I would bet a large sum that 3I is a natural object, but if it's artificial, I would bet that it's malign.

When it comes to alien civilizations, the probability is that they are millions of years more advanced than us.[1]

Millions of years is enough for natural genetic change to have an impact, and we already know what that impact will be: individuals that have more offsprings will spread through the population and displace individuals with fewer offsprings.[2]

But if you're a technological species, the only limit to having more offsprings is competition with other members of your species.[3]

In effect, over a million-year time-scale, you get into an arms-race to harness as much power/energy as possible to prevent others from killing you and to kill others who are using resources you need.[4]

So if any alien civilization deliberately decides to visit Earth, you can be pretty sure that their intentions are hostile. Maybe, if they are hydrogen-breathers who evolved on gas giants, they will leave Earth for last. But if they are carbon-based, oxygen breathers, they will squash us like bugs.

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[1]: Imagine that, over the 10 billion-year history of the galaxy, 100 civilizations appear. What's the chance that a randomly chosen civilization (say, the closest one to us) is less than 1 million years old? Using a Poisson distribution, the chance is 0.01%: a 1 in 10,000 chance.

[2]: This is just a restatement of Darwin's theory. Note that Darwin's theory holds even for intelligent/technological people. E.g., imagine some civilization decides that 2.1 kids is the limit because that yields a stable society. That civilization will be destroyed by one that has no such limit, because the latter civilization will have a need for more resources and will have the power to take it. After millions of years, only expanding civilizations will be left because they will have destroyed all the others.

[3]: Non-technological species are limited by their environment. Ants cannot colonize the ocean or the moon. But technological humans can. Our only limit is physics and other humans.

[4]: As long as there is more than 1 civilization, there will be competition because, over millions of years, the galaxy is a zero-sum arena. If one civilization expands to a star system, then the other one cannot. [And, as I said earlier, if one expands but one doesn't, the expanding one will take over.]

The only possible benign scenario is if there are very few civilizations who don't compete with each other. But in that scenario, they wouldn't be sending probes to our solar system.

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svnt 8 days ago | parent | next [-]

You assume evolution is a force that constrains the advance of humanity in some simple survival-of-the-reproductive way, when instead it is an emergent process that no longer operates this way in humans.

What you have proposed as the only path, we have, in our limited time on this planet, already proven false. The vast majority of people are already not harnessing more and more resources in order to reproduce more.

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GMoromisato 7 days ago | parent [-]

I'm actually glad to be getting a lot of push-back on this idea.

Old men like me can afford to be cynical, but I'm glad the next generation has enough idealists that they reject the dark future I'm predicting.

Still, I'm forced to reply.

> The vast majority of people are already not harnessing more and more resources in order to reproduce more.

Considering that every other species larger than a rat is being driven into extinction, largely because we are converting their habitats into farms or strip malls, I don't see evidence that we've learned not to consume more and more.

Sure, over the next hundred years our population will stabilize, but as the great scientist Jeff Goldblum said, "Life...ah...finds a way!"

If you want to know how humans will evolve you have to ask, which genes will spread? Obviously, genes for raw strength aren't useful--that's what machines are for. What about genes for intelligence? Do the smartest people have the most kids? No, which means those genes won't necessarily dominate.

In nature, every species is constrained either by food availability or predators or both. If two rabbits have four baby rabbits, and those four have eight baby rabbits, then why aren't there trillions of rabbits now? Obviously, it's because eventually they run out of food or get eaten by coyotes.

But a technological species like us has no predators, and we can continue to make more food by cutting down forests (where other species live) and turn them into farms.

The only limit we have right now is that we don't want to have too many kids. Unlike every other species, we can (mostly) control our reproduction, and we sometimes choose to have fewer children so that we can have a more luxurious life.

Of course, the desire to have children varies across individuals. We all know some people who want to have more kids and some who don't want any. It is likely, of course, that this innate desire is partly or mostly heritable.

Over long enough time-scales--maybe a thousand generations or 25,000 years--the genes of people who want to have kids will dominate. By then, of course, we will have run out of forests to cut down, so we'll have to start colonizing the oceans and other planets.

But like I said, I'm just a cynical old man.

	▲	svnt 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		You might look into the Norway rat experiments done by Calhoun and the idea of a behavioral sink. The essence of your hypothesis was disproven, in rats, likely before you were born. It seems your idea of the primacy of the forces of evolution, especially when this view is overextended and when competing forces are oversimplified or excluded, produces this dystopian view. Reproduction does not continue no matter what. The genes of people who want to have kids have been shown to be overwhelmed within social mammals, purely by social forces. Humans are unique in that they can escape the behavioral sink. It is your simple extrapolation of the theoretical animal limits that produces projected doom. But that extrapolation does not even hold in animals.

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Eduard 8 days ago | parent | prev [-]

A United Federation of Planets would condemn such exploitative barbaric interaction.

	▲	GMoromisato 8 days ago \| parent [-]
		If the Federation is not expansionist then the Borg will ultimately control the galaxy. If there is only one galactic civilization it will either be the Borg or a Federation so violent that it destroyed the Borg—basically a Mirror Universe Federation. Either way I don’t like our chances.