David Brin

Plenty of experts are genuinely pretty concerned about this.

Writing in the American Journal of Physics, the scientist and science fiction writer David Brin asked whether small groups of zealots should bypass all institutions, peer critique, risk appraisal, or public opinion to shout, yoo-hoo, into a potentially hazardous cosmos.

Another expert who has commented on this topic is Lucianne Warkowitz, who is the astrophysicist working at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.

She's also rather worried about all of this, and has this to say.

The most obvious example of this is the fact that we've never detected a confirmed alien radio signal after seven decades of searching.

The great silence, as astronomer David Brin famously dubbed it in 1983.

To keep things simple, in this video, I'm just going to bundle up colonizing aliens, radio transmitting aliens, and all the other plausible ways we could detect aliens into one category, loud aliens.

That's a deliberately vague term, but you get the idea.

Mm-hmm.

David Brin would be an example.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Okay? Uh, uh, you've got, uh, uh, Jim and Greg Benford.

There are various hypotheses also that talk about the idea that there may be aliens out there, but there are very specific reasons they've not made contact with us.

one of them is called the berserker hypothesis so if you take those self-replicating von neumann probes and they drift that is during self-replication there are various kinds of mutations they may become berserkers they may become destructive and they may end up deciding to hunt down and destroy anything that starts broadcasting and This was proposed by David Brin in his 1983 paper, The Great Silence, the controversy concerning extraterrestrial intelligent life.

It comes from Fred Saberhagen's fiction novel about berserker drones.

And you may think, well, it seems unlikely that these berserkers would come about due to drift, but it only needs to happen once.

But before examining the theory itself, it is important to understand that while Liu Qixin gave the idea its most complete and famous articulation, the underlying reasoning has appeared in various forms throughout the history of thinking about extraterrestrial life.

Astronomer and science fiction author David Brin explored similar concepts in his 1983 survey of arguments surrounding the Fermi Paradox, describing scenarios in which advanced civilizations might systematically eliminate emerging species to prevent future competition.

The idea of deadly probes, self-replicating machines dispatched to sterilize any star system showing signs of technological development appeared in Brin's work and in other speculative analyses of interstellar conflict.

Science fiction author Greg Baer, in his 1987 novel The Forge of God, depicted humanity as a baby crying in a hostile forest, drawing down wolves with every signal it emits.

pointed at specific targets and intended to announce our existence and location to anyone capable of receiving them.

Under the logic of the Dark Forest, each one is a precisely aimed signal flare launched into the night, and the debate surrounding these transmissions has been far more contentious than most people realise.

David Brin, an astrophysicist whose early work on the Fermi Paradox helped establish the intellectual framework that the dark forest theory later built upon, has been one of the most vocal and persistent critics of active messaging programs.

Brin has argued for decades that no individual scientist, no small organization, and no single nation should have the authority to transmit powerful signals on behalf of the entire human species without some form of broad international consultation and consent.

Yeah, they were excited about their new gadget and they did something dumb, potentially.

A similar idea showed up earlier in a 1983 science paper by an astronomer named David Brin.

He described a related idea sometimes called the deadly probes theory, and his paper gave this dangerous predator-style idea real scientific backing before the novel gave it its catchy name.

Yep.

This is a fun one.

Science fiction author David Brin posted on LinkedIn.

Oh, always a good start.

He's responding to a post about UAP disclosure efforts, and he says, quote, tens of thousands of our best tech folk would have been hurled at this problem for 80 years.

So there is no longer... kind of one core central social network weirdly enough ufo twitter kind of stayed on twitter like i i hate that i'm still actively scrolling twitter once a week to catch up on ufo news because that's where it's being posted and it means i have to be very careful to filter out all the horrible nazi bar shit but yeah what are you gonna do

yeah

So, yeah, sci-fi author David Brin knows many of the best tech folk and not one of them was pulled into a super secret Manhattan project.

It must be.

Privacy is somehow a right-wing cause now.

Sci-fi author David Brin arguing that total surveillance will be wonderful when everyone can do it." Yeah, I mean, imagine that.

You can just spy on everyone around you.

And you know, if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide.