonizing weaker, more primitive countries. Yet apparently every Alien species must behave like a bunch of fucking zigger apes.

It reminds me a little of how Calvinistic types attribute God's omnipotence and then assume God is enslaved to that omnipotence, must always express that omnipotence and must always run around roughshod like a giant among ants. As opposed to when you have immense power maybe you aren't behaving like a yapping rat-dog. The Spanish, to continue the hawkings metaphor, were a small vulnerable country terrified by the French sword of damocles above their head, the moorish spikes beneath them, and a rising wave of Ottomans to the East. They were eager for gold and converts to help gain greater security. So either an alien species is doing the same (in which case we're joining an interstellar shit-show) or an alien species is mindless cancer-growth 'number must go up' types in which case we'd have seen their sprawl by now.