A universe where we’re inside a 1000 light year bubble of no other spacefaring life is very different from one where we’ll have to deal with contact in the next couple of centuries.
The probability that we’ll have to deal with any contact of any species near our own tech level is very tiny, since the chance that they are near the same point in their evolutionary history is small. There’s no reason to expect anything like Star Trek where many species are coming online at the same time. So any species are likely to be either much more advanced than us (in which case how they want to deal with us will matter more) or much less so, in which case the ethical obligations could become very complicated. Babyeaters are of course the obvious example here even though that seems evolutionarily unlikely. More evolutionarily likely possibilities could still easily create ethical or moral issues for us. But the specifics of the situation will matter enough that discussion now is not likely to get very far.
I fully agree. Again, the point of this is to create something like the Drake Equation. Something that helps spark discussions like this one, rather than make reliable predictions.
The probability that we’ll have to deal with any contact of any species near our own tech level is very tiny, since the chance that they are near the same point in their evolutionary history is small. There’s no reason to expect anything like Star Trek where many species are coming online at the same time. So any species are likely to be either much more advanced than us (in which case how they want to deal with us will matter more) or much less so, in which case the ethical obligations could become very complicated. Babyeaters are of course the obvious example here even though that seems evolutionarily unlikely. More evolutionarily likely possibilities could still easily create ethical or moral issues for us. But the specifics of the situation will matter enough that discussion now is not likely to get very far.
I fully agree. Again, the point of this is to create something like the Drake Equation. Something that helps spark discussions like this one, rather than make reliable predictions.