KingInBlack posted...
To the people saying aliens would destroy us or we're going to end up being invaded, any species that can create a method of travel that is near light speed would be too advanced to be hostile.
The problem is, this is a completely unfounded assumption, and pure wishful thinking. It's just as much a faith-based belief as any religion.
There's literally nothing that suggests technological development
MUST
evolve in parallel with moral/ethical development. Any assumption we make of how civilizations progress is based on a single example (ours), and isn't necessarily universally applicable at all.
We have no real idea how aliens would theoretically perceive the universe. Or even that they perceive it at all.
And none of that takes into account possibilities like that any First Contact would occur via Von Neumann probes that don't recognize our existence at all and just eat us to fuel their own reproduction.
KingInBlack posted...
We're one of the earliest civilizations to emerge into space. No one is out there and won't be for millions of years. When they find us, we'll be long gone.
This is the one everyone always poo-poos because they go "The universe is billions of years old, how could we possibly be the first civilization?" Which ignores the fact that a) 14 billion years is relatively short amount of time on a cosmological scale, b) as far as we can tell we
are
relatively early in the overall timeline of the universe as a whole, and c)
someone
has to be first.
People will also cite the Empirical Rule and its derivatives as a criticism (ie, the principle that, when making any given assumption about theoretical alien civilizations, we should always assume that we fall somewhere roughly in the middle of the average - which actually has its own specific name, but I'm totally blanking on it right now), which means the
extreme
likelihood is that we're neither first nor last but somewhere in the middle - but "likelihood" is not the same as "objective fact". We
could
still be an incredibly unlikely firstborn civilization, simply because, again,
somebody
has to be first.
KingInBlack posted...
We're simply too far from each other and will never make contact. Galaxies are huge, and the space between galaxies is even more massive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv1spjsvu-A
This is almost certainly the #1 answer to the Fermi Paradox. Even if other civilizations exist, we will likely never encounter them, because space is so damned vast.
It'd be like dropping a single ant each in London, Berlin, Tokyo, Chicago, and Melbourne, and then expecting them to somehow find each other. Except even worse than that.
KingInBlack posted...
We're a simulation
The problem there is that this is another faith-based argument that sort of falls into the unfalsifiable trap.
There've been multiple studies that suggest we can't possibly be living in a simulation, but when those can be dismissed as "The people who programmed the simulation thought of that and programmed in those results", the argument becomes meaningless.
And what makes it even worse is that the main core of the argument in favor of simulation goes back to the rule of averages - we have to start from the assumption that any advanced enough civilization would create a simulation, and then any simulation that grew advanced enough would create its own nested simulation, and so on. So if all of reality is basically just an infinite chain of simulations, the odds suggest we're far more likely to be one of the links in the chain rather than the start of it. But the problem is, literally none of that says we
HAVE
to be a simulation (and if you refuse to accept the basic principles of the argument, the entire thing is completely meaningless).
Simulation Theory is basically a thought-experiment that spiraled out of control because it's another way to establish an incredibly narcissistic and egocentric view of the universe without having to resort to religion. In some ways, it's very much part of the trend of science replacing and
becoming
religion for most people.
Shadowbird_RH posted...
Any supposed predator civilizations would starve to death on the way, else they wouldn't need to hunt prey across the cosmos in the first place.
An old computer game does offer a potentially valid case though. Star Control 2: The Ur-Quan Masters features an antagonist race split in two, one which seeks to enslave all sentient life, the other, to destroy. The reason: Fear; paranoia. They can never trust that another life form won't evolve into a threat, so they make it the purpose of their existence to manage that threat.
To be honest, I don't think I've ever heard any postulation of the Dark Forest that suggests the Dark Forest was predicated on the idea of predator civilizations who would hunt weaker civilizations to exploit their resources.
The usual argument for the Dark Forest is that dominant civilizations are incentivized to destroy any nascent civilizations they discover to prevent them from eventually evolving into a threat or a rival (and thus eventually potentially becoming competitors for resources). And that smaller, weaker civilizations will do the same to anyone stupid enough to scream out into the void "HEY, WE'RE OVER HERE!" because everyone has a vested interest in not drawing attention to themselves.
So it's like being hunted in the forest by a wolf, who isn't going to kill you because it's hungry or wants to eat your lunch, but simply because you're
there
. And if you're making too much noise or being too obvious/oblivious, you might just get shanked by another traveler simply to shut you up.