If your premise is that you need less people I think statistics indicate that helping people in need would be your best bet (in addition to sounding, as you put it, less bad). As I understand the general mechanism, people tend to compensate for uncertainty regarding the survival of their offspring by having more children. With access to for example better medication, the argument goes, parents can afford to have fewer babies.

A rock is not evil. Does that imply it is good?

Ha! Everyone know the French use private islands to test their nukes!

I live in a rowing boat on a secret lake where I (almost) constantly row around in a criss-cross pattern determined by a quantum random generator.

You are certainly right. The reality is of course just that if they are very far away, they would have to travel either very fast or for a very long time to get here.

If they started 1 billion years ago they could have travelled at 0.1c and still reached us from a very faraway place (to the tune of 0.1 billion light years away).

Could some life have started and reached spacefaring capabilities somewhere in the general vicinity of us (less than 0.1 billion light years away) in the last billion years? Seems entirely possible to me.

The argument for intelligent design is based on the concept of irreducible complexity. A scientist and an intelligent designist could agree on some thing, say the general evolutionary history of the horse, but the distinction comes when the intelligent designist finds some thing to be irreducably complex such that the consitituent parts could not have evolved by themselves (that is, only God could have made it because Darwinism wouldn't suffice. Not a watertight conclusion of course but it is the one intelligent designer theory goes with). The scientist will then go on to investigate how come the complexity under question is not impossible to reduce after all and if the intelligent designist is also a scientist they will help out in this endavour, but if they think they have just found proof for their religious belief that some irreducible complexity _must_ exist somewhere they may be unwilling to test their faith as thoroughly.

If someone claims that anyone should be shot their idea should be shot down with very much greater priority than the idea that Santa Claus brings toys to children on Christmas Eve.

"Then there's [the well-known case of] Jupiter-sized outer planets"

mind = blown :)

Yes indeed. Is the most likely option that we are somewhere in the middle?

"It doesn't necessarily have to want to contact us, but we should be able to observe these magical spaceships and colonized Dyson Spheres and all the other mythology the Space Nutters believe in."

But we seem to be making headway towards cloaking before we stride towards FTL (well, we have the neutrino but we refuse to believe in it)

Agreed, but hypothesise that FTL spaceships were possible and we were to discover them in, say, 1000 years. Then we would only be asked to imagine that someone else discovered it sooner than we.

The problem with imagining this comes if we believe FTL to be impossible, so as long as that is a premise then I agree with your argument.

Was not the point suggested by GP that empathy was natural but could be surpressed to different degrees and perhaps in at least some cases due to cultural influence?

Then there is no contradiction in suggesting that such surpression could be differently strong - sometimes so strong that it prevents us from running off to faraway places to help hungry and sometimes even so very strong that we wouldn't even help a baby in the road.

If empathy is natural and initially based on directly available information (direct stimuli) but eventually complemented by also being based on derived information (knowledge) but empathy could also be surpressed for any number of reasons then there is nothing strange with what Dan East stated as far as I can see?

Count on my vote when you run for galactic president.

Assuming politicians are humans, and you assume they are only simulating empathy....did you just simulate empathy for a politician, and does that make you a politician?

Thank you for your answer! I think you have a very valid point and I want to make that clear right away.

I do not intend to troll, but I realize it comes off like that every time I fail to clearly point out exactly the disclaimer you do now - this is in the end only supposed to be a computer science model - and of course I might be failing at that too which is what I would like to ask a real computer scientist such as yourself about!

Any connection between a strict information theoretical model and real physics would be something for a physicist to consider and they may well conclude that the model even if internally consistent bears no interesting resemblance to reality, but that is a later stage (which unfortunately is not clear enough in my current draft).

I am at this point only interested if the model is internally consistent from an information theoretical perspective. The paper indeed jumps ahead of itself and talks as if we could draw conclusions about real physics, which makes it come off as "trollish". But I would ask a reader such as yourself and with patience to spare to try to see past that and help me examine if the model is consistent. Should it be seen as consistent, I think you are probably right to suspect that such a thing might well prompt me to go on and examine the possibility that a computer program _could_ tell us something about reality, but I promise that I will never say that you or any other serious computer scientist gave me the go-ahead to derive such wild conclusions and in the end I would have to agree that it could at least never be _certain_ that we could draw such conclusions.

I hope this is enough to assure you that while I am potentially confused, I am not trying to troll you and I am asking your advice to help me see if I am confused or not. Thank you again for what I found your most useful reply, I am seriously thankful for all help I can get in coming off less as a troll and understand if my proposed computer program (that's all it is really) contains a bug or not!