KyuubiNoKitsune-Hime said:
It's possible but unlikely, it's more attractive and imperative to tap into the physics possibilities of traveling faster than the speed of light if we discover FTL is possible. The reason being that it makes it easier to gather necessary resources and expand on interplanetary and inter stellar scales. That's both on an economic and social level. Communication really is a secondary concern because it's not as profitable. We also are making assumptions about how much energy FTL travel takes, while it may take a lot less energy than we assume to achieve warp speeds, or move ships into subspace, or hyperspace. Expansion and profitability of extraterrestrial exploitation far outweigh the imperatives of FTL communication.
While developing FTL communication is less profitable then developing FTL travel, it's also much, much less costly. In fact just for a structure like a Dyson Swarm or a Ringworld FTL communication would be massively useful within the confines of a single solar system given that it reduces the delay of signals from anywhere from minutes to hours depending on where the two points communicating are within a system.
Being able to send a telegraphic message over the course of a few minutes across an ocean isn't as profitable as being able to travel across the ocean in a few minutes, but it is much easier to achieve and is still very much worth the cost.
Besides that if they could do it that way, it'd be far more cost effective to terraform and colonize extra-stellar worlds than to build a Dyson Swarm, or ringworld. Building such a mega structure means it's more economical to remain in one's own home system, than it is to leave the system.
We don't know that that is the only thing they are doing. It's quite possible they are doing both at once and that due to development their species' sphere of influence has simply not reached us yet. Staying within a single system is an assured means of extinction as one way or another the time will come when something wipes out all life within it.
The possibility that they might just have very similar concepts of life to us. They might consider us too valuable from a scientific standpoint to destroy. On the other hand the energy to wipe us out in a timely fashion might be too large an expense to justify doing it. The project has to be economical for it to be an option, it's very likely that on a time and energy scale it's not. Also if they're building a Dyson Swarm or ringworld, they probably need every bit of mass they can get their hands on. The necessity of resources would potentially dissuade them.
The mass and energy necessary to eliminate us wouldn't actually be even a millionth of a percentage rounded up for what would need to be the daily production for something like a Dyson Swarm to be viable. Take a piece of refined metal the size of a space shuttle and shoot it out of a canon towards Earth at 0.3c or above (something that isn't very energy intensive when it's just shooting a slug when compared to the energy they'd have) and do it a few more times in case calculations where off by a millionth of a degree. There, in two thousand years the problem will solve itself and continued survival is assured.
Also time dilation is a hindrance because of the amount time slows down the closer to light speed you get. While it might be 80 years aboard ship it'd be thousands in real space, by which point we could easily already be extinct. That would mean the resources used on such an endeavor would be absolutely wasted, especially in terms of energy, not a cost easy to justify.
Actually it's a win-win scenario as in situation 1 where we are still alive when they get here they can eliminate us due to being technologically ahead of us, and in situation 2 where we are dead they can use it as an opportunity to continue their species by having a part of it come to another system and colonize the location, increasing their odds of survival in the long run. In fact, for all we know this situation is exactly that: a colony building a Dyson Swarm around another world, not their home system.
Well if they're building a Dyson Swarm, or a Ringworld then it's possible they do know a trick around it, it's possible they've already prepared for the possibility of something coming in at 30% of the light speed.
It's equally possible that it's more like they'd never be able to detect a species not building on their scale before it detected them. Which means they have to prepare for potential hostilities with extreme caution, or wipe life off every potentially life bearing planet in the galaxy.
Also there are no guarantees that if they move to wipe out an alien species, that said alien species is already trying to wipe them out much the same way. That means they're already doomed because of the scale of construction they've committed themselves to.
It's also incredibly unlikely that the project would be what the entirety of their civilization is dedicating itself to. All successful species, when making massive plans for the future, would logically have a backup plan in case things fail. Not only is it possible this is one of countless projects being done, it's far more likely that that is the case then that it is the only project they as a civilization are working on.
It would first require them being aware of us. By building a Dyson Swarm, or Ringworld, they've basically lit a beacon that will allow other civilizations to launch attacks they can't stop, before they can discover those civilizations. Which means it's imminently possible that prior experience with other civilizations has convinced them they're safe. Because otherwise building a Dyson Swarm or a ringworld is far too risky a thing to ever justify.
This is making the assumption they have any other experience with alien life forms, or that they simply did not believe the project to be one where that was too much of a risk. We don't know what, if this is a Dyson Swarm, the level of dedication for the civilization in question this actually amounts to. For all we know this could be one of thousands of already completed Swarms where its destruction would, while leading to material loose, not actually spell an end to their species.
I'm aware, but it's making a huge assumption based on how we act, extraterrestrials may have evolved in an environment where they were herbivore herd animals with no natural predators.
While that is always possible, it's incredibly unlikely. I don't remember who said it, but one person whose quote I came across put it like this: you don't need intelligence to hunt down a blade of grass. Intelligence as we have seen it in species is directly proportional to their predatory nature. Intelligence is very energy intensive (to the point where one of the answers to the Fermi Paradox is that intelligence simply isn't common enough as an evolutionary advantage) taking up a massive part of our daily energy intake (often around 40%) for something that, for a herbivore, would simply offer no evolutionary advantage. Intelligence required a cycle of energy intake needing to be higher, so more meat was needed, thus more intelligence was needed, thus more meat for that energy, and so on until we became who we are. Vegans may hate it, but we simply never would have reached where we are without eating meat as a significant (and at the end of the day most important) part of our daily diet.
