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How is METI not a capital crime? (self.utopianfiat)

submitted 2 years ago by utopianfiat to c/utopianfiat

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_SETI

Even if you don't subscribe to the Dark Forest Hypothesis it's extraordinarily unethical to violate the cosmic privacy of the entire human race without their consent- at worst it's essentially summoning the obliteration of all life on Earth; at best it's scientifically experimenting on the entire human race present and future without our consent.

We should be locking up people who do this or conspire to do this for life so they don't do any more damage.

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[–] utopianfiat 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I believe most if not all intelligent life drives itself to extinction before becoming interstellar.

And one way this can be done is by shouting yoohoo at all the existential threats out there!

I’m sure they will have advanced enough technology to either differentiate between background noise

I'm not sure how technology helps you here. You can get a lot clearer as you approach the noise threshold but once you're there, the signal is gone and there's no getting it back.

Even short term prison sentences would be extremely cost-ineffective… never mind life sentences. I applaud the consideration but I don’t see any real world practicality… that’s why it’s not a crime.

We imprison people for much less. Bear in mind you would have to be actively building an extremely high-power transmitter and preparing to use it, this is not something people stumble into or do in their garage.

In The 3-Body Problem, Ye Wenjie has to discover a new way to amplify signals by resonating them off the surface of the sun- otherwise there's no practical means of achieving the amplification needed to be detectable. This is science fiction so it's not even clear someone would be able to do something like this.

[–] ConTheLibrarian 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I’m not sure how technology helps you here. the signal is gone and there’s no getting it back.

That's your assumption. Indeed there could be traces in the quantam or something else we don't know about. Either way assuming it disappears completely is just as certain as assuming METI will result in human suffering.

We imprison people for much less.

Yes. That is a bad thing. We shouldn't do that, or this lol

[–] utopianfiat 0 points 2 years ago

That’s your assumption. Indeed there could be traces in the quantam

The quantum what? This sounds like sci-fi hooey.

We shouldn’t do that, or this lol

Are you disagreeing with the punishment or that there should be any accountability at all for someone who summons obliteration on the planet?

How do you think we should deal with people who are causing climate change?