Individually doing atmospheric analysis for every planet in the galaxy is probably an impossible task for a civilisation confined to a single solar system. Listening for signals is something our civilisation already does. If we discover radio signals from a primitive civilisation in the next star system over there's a non-zero chance we'd panic and try to wipe them out.

That's the risk that dark forest theory is talking about. Maybe the threat comes from a civilisation dedicated to wiping out intelligent life that just hasn't found you yet, maybe it just comes from your nearest neighbor. Maybe there's no threat at all. The risk of interplanetary war is still too great to turn on a light in the forest and risk a bullet from the dark.

And while knowing this, why do we still not choose to just observe and be as quiet/ non existant as possible?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] INeedMana 31 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Everything that travels via a wave (wifi, gsm, radio, tv, etc) travels in more or less planar dimension. in order to stop it, you'd have to have some kind of wave blocking shutter (physical requirements for such a block would depend on the length of the waves you want to block) around the whole planet. Blocking waves is not feasible as long as we want to have sun

https://xkcd.com/273/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Seems like OP has never watched Futurama.