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posted by janrinok on Wednesday June 06 2018, @10:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the own-worst-enemy dept.

"Alexander Berezin, a theoretical physicist at the National Research University of Electronic Technology in Russia, has proposed a new answer to Fermi's paradox — but he doesn't think you're going to like it. Because, if Berezin's hypothesis is correct, it could mean a future for humanity that's 'even worse than extinction.'

'What if,' Berezin wrote in a new paper posted March 27 to the preprint journal arxiv.org, 'the first life that reaches interstellar travel capability necessarily eradicates all competition to fuel its own expansion?'" foxnews.com/science/2018/06/04/aliens-are-real-but-humans-will-probably-kill-them-all-new-paper-says.html

In other words, could humanity's quest to discover intelligent life be directly responsible for obliterating that life outright? What if we are, unwittingly, the universe's bad guys?

And if you are not sure what the Fermi paradox is then the link should help, and there is a long explanation of that one in the article.


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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday June 06 2018, @10:39PM (6 children)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Wednesday June 06 2018, @10:39PM (#689598) Journal

    If we are typical, that means that there must be both species that are better than us, and species that are worse than us. Guess which of them would start dominating everyone else.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday June 07 2018, @05:07PM (5 children)

    by bob_super (1357) on Thursday June 07 2018, @05:07PM (#689951)

    I witness no evidence that we are typical, unless in this galaxy typical is defined as "mindbogglingly destructive, evil, and self-destructive, amounting to aggressively collectively suicidal through unquenchable greed".

    • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday June 07 2018, @06:23PM (3 children)

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Thursday June 07 2018, @06:23PM (#689995) Journal

      That's not how it works. We have no indication that we are not typical, therefore we must assume that we are.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
      • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday June 07 2018, @06:34PM (2 children)

        by bob_super (1357) on Thursday June 07 2018, @06:34PM (#690000)

        We have strong evidence that we are not typical, in the Earth context.
        Are all the other Earth creatures atypical weaklings, or are we atypically destructive ?

        • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday June 07 2018, @06:48PM

          by maxwell demon (1608) on Thursday June 07 2018, @06:48PM (#690008) Journal

          In the Earth context, we are the only technological species. Therefore we are by definition typical for technological species on Earth.

          --
          The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
        • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday June 08 2018, @12:41AM

          by Immerman (3985) on Friday June 08 2018, @12:41AM (#690133)

          >Are all the other Earth creatures atypical weaklings

          No, we developed technology, which made us atypically powerful. But if you look at the ratio of how destructive we are compared to how destructive it is within our ability to be? I'm not sure we're anything special. Maybe even one of the more moderate species. Technology - it's an amplifier.

    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday June 08 2018, @01:19PM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday June 08 2018, @01:19PM (#690297) Journal

      All life forms almost certainly evolve from a place of eating each other, rather than being little photosynthetic hippie microbes, and later fishies, from the start. And when they evolve to cooperate in same-species groups, tribalism could set in.

      Violence could be the most unfortunate result of universal convergent evolution.

      But I have to use "almost certainly" and "could" because the sample size is too damn low.

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