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I'd read about these books some time ago, and found the 'Hunter in the Dark Forest' premise pretty interesting.
I think that's it's likely that the development of space travel at relativistic speed would be an extreme danger, in and of itself. If the civilization developing it didn't suffer an 'own goal' event (spaceship crash = planet gone), I'm sure if there happen to be other civilizations out there, they'd probably be wary of any other species developing it.
After all, a mass the size of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier traveling at 0.1C would impact the Earth with the force of 11,000,000 megatons, while 0.5C would result in a force of 270,000,000 megatons.
I could see a scenario in which another civilization might see it necessary to wipe out another one on the verge of achieving relativistic space travel. That being said, given the enormity of time and space, it's probably extremely unlikely there's anyone out there who is aware of us.
I've read that pretty much all of our transmissions are too faint to even be recognized, and even if they could be deciphered, you'd have to have the specific technology they were intended to be received on to make any sense of them. The Areceibo Message for example was transmitted in extremely simple binary.
Edit: Yup, that article says the same exact thing, probably because I've read it before, in fact, in the last month.
I suspect life is more common in the cosmos than we think. Kepler's found planets orbiting practically every star it's looked at. But I was watching a series of YouTube videos on a channel called CloserToTruth, and one of the physicists being interviewed made a pretty good point. Among the billions of species that have ever lived on Earth, intelligence on our level has only evolved once.
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