Your aliens are assigning zero weight to their own death, as opposed to a negative weight. While this may be logical, I can certainly imagine a broadly rational intelligent species that doesn't do it.
Consider the problems with doing so. Suppose that Omega offers to give a friend of yours a wonderful life if you let him zap you out of existence. A wonderful life for a friend of yours clearly has a positive weight, but I'd expect you to say "no," because you are assigning a negative weight to death. If you assign a zero weight to an outcome involving your own death, you'd go for it, wouldn't you?
I think a more reasonable weighting vector would say "cessation of existence has a negative value, even if I have no subjective experience of it." It might still be worth it if the probability ratio of "superman to dead" is good enough, but I don't think every rational being would count all the universes without them in it as having zero value.
Moreover, many rational beings might choose to instead work on the procedure that will make them into supermen, hoping to reduce the probability of an extinction event. After all, if becoming a superman with probability 0.0001% is good, how much better to become one with probability 0.1%, or 10%, or even (oh unattainable of unattainables) 1!
Finally, your additional motivation raises a question in its own right: why haven't we encountered an Omega Civilization yet? If intelligence is common enough that an explanation for our not being able to find it is required, it is highly unlikely that any Omega Civilizations exist in our galaxy. For being an Omega Civilization to be tempting enough to justify the risks we're talking about, I'd say that it would have to raise your civilization to the point of being a significant powerhouse on an interstellar or galactic scale. In which case it should be far easier for mundane civilizations to detect evidence of an Omega Civilization than to detect ordinary civilizations that lack the resources to do things like juggle Dyson spheres and warp the fabric of reality to their whims.
The only explanation of this is that the probability of some civilization within range of us (either in range to reach us, or to be detected by us) having gone Omega in the history of the universe is low. But if that's true, then the odds are also low enough that I'd expect to see more dissenters from advanced civilizations trying to ascend, who then proceed to try and do things the old-fashioned way.
Hmmm, it seems that most of your arguments are in plain probability-theoretical terms: what is the expected utility assuming certain probabilities of certain outcomes. During the arguments you compute expected values.
The whole point of my example was that assuming a many world view of the universe (i.e. multiverse), using the above decision procedures is questionable at best in some situations.
In classical probability theoristic view, you won't experience your payoff at all if you don't win. In a MWT framework, you will experience it for sure. (Of course t...
We have a sample of one modern human civilization, but there are some hints on how likely it was to happen.
Major types of hints are:
Data for:
Data against:
To me it looks like life, animals with nervous systems, Upper Paleolithic-style Homo, language, and behavioral modernity were all extremely unlikely events (notice how far ago they are - vaguely ~3.5bln, ~600mln, ~3mln, ~200k or ~600k, ~50k years ago) - except perhaps language and behavioral modernity might have been linked with each other, if language was relatively late (Homo sapiens only) and behavioral modernity more gradual (and its apparent suddenness is an artifact). Once we have behavioral modernity, modern civilization seems almost inevitable. Your interpretation might vary of course, but at least now you have a lot of data to argue for your position, in convenient format.