“Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

That's not the point: if you have capabilities to do stellar lifting, interstellar travel is likely on the table too. Fermi paradox is about the question, why we can't detect any sign of extraterrestrial civilizations out there. One explanation is that while life in general might be relatively abundant, true sentience as in us humans that allows life to spread besides its cradle might be quite unique.

The Indigenous peoples of the Americas knew well enough about the value of cooperation and alliance. That's why they had stuff like the Iroquois Confederacy, and switched between working with the British, the French, and the colonies depending on which was best for each individual group of natives at any one time. To present them as pure victims powerless before the might of white settlers undermines the political and cultural agency that Native peoples in fact had, and exercised.

The predominant form of relationship between European and Native American peoples for hundreds of years was trade, not war. The tragedies and the atrocities that resulted were a slow burn of conflicting interests and epidemiological naïveté, both between Europeans and Natives and also within each group. That's quite different from the hiding and decapitation strikes usually presented as "dark forest hypothesis", because there's no reason that those specific interests and ignorance would carry over to interstellar society (and every reason that they would need to be overcome in order to become interstellar in the first place).

But why do people always use the fate of resource-constrained preindustrial societies (both Europe and America) to try to predict relationships between hyper-advanced Kardashev-level civilizations anyway? It really seems to me like some kind of projected shame. You can see this too with Liu Cixin. He came from a country that was recently dominated, and has more recently been preparing to dominate its neighbors, so his story pretends nothing better is possible. I suppose that's comforting for some, and questioning it brings out people who show what it's really about.

Google Trends shows the top 10 countries for "Dark forest hypothesis" include the US, Taiwan, China, Peurto Rico, HK, Canada, and Aus [1]— Places with a prominent recent or ongoing imperial history, whether as victims or victimizers. I actually find the "dark forest" narratives quite disturbing, not as a prediction of our future, but as a window into the psyche of people who seem to want it to be one.

You might as well say the Romans had a slave-based economy, so therefore spacefaring empires must also be looking for human slaves! That's got exactly the same amount of validity as the Native comparison. But economic and military incentives obviously change as technology and culture develops. If anything, the fact we used to kill a lot of natives, and we don't so much anymore, is a strong sign that advanced societies can trend towards being less genocidal.

1: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=%2Fg%2F11jyk5h9nj...

Cooperation only depends on anyone, in the history of ever, having at any point survived long enough to contact each other and form an alliance. Once a critical mass of parties that prefer cooperation has been reached, all future cooperative parties are at an automatic advantage over aggressive parties.

You can see shades this of this, e.g., in the difference between single-round versus iterated Prisoner's Dilemmas.

> MAD is utter bunk. It depends on rational actors that also believes the other actors are rational. Even Reagan realised the folly of MAD after Able Archer in 1983, and realising the Soviet leadership genuinely seemed to believe the US might be prepared to strike first.

What do you think the long-term prospects are of a species that goes around flinging RKVs at people? No more North America and no more Eurasia, if that happened. Maybe South America and Africa can pick up the pieces. Just because irrational hyperaggressive actors can briefly exist doesn't mean you're likely to encounter them. They won't survive for long.

MAD exists whether or not any particular participant believes in it, because it's just the cause and effect of competing powers each with their own agency. Or else we wouldn't be here. Even the Soviets knew that a possible US first strike was better than a guaranteed US retaliatory strike, which would happen if they struck first.

> Cooperation might eventually win out, but that won't help you if your civilization has long since been wiped out.

The whole "Fermi Paradox" arguments are based on an extreme form of "eventually, we should expect to see aliens, so why haven't we already?" This doesn't mean aggressive civilizations don't exist, but the reasons to think they're prevalent are overblown.

It would be somewhat worrisome to actually find signs of primitive extraterrestrial life because of the Fermi Paradox. Given the age of the universe, and how long it took both complex life to develop on earth and for a creature such as us to emerge from that, finding life elsewhere would beg a return to Fermi's question of "Where is everyone?" implying that something comes along and causes evolving civilizations to be exterminated before they ever show signs to their presence to the wider galaxy.

If life, even of a very primitive sort, were found, it would stand to reason that it had done so in the past and that other civilizations, possibly even many of them, had formed in our huge galaxy long ago, giving them time to develop enough to be detectable even to us, so then, where are they?

Then again of course, there are probably many, many known unknowns and unknown unknowns lurking amidst all of the above supposition.

Humans only started planting grain about 12k years ago. Anatomically modern humans were gathering wild grain, but not planting grain, for about 100k years. Given this very long period of stagnation, I don't think humanities ascension was an inevitability.