I hardly ever see anything said about extraterrestrial dangers in the EA community. I haven’t seen Bostrom take on the subject, and in The Precipice, Ord only takes on the subject for about a page or two. I think we must shed much more light on the issue. Even Stephen Hawking has warned about the subject. If we are to do the most good and protect future generations, we must be highly cautious about advanced hostile extraterrestrial intelligent life. An advanced civilization from outer space could easily colonize our planet and enslave us as Columbus enslaved the Indigenous tribes of the Americas. It doesn’t help that we have been broadcasting to outer space since the invention of the television and perhaps even earlier. Unpopularly, I also believe it is dangerous that our civilization is visible from space at night due to light pollution. I think we ought to focus on seeing if there are alternatives to visible-from-space lighting and broadcasting via satellite. We have certainly made it known that we are ripe for the picking for any extraterrestrial civilization. I’m not sure what must be done, but I wanted to shed some light on the topic.
This LessWrong post had some good discussion about some of the same ideas :-)
An advanced civilization from outer space could easily colonize our planet and enslave us as Columbus enslaved the Indigenous tribes of the Americas
I think this is unlikely, since my guess is that (if civilization continues on Earth) we’ll reach technological maturity in a much shorter time than we expect to meet aliens (I consider the time until we meet aliens here).
I hardly ever see anything said about extraterrestrial dangers in the EA community. I haven’t seen Bostrom take on the subject, and in The Precipice, Ord only takes on the subject for about a page or two. I think we must shed much more light on the issue. Even Stephen Hawking has warned about the subject. If we are to do the most good and protect future generations, we must be highly cautious about advanced hostile extraterrestrial intelligent life. An advanced civilization from outer space could easily colonize our planet and enslave us as Columbus enslaved the Indigenous tribes of the Americas. It doesn’t help that we have been broadcasting to outer space since the invention of the television and perhaps even earlier. Unpopularly, I also believe it is dangerous that our civilization is visible from space at night due to light pollution. I think we ought to focus on seeing if there are alternatives to visible-from-space lighting and broadcasting via satellite. We have certainly made it known that we are ripe for the picking for any extraterrestrial civilization. I’m not sure what must be done, but I wanted to shed some light on the topic.
This LessWrong post had some good discussion about some of the same ideas :-)
I think this is unlikely, since my guess is that (if civilization continues on Earth) we’ll reach technological maturity in a much shorter time than we expect to meet aliens (I consider the time until we meet aliens here).