Programming in the Apocalypse

It takes a great effort to get a coherent radio signal to hit a system many light years away. Leaked radio emissions just don't reach very far. Even high powered radar is extremely narrow beams coming from a spinning planet orbiting a star that itself is flying through space. The odds that beam crosses some system specifically listening for it is extremely low and the odds of a reoccurrence is ridiculously low.

The dark forest just doesn't make sense. A sufficiently large telescope can get spectra from terrestrial planets. If you have some killer space fleet you'll send it off to any planet where you find short-lived industrial emissions (CFCs etc). There's no need to wait for radio emissions from a planet with biomarkers. It also presumes its practical to send a space fleet to go destroy anyone.

It's far more likely the odds of any two technological civilizations existing at the same "time" at detectable ranges is extremely low. Species also don't tend to take over galaxies because it requires unattainable amounts of power and resources much better used to live happily in their own little corner.

Bill Gates tells us to not eat meat and owns a gigaton of farmland.

He rells us to ride bikes and has the largest fleet of private jets in the world.

This is likely to reduce the amount of arable land, and the intersection of that and continued human population growth is likely going to put pressure on populations to migrate to more livable zones, and that will create the kinds of tensions like to lead to widespread warfare and possibly even genocidal actions.

Now, can some of this be technologically mitigated? Absolutely. It's entirely possible to run the global economy without fossil fuels. The major sources of replacement energy would be wind/solar/storage, and nuclear in some regions (massive expansion of nuclear is just not feasible, sorry enthusiasts, but that's the reality - there's not that much high-grade uranium ore around, breeder concepts are implausible, fusion is nowhere in sight, and the cost equation favors solar and wind in the vast majority of regions, from the equator descending polewards).

However, that would upend the economic status quo in a remarkable way. All the petrostates that live off oil exports and oil production would have serious readjustments (and this is non-ideological, it's true for the USA, for Saudi Arabia, for Venezuela, for Russia, for Iran, etc.).

Imagine if we got serious about eliminating fossil fuel use globally. Well, one obvious first step would be a ban on the international trade in fossil fuels, right? Who would agree to that? All the fossil fuel corporations I know of are planning on maintaining current levels of output for the next 30 years, as well.

Regardless, we could very plausibly reduce fossil fuel production in the USA by 3% per year if we also increased solar/wind/storage by 3% per year, while maintaining most of the current nuclear fleet. Then, in 30 years, the USA would produce zero fossil fuels. It's entirely doable with existing technlogy, but would require as much investment as say, the military-industrial complex currently gets.

As far as computer tech and programming, I really don't see that being fundamentally impacted; if there's an energy / material crunch then it will just become more expensive to buy a computer or run a datacenter, and it'll be more restricted to key uses (managing energy grids, running factories, etc.). However, running a chip production line off solar power is entirely feasible.