Old Theories and New Considerations
24 Mar 2024T.Fulda
Commander T.Fulda log, Earth date 3/24/3310:I haven't been keeping up with these again. I get busy with my work and it slips my mind, so whoever reads these logs will just have to deal with that. In either case, I got my hands on some ancient books from Earth at a starport gift shop in Haritanis. They had some theories that are good for a hearty chuckle here in 3310, but I've been reading about the Fermi Paradox and several solutions to it. For those who don't know and without getting to into it, the Fermi Paradox was a question posed by an Italian physicist named Enrico Fermi. The guy basically posed the question, "If life is common, then where is everyone?"
Of course, now we know the solution to the Fermi Paradox. It turns out all the aliens were either dead or wholly uninterested in communicating with anyone except through hyperdictions and caustic weapons. Seems rather simple in the end, but regardless, I found an interesting solution to it from back in the day called the "Dark Forest Hypothesis". The Dark Forest Hypothesis states that life is common but nobody communicates because alien life is likely to be hostile and may seek to exterminate potential competition for resources.
At first I thought it was bunk... Just a nonsense theory by people who lived in a time where aliens were just theoretical. After all, while the Thargoids have not made peaceful co-existence easy at any point since our initial contact with them, it is primarily humanity that pushed the conflict with them to its current state. But the more I think about it, the conflict at least started due to competition over resources. They seeded planets and left, we arrived and started exploiting said planets, then the Thargoids returned and found us messing with their meta alloys. Seems like a classic case of "This galaxy ain't big enough for the two of us" resource competition to me.
In either case, my purpose here isn't to relitigate how the current conflict started, so I'll get to the point. I was at a bar the other night and heard some fella talking about how the eggheads over in Canonn Research engaged in an experiment to activate all the known Guardian beacons at the same time. Based on what I'm told, nothing happened except that they all lit up like a big galactic Christmas tree. Still, we can't know for sure that it had zero effect just because nothing unexpected happened upon activation. For all we know, the message could've been received. Maybe in a few months or years... Hell, maybe even hundreds of years from now, a fleet of Guardian war constructs will arrive seeking our annihilation all because of this one experiment. After all, the lingering problem with the Guardians is we have no idea what happened to their war constructs after they rebelled and exterminated their creators. That's a pretty significant loose end in my book and one we need to strongly consider.
Maybe in the end, no one is listening and I'm just pumping the breaks for no reason. Point is, we can't be sure. Between what happened to Jasmina Halsey (as much as I personally hate the woman, I don't write off her visions as a mere hallucination) and that fella who stole a ship and disappeared because of his similar visions, something Guardian related is out there and it's at least semi-aware of us. If it's one thing we, as a species, should learn from the Thargoid War, it's that maybe we should be more careful when it comes to messing with alien tech. Although our galaxy doesn't appear to be teeming with advanced life as some ancient theorists believed, we still don't know for certain what all is out there. The galaxy is a big place and according to Universal Cartographics, we've mapped less than 1% of it. All I'm saying is, there might be something to the Dark Forest Hypothesis and we should tread carefully.
CMDR T.Fulda, signing off.