Defence of the species (semi serious)

[Dauphin]

You're not properly accounting for the game theoretic aspect of this. As long as the thing costs substantially less than the discounted future consumption of your entire society, then the rational move is to pay for it. In this case, that ratio is likely less than 1%, which makes the choice obvious.

I'm not sure how rational humans are for longer timescales. I think the discount factor would be very large as people are myopic. Even more so when the threat is non-tangible and generally out of mind. Look to see how much traction climate change threats are getting, or how much people care to save for retirement.

[giblets]

Which planet will we use to test the doomsday device to make sure it works? Mars?

[pchang]

Proxima B?

[Dauphin]

Which planet will we use to test the doomsday device to make sure it works? Mars?

Earth. They'll never see it coming.

[Lorizael]

I'm not sure how rational humans are for longer timescales. I think the discount factor would be very large as people are myopic. Even more so when the threat is non-tangible and generally out of mind. Look to see how much traction climate change threats are getting, or how much people care to save for retirement.

With reduced scarcity, increased longevity, and access to nootropics/genetic engineering/AI, it could be argued that human rationality will trend upwards with better technology. If a correlation between rationality and technology is universal (this seems like a very bad assumption, especially given that people disagree on what rational actually means for prisoner dilemma-type scenarios), then it's possible that at the point where annihilating alien civilizations becomes trivial, a rational (read: awful) analysis of the situation becomes inevitable.

[KrazyHorse]

The worst reading of the Fermi paradox is that I'm right, and the few remaining alien civilizations are quiet, well-defended, and genocidal.

[Dauphin]

If you were in control of the decision to irrevocably activate the doomsday device - which is built and ready to deploy at no more cost - on another world with a confirmed intelligence on it, based only on the knowledge and reasoning you have now, would you press the button?

And on another note would the type of intelligence affect your decision if you discovered it was in a certain form - e.g. almost human, a computer like intelligence, a bug world, etc. I'd imagine people would find a giant can of doomsday Raid more palatable than killing something that reminded us of much more of ourselves.

[Lorizael]

Today's SMBC:

[The Mad Monk]

Cute, but inaccurate. Fossil fuels is what jump started our rapid technological advancement in the first place.

[The Mad Monk]

Also.

I'm just saying, it's what WE would do.

[Aeson]

Maybe we are some long dead civilizations kill bots ...

[KrazyHorse]

The most ingenious of all...