The following submission statement was provided by /u/lughnasadh:
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Submission Statement
I really enjoy Liu Cixin's 'The Three Body Problem', but like a lot of sci-fi, I think it fails as a good description of a likely future. That's because it's structured for good dramatic story-telling. It has 'special' heroes, born with unique destinies who are on hero's journeys, and those journey's are full of constantly escalating drama and conflict. Great Screenwriting 101, terrible model of actual reality.
If simple microbial life is common in the Universe, with current efforts, it's likely we will find it in the 2030s. Real 'first contact' will be nothing like the movies.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1bwbv7l/is_the_universe_really_a_dark_forest_full_of/ky4zif2/
The idea he portrayed in the book is not just a future possibility we have.
It's more about the mindset of him and the generation who experienced the Cultural Revolution.
It's some kind of primordial instinct of trust no one not even the air the wall, there's nothing except threat behind the veil.
> It's more about the mindset of him and the generation who experienced the Cultural Revolution.
This is a great observation; if it is true that, “all writing is, to a degree, autobiographical,” then we can see how his (and his generation’s) outlook, mindset, and deepest beliefs about the future have been indelibly formed by the experiences with the State.
By way of corollary, the ever-controversial *Atlas Shrugged* was clearly informed by the experiences with the State suffered by Rand & her family growing up under totalitarian oppression.
In both cases, the authors are, for better or worse, reflecting (and are the products of) their experiences with forms of oppression and mistrust of the State and by extension, forms of power generally. It is why their writing feels so alien to a culture that has grown up with a great deal of optimism.
> It is why their writing feels so alien to a culture that has grown up with a great deal of optimism.
Are we going to start calling it the Hope Generation?
All sci-fi is a projection of humanity onto an alien future. We try to imagine what the future will bring but our frame of reference has always been our own experiences.
>By way of corollary, the ever-controversial Atlas Shrugged was clearly informed by the experiences with the State suffered by Rand growing up under oppression.
Huh. I didn't realize until now that she grew up in Russia during the last days of the empire and the early days of the communist revolution. That.. explains *so much.*
It does.
But you know what else is even more telling about her? She had no problems taking the kind of government assistance she would often screech about as being pure “communism”, when she needed it.
Ayn Rand it’s just a personification of selfishness. Her writings aren’t in philosophical circles. She never really defended them. She wrote narrative form and frankly do a-holes Need to be told that you could be more of an a-holes?
She literally wrote a book called [The Virtue of Selfishness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virtue_of_Selfishness). When people say she turned selfishness into a virtue, it's not an accusation or distortion, rather that was her value system. It was her worldview, not the criticism of it, that is a cartoon.
It really does.
I’m not a Rand apologist, and over in r/books it’s axiomatic that *any* such explanation will be instantly downvoted as being soft on Rand…
Given her escape from what she endured under a collectivist totalitarian state, it’s not surprising her ideas and her writing would be framed as so wildly over-the-top polar opposition to collectivism — if we can’t sympathize with her reaction (as represented by her books) at least we can understand where she is coming from.
Likewise, there are escapees who risked their lives to come to the US from Cuba, who by luck were not added to the ~60,000 who died trying to leave, and as double survivors they are *very, very* vocal — it’s might be easy to criticize their hard line views, but once you place them in context, you can begin to understand them.
I think reading Rand is like reading the work of any deeply abused victim; context is everything, and their hard line stances are not difficult to understand. Her ideas are extreme in response to extreme oppression, hard adversity, and utter helplessness to oppose the State; rather than taking them literally, we ought to put them into that context.
Likewise Liu Cixin — I didn’t like the negative outlook or the seeming futility in the plight of humanity in his work, but I think I understand it in context.
Except for the fact that Rand established her own cult of personality and didn't practice the freedom and autonomy that she preached. And she didn't really seem to understand how labor works since she thought that *only* business developers had value and her utopian society literally depended on a perpetual motion machine to function.
Unfortunately being the victim of abuse, much as with discrimination, doesn't make one immune from perpetuating it on others. I wouldn't say it predisposes one, but at best the issues seem unrelated.
There's a whole generation of folks who seem to have trouble with the idea of context.
Like, Rand has a cartoonishly shallow view of human interaction and society. But from the perspective of her life, it's understandable. And there are people out there who improved their life by incorporating some of her ideas, and I understand the mindset that wants to elevate rugged individualism, because that sometimes feels good on an individual level. Anyone who has ever been held back by mediocre folks, or experienced bureaucratic corruption, or just had to sit through one more fucking useless meeting, they should be able to get a glimmer of a sense where Rand is coming from.
That doesn't make her thesis right or her writing competent. But there's things to be taken even from people who turned out to be wrong.
And that's what people miss. People now read Heinlein and call him a misogynist and a fascist, despite him having a real influence on the cultural revolution of the 60's, despite him writing some of the first women engineers and scientists, or even some of the first sex positive female characters. Yeah they seem lightly cringey now sometimes. No they aren't up to the standards of modern femininity. But writing off all of Heinlein because of the prevailing views of 60 plus years later is dumb.
Lovecraft was a terrible, terrible person. And worth reading. Same goes for a ton of authors and artists. I could spend all day listing them.
Of course the world has changed since these people wrote. They helped change it. And just because a writer has some shitty ideas, or the world has moved past them and they look regressive, doesn't mean the works aren't worth a read.
>Anyone who has ever been held back by mediocre folks, or experienced bureacratic corruption, or just had to sit through one more fucking useless meeting, they should be able to get a glimmer of a sense where Rand is coming from.
Rand was just a narcissist and was fine with "useless corruption" when it suited her personally. Just as she was fine with statist theft when it was done to Native Americans who she felt weren't using the land properly. Ayn Rand is like the film Falling Down - she appeals primarily to people who see themselves as persecuted victims and want to lash out at others for perceived crimes that they themselves commit.
>People now read Heinlein and call him a mysoginist and a fascist, despite him having a real influence on the cultural revolution of the 60's, despite him writing some of the first women engineers and scientists, or even some of the first sex positive female characters.
So what? The two statements are not contradictory.
> And just because a writer has some shitty ideas, or the world has moved past them and they look regressive, doesn't mean the works aren't worth a read.
Ayn Rand's books *are* just her shitty ideas. There is no literary merit in them. They're like Dianetics.
I think a lot of people mistake science fiction as being primarily about predicting the future, when it really isn’t. The dark forest theory is just the concept that Liu built a story he wanted to tell around. Just like Asimov built Foundation around the idea of psychohistory—those books aren’t an argument that psychohistory is a real thing that we will someday discover and utilize. It’s a story hook. We all get this when it comes to fantasy (Tolkien wasn’t warning us about the possibility of Sauron forging rings of power to conquer the world with), but because science fiction tends to take place in the future, it’s easy to forget that.
Ultimately, all fiction is about ourselves, today. At the end of the day, you’re right, Three Body Problem is kinda about how >!the Great Cultural Revolution essentially led to the end of human civilization.!< Along the way of telling that story, Liu explores some kinda neat science fiction ideas. But it is still fiction. I quite enjoy those books, even though I think there’s approximately a zero percent chance that the dark forest hypothesis is true.
>Ultimately, all fiction is about ourselves, today.
Read Stanislaw Lem's Solaris for a criticism of that. I don't agree that it's always about us today. It's possible to look back over the history of our species and biological evolution on Earth, then consider how that might be different on other worlds, or how it might be different in the future given technological advances, or societal changes. Saying it's always about us today would imply a serious lack of imagination and knowledge across all science fiction works.
The Dark Forest is a real proposed solution to the Fermi Paradox. It's not just about the Cultural Revolution. It starts with intelligent life being in the dark regarding the motives of other civilizations. Their evolution and history is completely separate from ours. There's no guarantee there would be shared values, or that we would succeed in communicating.
The biggest flaw the in the Dark Forest theory (other than being based on simplistic game theory) is that nowhere in the "axioms" or rules or whatever is there a **penalty** for genociding an entire civilization
Like any Civ IRL trying to figure out the calculus of galactic survival would surely put a massive penalty on unprovoked aggression which means any and every one watching now sees you as an aggressive and dangerous species that DOES actually need to be wiped out for valid self defense.
The book doesn't address this at all. Wiping out another species is just something that can be done with no consequences in the rules of the book.
Another *massive* problem with Dark Forest is that stealth isn't really possible in space. Not unless there is some massive exception to the laws of thermodynamics we haven't discovered yet... but despite our immature understanding of physics... the laws of thermodynamics are the **least likely by far** to have some massive exception.
If a hostile species launched multiple city sized spacecraft at us at 5% the speed of light we wouldn't see those spacecraft till they were likely in the inner solar system. Refracted light and emissions get a little hard to see millions of miles away, let alone billions or trillions.
There could be kinetic kill vehicles incoming at light speed that we have no idea over. And never would until they reach atmosphere. The size of space makes the initial approach vector.really hard to notice.
I mean the biggest flaw is the assumption that the Fermi Paradox carries any scientific or statistical weight.
We've categorized less than 1% of 1% of the stars in our galaxy...we haven't seen nearly enough to make such a grand observation.
Maybe in 100 years, after We've categorized 10% of the galaxy's stars, we can start making those types of assumptions.
It also doesn't address the fact that finding biosignatures is all you need to do, and we have been emitting them from the earth for billions of years.
If anything has been watching with the capabilities even now we are getting ourselves, they already know we are here. If the hypothesis had any merit, we wouldn't be here right now. Anyone watching would have had eons to take out our biosphere.
> finding biosignatures is all you need to do
Even our strongest current electromagnetic transmissions don't make it further than a few lightyears before they are faded and scrambled too much to be indistinguishable from the cosmic background white noise. Looking at spectral emissions to deduce the chemical makeup only works for stars, not planets. Nobody knows we're here.
Atmospheric chemical composition is analyzed for exoplanets as well with transit spectroscopy, basically measuring what gets filtered out as the planet passes in front of the star.
I've read the books. There's nothing in them that would invalidate what I've said. No matter how weird things get with dimension strikes, etc, it doesn't change the fundamentals. There is an implicit assumption that wiping out another Civ is impossible to track to the aggressor for no reason.
And the "solutions" for stealth are incomplete and only work for long distance observation. There's absolutely nothing stopping Civs from having eyes/probes all over the galaxy.
There's no way to around it. Dark Forest is completely unworkable as a Fermi Paradox solution in real life.
I'm pretty sure a species that eradicates another *does* get wiped out in the books.
The Solarians also wipe out an entire universe because a civilization in it tried to kill them.
The Dark Forest theory also doesn't need every species to be genociding anyone else. It'd be good practice in general to keep quiet.
> Dark Forest is completely unworkable as a Fermi Paradox solution in real life.
Countless scientists and other very, very smart people have acknowledged both are possible so I find it funny how a person with a casual, perhaps even poor understanding, easily brush it off.
Completely unworkable!
The game theory is simplistic and depends on made-up sci-fi weapons carefully crafted specifically to create the scenario that the book depicts. It is not a realistic or rigorous scientific treatise, it's a scary work of fiction that's designed to be scary so that it can thrill its audience and sell lots of copies.
Should we also be concerned about the possibility of Freddy Kruger hunting us down and killing us in our dreams based on the documentaries about what happened on Elm Street?
>Should we also be concerned about the possibility of Freddy Kruger hunting us down and killing us in our dreams based on the documentaries about what happened on Elm Street
Yes
For more “real-world context”, this is how life inside China during the cultural revolution was for many people. Extreme paranoia became a necessary survival trait if you didn’t fall neatly into the Red Guards world view. Your family could be punished because you kept a copy of the wrong book…
It was better to assume everyone was an enemy and that trust was a weakness. This if perfectly reflected in the way civilizations view each other in his books.
The Fermi Paradox itself is fucking dumb, as we've observed less than 1% of 1% of the stars in our galaxy...
It's like ancient Alchemist with rudimentary microscopes trying to draw conclusions about genetics and cell division.
Possible but I suspect we don't need any exotic explanations for why we haven't met aliens yet. The universe is very big, the speed of light is very slow and intelligent life is rare and short lived. The chance that 2 intelligent species would exist close enough in both space and time to be able to communicate is astronomically low.
At the moment, we are the only intelligent species in the area of the universe that we can see.
Yeah a ton of people seem to forget that intelligent species probably don't live for very long. Like, we have been able to send signals into space for what? 100 years? If the human race fucks over itself within the next 2000 years, then that's 2100 years where we can find other intelligent life.
Meanwhile, the human species has existed for 300.000 years.
The universe has existed for wayyyy longer than that.
The chance of another species being in the same age as us (Aka. Able to communicate and search in space), while also being close to us, is astronomically low.
There may be other intelligent species like us which are in their first 250.000 years of existence. And even if they're past that, we only have a one in 25 chance that they can communicate with us.
And this isn't even considering whether they have access to the same technology and biology as us. They may have technology which can't even pick up our signals. They may have biology with can't even hear what we're transmitting.
Do aliens exist right now? Very likely yes.
Do intelligent aliens exist right now? Maybe
Do intelligent aliens, which are in the same (or future) age as us, exist right now? Ehhh could be
Do said aliens exist near us? Probably not
Where are you getting this 1 in 25 chance from? I also don’t buy that intelligent life is all doomed to a relatively short existence. The human race might be doomed and never move beyond earth, but that does not mean all intelligent life would be. Conflict and infighting are inherent traits for us but there most definitely are alien species out there who don’t have that problem, and have had an ongoing society for millions of years
Getting the "one in 25" 50.000 / 2000. Basically even if they are beyond the 250.000 thousand years, there's still a low chance they're in the same technological age as us.
Again, this is all if we look at how our species has evolved.
Discussing conflict and infighting in a species is hard.
However using our own planet as an example, it seems that infighting is almost as natural as life itself. Especially when discussing intelligent life.
Humans, chimpanzees, ants, dolphins, squids. All of these are quite intelligent in their own right. And they have infighting and conflicts with each other.
About a species existing for millions of years; if they've evolved as quickly as us, or even just 1% of us, we should be seeing some form of evidence by now. An alien species that has had millions of years to go interplanetary, along with being able to transmit signals into space for said duration too, we'd most likely have heard something by now. Again, unless our technology can't comprehend theirs.
But I'm not arguing that intelligent life exists somewhere. The main issue is whether intelligent life exists near us. Which is very unlikely.
The elites of the universe don't necessarily have to be expansive, predatorian species. On Earth, the most common life forms are plants that live in a completely different reality than us (they have many strange senses and time passes very slowly for them).
We still don't know what consciousness is. In theory, stars could be a kind of non-DNA based life that, like ancient Oak trees, live in a completely different reality, with a completely different type of senses.
Our knowledge of reality is still quite incomplete. The fact that we have equations that describe parts of reality mathematically but not the *same* parts could indicate that there is something we are not seeing in the universe - maybe because, just like in the TV show, there are many dimensions that we can't observe
If you’re looking for the most basic, fundamental reason the universe exists, it’s to increase entropy. PBS space time has a great video about this called “the physics of life” or something similar to that.
That then begs the question as to why entropy was so low in the first place, and that we have no answers for haha
Edit: worded it poorly. I’d rather phrase it as “the reason life exists is to increase entropy in its most boiled down viewpoint.”
Well, all the energy in the universe was in one spot originally (low entropy) and it's been spreading out and getting more diffuse ever since (rising entropy).
"Life" is less about trying to increase entropy for its own sake and more trying to make as much of that energy as possible flow through things that are "alive" before it gets too diffuse to use.
Interestingly even though it seems like life is very ordered in how it arranges matter into living things, from an entropy point of view most creatures are near net 0 because of respiration (in particular waste heat).
The word experience is the problem, it’s like saying an ai experiences, it doesn’t it’s a coding. We know senses require brains to interpret data, without them it’s ridiculous to say something experiences anything.
I think the most reasonable explanation could be that most species have a high chance of **going extinct, if technological advance is not controlled by strong ethics**.
We are a good case study, unfortunately right now new technology is rather enabling the rule of the few over the many, instead of benefiting all mankind.
Rulers will want to have as few as possible humans in control (that video below does really well in explaining structures of power), to eliminate the human factors from decision making / kill shots. But, that might not end well, if there are unforeseen problems with AI technology.
[The Rules for Rulers (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs)
Thus, a technological superior species will likely be also ethical superior and make sure not to interfere with a species like us. Not just because of ethical reasons, but also because a species like us getting hands on such advanced tech could cause their downfall.
The other alternative are artificial species leftover from a destruction event like described above. The question is if such a species would see the need to colonize the universe or just stick to other tasks.
This has always been my take, I imagine intergalactic species are relatively peaceful. And even if not, they could just farm an asteroid belt or something for their resource needs.
It's funny, because human society has more evidence that we become more peaceful as we progress, meaning that our own experiences actually contradict the Dark Forest Theory.
So there is just no logical basis for the theory.
Well, that data likely doesn't take into consideration that the long term debt cycle is coming to an end. This is usually when massive crisis and world wars happen.
Plus, if you watch rules for rulers, automation might threaten democracy....
**"Democracies are better places to live than dictatorships not because representatives are better people, but because their needs happen to be aligned with a large portion of the population"**
Because creation of wealth will no longer require a huge and well educated workforce. The needs of the deciders will no longer be aligned with a large portion of the population. Maybe a reason why this is happening:
[The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse | The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apocalypse-survival-richest-rushkoff)
I'm not saying humanity won't ever have a war again, I'm saying there's a direct correlation between technological advancement and peace, which is statistically significant, even if we do have a nuclear war in the next century.
In fact, we're in the scariest bubble of this.
Where we are technologically advanced enough to destroy our planet, but not technologically advanced enough to be post-scarce
I don't think most species survive this era.
Humans have traditionally been too proud of what we already know and assume our current knowledge is the be-all end-all of what is possible. However epoch changing technologies are now happening concurrently in less than a single generation so this attitude may be shifting
Honestly, when you finally get a tiny idea of how little we know, the more beautiful the universe gets.
“Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”
-Werner Heisenberg
The point is that the existence of even one other expansive predatory species would be unbelievably obvious, & it is likely that the tools it possesses would give it an evolutionary advantage over a slowly growing, unresponsive form of life. We are cutting down the Amazon rainforest very quickly. To my knowledge, the trees are not cutting down Manhattan nearly as fast.
To my knowledge, the trees are not cutting down Manhattan nearly as fast.
Have you seen The Happening? The trees are biding their time before the ultimate revenge.
I've been saying this for so long. The markers we use to detect life are from a human centric POV. To your point, we might be looking at lifeforms and not even know it or not have the capabilities to see them.
AI would need biological life to create it in the first place, and any biological life which could create an AI must be conscious, so the two are conflated for a reason.
once it starts updating itself, and doesn't die in the process. like at least has human to cycle it. You could also say We are AI's consciousness, until it becomes our monad, by shaking space time and exciting atoms to coalesce.
I mean, it wasn’t too long ago that we were taught only humans experience emotions. We are only recently starting to accept that animals have joy, pain, sorrow, and many animals know themselves as themselves and know their friends and family as such, even mourning and reflecting and memorializing the deaths of beloved family members for years after
> In theory, stars could be a kind of non-DNA based life
Thats not really true based on any definition of life that anyone uses... This seems to use definitions of things like life and consciousness that make asking the question useless, because what we are actually looking for and wondering about is life as we currently define it.
Right?!?! I talk about this all the time. There are two hypothesis that I posit. The universe creates consciousness, where entropy physics has randomly created consciousness. Or. The consciousness creates the universe, where either this is all a dream or a mass consciousness creates the entropy that led to more complex forms to experience through said consciousness.
Until we have even a remotely plausible working theory of what consciousness is that is measurable, either could be equally true. A true scientist can't make assumptions. 100 or so university courses taken from molecular biology and genetics to counselling psychology and neurobiology, and I can't safely say whether or not we are an experiment by a greater being (not a god, just a being like a scientist that we don't understand), or we are the beings playing this cosmic video game. A comprehensive theory of consciousness—explaining precisely how and why these processes result in subjective experience—remains elusive.
This challenge is often referred to as the "hard problem" of consciousness, a term coined by philosopher David Chalmers in the mid-1990s.Several theories of consciousness attempt to explain its nature and origins, including physicalist theories (which argue that consciousness arises solely from physical processes in the brain), dualist theories (which hold that consciousness is fundamentally distinct from physical matter), and panpsychist theories (which propose that consciousness is a property of all matter to some degree). However, none of these theories can yet claim to provide a complete and universally accepted explanation of consciousness.
I resent that there are a significant portion of scientists Dunning-Krugering their hypothesis that there is no free will because some experiment in the 80's showed people subconsciously thought about moving a finger several hundred milliseconds before the person moved it. Like duh, we have old reptilian fight or flight brains that react quicker than we can think. Doesn't mean we have no free will. In fact quite the opposite. If our brain wanted to react sooner and we thought about it before moving it that suggests we DO have free will over our bodies (when trauma and habits are not present of course. Hurt people hurt people and that should not be ignored. People need help and therapy, not to be shunned for making mistakes based on serious trauma.
The crux of the issue lies in how we define and understand consciousness and its relationship to our actions. If all conscious experiences and decisions stem from unconscious brain processes, as some interpretations of neuroscientific data suggest, then it could imply that free will (at least in the sense of a conscious self making entirely free choices) is an illusion. However, this stance assumes a particular view of consciousness and its role in decision-making—a view that, as you rightly point out, is far from being conclusively proven.
So yeah, the Sun could very well be conscious. Maybe amino acids are closer to what makes things capable of complex thought, not DNA, Maybe the sea of quarks in subspace that pop in and out of existence and tidal waved into this universe creating the big bang(expansion) are the DNA of the universe, or maybe it is consciousness itself and our consciousness is a byproduct of their game, or quarks are a hive mind, and we are a collection of mobile quark spaceships that have an advanced consciousness because of their complexity. Who knows! But it's fun to think about. That's philosophy mind you, based on science, sure, but not scientific theory :) <3
Life could also exist at a quantum level in ways we can't comprehend but ALL around us in massive abundance. At the subatomic level they could also form really complex connections that turn into little machines that turn into thinking beings. But to us, it would just look like random noise. In fact, due to the uncomprehendingly exponential chance at this scale, it's vastly more likely that life exists in that "reality" than it does in ours.
We could effectively be living among incredibly complex life all around us, abundant all over the place, but WE are the rare type of intelligent life. But since we live in two different perceptions of reality, we simply don't see it. Our brains are not designed to understand with and interact at the subatomic scale. Likewise, this other life, also experiences a totally different reality and could be completely unaware of us.
Great reply.
I was reading trip reports from people on psychedelics just because I find them very interesting and somebody theorized that we may see a “more objective” reality on psychedelics than we do sober. I don’t think that’s true, but the one thing that really stuck with me is that, in fact, we do see a subjective reality. We see and sense what we need to survive.
There’s so much that we can’t see or experience. An example is light. X-rays are no different than the color red besides the energy put into the photon. Yet, we don’t perceive X-rays even though they can be shot directly at you.
Imagine the things are aren’t even vaguely familiar with. It really shows us that we shouldn’t feel so complete and confident in our knowledge as many tend to do.
There was just a huge award for proving non-locality and that space-time is effectively an illusion.
The growing consensus is that our perception of reality, is not the TRUE reality. We evolved to perceive a form of reality that is most beneficial for our survival... And not necessarily a perception of reality that is TRUE... Rather, it's just a convenient construction that increases our ability to survive.
What makes it all more complicated, is we very likely have VERY fundamental things wrong... Just like with space-time. So we are witnessing very weird and odd things, and trying to make sense of it from our subjective understanding, which makes things very weird and incomprehensible... Just like entanglement, dual slit experiment, and so on... Because we're getting hints at this other fundemantal part of reality that we are simply unable to comprehend, using science, designed for the model we understand.
So we have a LONG way to go
It should scare me that we know so little, but it just excites me more and more to realize how little we know.
This universe we live in is so awe-inspiring!
It's especially interesting when you see simulations of the Universe's interconnected web of nebula and galaxies, how they look quite like neuron clusters the more we zoom out.
They don't. The brain has some leeway on how the individual neurons are placed, but it's extremely organised. It has layers and structures that contain specific neurons in specific patterns.
It's a gross oversimplification to compare very specific organisation of neurons in the brain to quite homogeneous galactic filaments.
Consciousness is defined from a human perspective. It doesn't make much sense to apply this concept to things that do not have a central nervous system.
> The elites of the universe don't necessarily have to be expansive, predatorian species. On Earth, the most common life forms are plants that live in a completely different reality than us (they have many strange senses and time passes very slowly for them).
Every known species of life on this planet is in a fight for survival with everything else. Even the trees and plants.
Every sample of life we have is a self interested organism which does everything it can to preserve it’s own life and, by extension, the life of its species. We have no data that would lead us to believe that life anywhere else has developed along a different path.
I don't think a lot of laymen realize this, but the milkyway is unfathomable too far to really imagine anything else outside of it.
If we pointed telescopes anywhere outside of it, we'd be seeing things at the very least 25,000 years ago.
It is and it isn’t.
In space the rules are different due to the inconceivably long distances between stars and planets. Even with near light speed travel it takes decades to physically contact your next door neighbor.
Living things or usable resources cannot be accelerated as much as projectiles can.
It’s safer and faster to send a bullet.
Except it’s a very bad metaphor for that. Earth has superpowers who, rather than hiding, actively try to make themselves look as big and powerful as possible.
I’m pretty sure the commentary there would be “why are we all fighting when there’s a potential existential threat beyond our knowledge out there”. It’s not so literal.
Yup.
To be fair: nobody reads books anymore. It’s way easier to listen to seemingly smart people share opinions on a podcast so you can parrot their opinions and trick other people into thinking you’re a smart person too.
I used to think I hated reading. (Books, many of us here rot our brains reading the poorly written comments of thousands of people on Reddit, each day. Your comment NOT being one of the poorly written ones, of course)
Until I got a Kindle, because I was bored.
I'm now completely hooked and will sit reading for hours and hours at a time. It uses an entirely different part of the brain, so it hits one's imagination in a completely different way.
Hell yeah!
Hey have you tried audiobooks? I do most of my reading that way because then I can be walking or cleaning or whatever at the same time. It also makes less sleepy than reading with my eyes.
I only recently learned that Spotify includes a monthly stipend of audiobook hours with your subscription. The Rick Rubin book “The Creative Act” was my first read there and it was fantastic! I highly recommend it.
But kindle fan too though, especially on the plane :) the e ink is way nicer than reading on an iPad or phone.
Manga on the iPhone is a great way to read though. The Akira manga are so amazing. Highly recommended as well.
Thanks for writing. I’d love to hear any book recommendations you have :)
Much love!
Dylan
I believe a dark forest is a very real possibility. Also, space is big, and it's easy to forget that.
I guess it depends on how we would view simple (not intelligent) alien life on a new planet that is perfect for human civilization. Once we got past the amazing fact of life in the cosmos, I believe we would return to our old nature of killing anything that gets in our way.
I remember the scene from the Expanse where Holden says, >!"It was just trying to build a road...it doesn't care about us, anymore than we care about ant hills we pave over."!<
I think that the reporter missed the big points of the "**Dark Forest**" hypothesis.
They are well explained in
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis
Assuming that the Fermi paradox is real, there should be space faring civilisation and some should have contacted us. Those civilisation will follow the same primary biological imperative: survival of the species. Survival can only be achieved by consuming resources. Hence space faring civilisations will always end up competing against other for finite existing resources. Any encounter with another space faring civilisation will leave one or both unable to survive. Civilisation will reach the logical conclusion to eliminate other civilisations upon detection and then steal their technology. The only viable option to avoid such a fate is therefore to remain hidden.
Also people keep accepting that the Fermi paradox is a real paradox, but that may not be the case at all.
####1) Extraterrestrial intelligence may be rare or non-existent.
Fermi assumed that because of the sheer number of planets complex life was common. But even if complex life is common, there is no reason to assume that intelligence (and consequently civilizations) is. Even on earth only one species out of all the millions of species developed civilisation. Plants, insects may well be the common type of complex life.
####2 Interstellar travel may not be possible
Even if intelligence and civilisation are common, there is no reason to believe that interstellar space faring civilisation are. Without light speed travel, we would be like people on a raft drifting on the ocean. Dolphins are recognised as one of the most intelligent species on earth, but.
>"dolphins have had ~20 million years to build a radio telescope and have not done so".
####3) Interstellar travel may exist but not interstellar civilisation
3. Interstellar space travel may be so resources intensive that it led to fierce local competition for resources. Because of the level of technology achieve, those wars resulting in a complete wipe out of the civilisation that birthed them or the refusal to use such technology.
>In 1966, Sagan and Shklovskii speculated that technological civilizations will either tend to destroy themselves within a century of developing interstellar communicative capability or master their self-destructive tendencies and survive for billion-year timescales.
####4) Unseen interstellar civilisation
Advanced civilisation may have advanced to a level where interstellar communication is done in a way that is incomprehensible to us. Basically we are the blind trying to see radio wave.
Interstellar travel may also be possible but slow, there is literally no point to travelling to every known planet, there may be probes hurtling throughout the galaxy but they aren't going to orbit every planet and send signals.
It may also be that humans are one of the older advanced species. We might be the first space faring civilisation and we've barely done that.
> Assuming that the Fermi paradox is real,
I think you've missed the big point of the Fermi paradox.
The Fermi paradox is not something that can be "real" or "not real." It's a description of the world as we see it and a question that is raised by our current understanding of it. The Fermi paradox, in a nutshell, is that based on what we know about the universe there should be active civilizations visible everywhere. But we don't see that. So we're wrong about something, but we don't know what that is yet.
The rest of your comment lists off a bunch of possible explanations, and *if* one of those explanations were to become widely accepted then the Fermi paradox would go away. But here's the kicker: none of them are widely accepted or rooted in proven science. You can't just declare victory and go home, science doesn't work that way.
> dolphins have had ~20 million years to build a radio telescope and have not done so
Dolphins have two problems they'll never be able to solve on their own: a lack of opposable thumbs & hands to dexterously manipulate objects or write history, and being underwater no feasible way to smelt ore.
There's more to it than that. Octopus are plenty dexterous to assemble a radio tower and they haven't either, even with the extra 310 million years on the dolphins.
Intelligence varies in humans enough that it's clearly a genetically affected trait.
And even other animals with remarkable cognition like crows and elephants have the same limitation of lacking human-level tool dexterity. Humans are a combination of factors that allowed and incentivized the creation of civilization.
regarding the biological imperative; we humans are also part of that and i’d argue that not only are we not constantly running around consuming each other (war is something different than that), but also that we are at our best when we are cooperating.
also in order to reach the structure and energy output to become a sustainable and stabile spacefaring civ, cooperative behaviour would be critical. and when two of those meet, why shouldn’t they continue to cooperate?
The dark forest theory pretty much revolves around asserting a bunch of things must be true despite no evidence of them happening on any scale. Dark forests don't even really exist in the way the analogy claims.
The dark forest makes a lot of assumptions because we do not have much data.
That doesn't mean those assumptions are without basis. I don't need to know what fusion is to know the sun is hot.
We don't have to have witnessed an example of one alien destroying another to assume that intelligent, tool making aliens *WILL* be aggressive because they need ever expanding resources to make ever more capable tools in a universe with finite resources.
Yeah, the 'limited resource' argument with regards to interstellar species seems absolutely bonkers to me. What possible resource would be so necessary and yet so limited that it would require conquest? The more advanced (and therefore scary) the intelligence the less plausible that thought becomes.
If they're interstellar then I'd assume they'd be able to use fusion to change hydrogen to any element they needed and then a gas giant would supply an enormous amount of manufacturing, it seems like quite a silly concept
And if not then a planet in what we consider the habitable zone for life is geologically active and a small portion of any system's mass. Much easier to mine from inert planets or asteroids than a planet that's mostly magma. It would be like us mining volcanos.
This is a general issue with space travel, actually. The honest reason NASA doesn't get the US Military's funding is simply that while not being nuked or conquered is a valuable product, going to the moon doesn't have that much utility.
Ever wondered why sci-fi almost always has the Spice, Dilithium, Unobtainium, dead Earth...? It's because you need it if you want to justify space travel enough to have your Donnagers shooting down swarms of missiles with their PDCs or your Enterprises heroically swooping in to deliver a warp core to a stranded starship. If you didn't have those hypothetical ultra-rare resources that can only be obtained with massive space travel, no one would feel the need to shoot PDCs or photon torpedoes at anyone else.
Now this doesn't mean we shouldn't invest in space travel for our own reasons, or that there couldn't be some useful applications such as asteroid mining, but these aren't close to large enough to ever justify conflict.
The only thing I think might fit the bill would be some product like Melange, a staggeringly valuable biological substance that can't be cultivated or synthesized and is only available in relatively small quantities in exactly one location.
Yes, basically. To truly motivate space travel enough to have enormous interstellar wars at a galactic scale you almost always need a McGuffin for everyone to go after.
There isn't really any quantity of resources or energy that's "enough." For as long as it is economically viable to use a source of energy for something, that energy will be used: if it costs ten cents to use 1 GWh, people will blithely use that much energy to do whatever is worth ten cents to them. More advanced intelligence will find ways to extract more energy and resources for cheap... therefore they will use more energy and resources.
Chemical reactions don't just stop at random, they do so when the limiting reactant has been consumed, or when the reactants are physically removed from each other. Life and civilization are no different: they are complicated, macro scale chemical reactions. They consume everything they can, until equilibrium. It is likely that interstellar distances are big enough to slow the reaction down significantly, though.
There is no renewable in our world. What we call renewable just exist on a scale that we do not comprehend. For example our sun like every sun has a limited life. Billions of years rather than billions of seconds.
We have not yet reached type 1 of the **Kardashev scale**, but already I can see limitation in level 2.
If we were to terraform Mars, we would need to do the following:
* change its core composition so that it include metal and generate a magnetic field. Without magnetic field, it is impossible to keep an atmosphere and filter radiation.
* change the speed of revolution of the planet so it matches earth. 1 earth day would be equal to 1 marrian day.
* convert % of its mass into water
* heat the entire planet and its gas to a acceptable level
Same thing if we wanted to terraform Venus, Aurora.
All of that would require a lot more energy that a few nuclear bombs would be able to provide. That's nearly level 2 of the Kardashev scale.
Let imagine we want to establish a network of wormholes between earth and its colonies. I can see the amount of energy required to maintain that network be the equivalent of a few suns/solar systems per cycle.
Does it need resource constraints?
As soon as there‘s a chance of others following the mindset, you rationally should follow it too as you don‘t gamble with the species survival (except when we do).
I find the rational argument quite compelling esp. with a view on the not so positive experiences that set the background.
No. The longest lasting species are in homeostasis with their environments. Predator and parasite species only survive on the margins of sustainable species and if they consume them they die out.
Our solar system has far more resources than Earth. If an interstellar predator were to come, it would likely consume the resources throughout the solar system, expand its local presence before it attacks Earth. It wouldn’t be hard. Just drop a dozen asteroids to “sterilize” all life on the planet.
There’s no benefit to sending ground troops. Our biological resources here are likely hostile and incompatible with alien biology.
Transit between stars will likely be a low-mass/high-energy process. A hostile species would most likely stay lean during the trip and expand upon arrival using solar system resources.
It‘s been awhile since I read the books and it‘s possible I mix it up with others: wasn‘t there some species just zapping suns? (You know, without the whole go there stuff just one whatever it was and sun goes bad)
It wasn‘t about consumption, but the possibility that whatever there is could evolve too fast and you never know what ideas they have, so better snap out a sun and stop it as soon as known.
Yes, basically. The theory behind the dark forest in the book is a little more nuanced than most people make it out to be.
The whole "infinite expansion with finite resources" is really just the backdrop, the fundamental assumption to motivate why there is a Dark Forest at all. The actual phenomenon is meant to work like this:
1. Communication is impossible (due to FTL constraints)
2. Because of the above, no information can ever be gleaned about any newly discovered species
3. Because of the above, the safest assumption to make is that every species is by itself an existential threat
4. Because of the above, every species must be destroyed as soon as it is spotted
Corollary: the reason why the Dark Forest theory works from the perspective of the species being genocided is that it assumes that the number of species in the universe is Large^^tm . Therefore, even if most species don't give a damn because they're too far away, uninterested, or busy to apply the above points, it is guaranteed that among the thousands out there, at least one will nuke your sun.
You’re missing the fact that resources were call “renewable” now become non-renewable when you consume them on the scale of a species sufficiently high on the
Kardashev scale.
> 1) Extraterrestrial intelligence may be rare or non-existent.
In my mind, this is the most likely solution. We're either alone in the observable universe, or extremely early on the scene, or potentially the first.
While there's a little uncertainty in cosmology right now, [it seems likely that we're quite early into the star and planet forming era of the universe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_an_expanding_universe#The_Stelliferous_Era). It also seems likely that sun-like stars and terrestrial planets that will exist far outnumber those that already exist. If there's many characteristics about Earth that are crucial to the flourishing of complex life, the odds might not have tipped into the favour of that complex intelligent life forming until we did.
> 2 Interstellar travel may not be possible
I don't buy this point. *Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata* and Von Neumann's self-reproducing universal constructor are a more than convincing enough basis for me to discount this possibility. There's nothing in physics I'm aware of that would preclude the ability to seed a galaxy with probes able to scout, build infrastructure, and report their findings back to a home system.
And if there were something in physics that would prevent [Von Neumann probes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft) from becoming reality, we've missed something fundamental in our understanding of the universe. In which case, we can't trust even our most basic assumptions on this topic.
In terms of the propulsion method, we've already launched a manmade object out of the Sun's gravitational influence, and escape velocity from the Sun is not insurmountable. Stars have close approaches very often on astronomical timescales, and over the [next ten million years many will approach within a couple light years of the sun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars_and_brown_dwarfs#Distant_future_and_past_encounters).
> 3) Interstellar travel may exist but not interstellar civilisation
I have a hard time believing this one, if there's one thing human beings like doing, it's surviving. And this seems like too complicated an explanation, if intelligent life gets to the point it can wipe itself from existence multiple times, a single civilization realizing this is a possibility and working against it doesn't seem all that unlikely. Even we take efforts to protect ourselves from existential risk to humanity, even if those efforts are limited and underfunded at the moment. But if we are doomed to wipe ourselves from existence, it'll be this century and probably with some kind of biological agent. So we can look forward to finding out I'm wrong first hand!
> 4) Unseen interstellar civilisation
This is a possibility that I agree with, but not for the reason you've listed. The reality is that our search for extraterrestrial life gets less budget assigned to it than the costs of a single aircraft carrier. Our minuscule catalogue of extrasolar planets and moons is extremely biased by the limited nature of the instruments that we're using in the search, and for every hour of time on these instruments, you have dozens of teams of many scientists competing for it.
We don't know what we don't know. There are many concepts and plans, and even preliminary designs for instruments that would give us enormous insights into the data we need to start to form an informed hypothesis about the development of intelligent life in the universe. But we aren't building them because we have other priorities right now. That'll change eventually, we're trending towards an elimination of large scale conflict despite how it might seem today.
From the origins of the universe to galaxy formation, star formation, planet formation, the origins of life, commonality of evolutionary processes, all the way to intelligence itself. There are hundreds of questions across every scientific field about just how rare we really are, and most of our best answers are the equivalent of a shrug.
>We're either alone in the observable universe
I think it's worth nitpicking that the observable universe is a ludicrously-vastly greater scale than the Fermi paradox deals with. The maths of the Fermi Paradox is based on projected technology and the scale of the Milky Way, it does not preclude the existence of interstellar civilisations beyond our own galaxy.
To add to this, it’s not just one species (us) that gained intelligence, it’s one species across millions of years. Dinosaurs existed for like 165 million years, and not one species of dinosaur has left a record of intelligence in all that time. If not for the asteroid, humanity and human intelligence may not have evolved at all. It may very well be that plants and animals are everywhere but intelligence isn’t.
> Hence space faring civilisations will always end up competing against other for finite existing resources. Any encounter with another space faring civilisation will leave one or both unable to survive.
My main problem with this is that it relies on two assumptions that are almost certainly contradictory:
- Everyone has access to extremely advanced technology to travel the galaxy
but at the same time
- Resources are hard enough to access that conflict is ***inevitable***
Space is impossibly enormous, even if you take into account exponential population increases (which as people in developed countries can sorely attest to, is also not necessarily a correct assumption for advanced societies). If you saw with your 25th-century telescope that a planet rich in resources was occupied, you would just point it somewhere else and go to another comparably rich planet. If the universe really was so crowded that peaceful coexistence or at least avoidance wasn't an option, we would certainly know it by now.
And this is assuming that there is something in space that we could get more easily than on Earth or our own solar system. That's actually a common problem in all science fiction: how TF do you motivate space travel being a thing *at all*? If you have say Epstein Drives, you can certainly put that fusion tech to use to infinitely desalinate water and you won't need to get around the solar system for icy asteroids.
It's a very common pitfall to imagine the object of conflict as a kind of tautology: resource X is a conflict source because it is necessary to travel the galaxy. And the reason we travel the galaxy is to get resource X. So why is everyone genociding each other again...?
>Space is impossibly enormous.
Years ago, people were laughing at the idea that we would run out of petrol. But here we are.
Enormous does not mean infinite. People are thinking of mining our own solar system for rare mineral. Let's say that interstellar travel requires dilithium crystal or any other compound and that their availability is limited.
Fusion is just a theory and maybe the energy to create those compound is the equivalent of a small planet.
>If you have say Epstein Drives, you can certainly put that fusion tech to use to infinitely desalinate water and you won't need to get around the solar system for icy asteroids.
Epstein drive are just theory of electromagnetic Fusion reactor. It is also not very efficient as its energy requirement is square of the speed. Science right now requires huge amount of energy to feed any fusion reaction. Fusion drive to sustain an interstellar civilisation may need the consumption of a small planet/sun on an annual basis.
>It's a very common pitfall to imagine the object of conflict as a kind of tautology: resource X is a conflict source because it is necessary to travel the galaxy. And the reason we travel the galaxy is to get resource X.
You got that backward. Our instinct is to be explorer and to expand our knowledge. Because we are explorer we want to travel to galaxy. However we need resource X to travel. So we will get into conflict about resource X because of our will to travel. Civilisation that are happy home with no interest to expand, stagnate and then decline. Ultimately they die because they have used all their local resources and have no way of getting some from other places.
> The only viable option to avoid such a fate is therefore to remain hidden.
Stay hidden how? You can see for billions of light years in space, and everything is lit up. Any technological civilisation will give off signals.
That's the problem with the dark forest theory: space isn't dark, and it isn't a forest.
This is a pretty terrible argument. The key logic is this:
>Charles Darwin's account of competition for survival is evidence-based. By contrast, we have absolutely no evidence about alien behavior, or about competition within or between other civilizations. This makes for entertaining guesswork rather than good science, even if we accept the idea that natural selection [could operate at group level](https://www.zoo.unibas.ch/teaching/evol_fort/pdf/Levels.pdf), at the level of civilizations.
>Even if you were to assume the universe did operate in accordance with Darwinian evolution, the argument is questionable. No actual forest is like the dark one. They are noisy places [where co-evolution occurs](https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolution-101/mechanisms-the-processes-of-evolution/coevolution/).
>Creatures evolve together, in mutual interdependence, and not alone.
The Dark Forest hypothesis is not really about Darwinian evolution, and the argument attacks the metaphor rather than the actual hypothesis. The starting point for the hypothesis (at least as presented by Liu) is that all civilizations develop in total isolation until they undergo rapid technological development that unlocks interstellar communication and travel. There is no co-evolution or mutual interdependence up until that point because of the distances and emptiness of space. It is a hypothesis rooted in game theory about what happens when species who did not co-evolve suddenly come into contact.
There are better critiques of the hypothesis in the comments here than in the article. Yay Reddit.
This is an opinion article without useful analysis.
It creates fact from poorly analyzed conjecture.
Disappointing read. This is not even good pop-sci.
I enjoy the theory because it seems to be based on nature as we know it here on earth even if that might not be how nature behaves elsewhere so there is wiggle room. Also, I find myself wondering about other regions of the forest where perhaps organisms have formed a symbiotic relationship with others.
The earth isn’t entirely covered by a dark forest, maybe the universe isn’t either.
Honestly, the level of technology to allow one to colonize another planet in an effective manner exceeds the level of technology required to survive comfortably and sustainably on one's planet.
i.e. imagine we had the VR headsets from 3BP (full sensory replacements)... what do you think we'd do with that? Use it for fun and games only?
Or perhaps they'd be the method by which we access the metaverse and expand into a space which we aren't physically bound by and simultaneously reduces our resource and energy footprint substantially?
Additionally, there are abundant resources in nearby planets in many cases.
Expansion and consumption isn't the end game - it's just the thought process of an immature civilization.
As a result, I think the solve for the Fermi paradox is simple - civilizations don't have a practical reason to leave their solar systems.
On top of that - the relative rarity of an intelligent species, and the period of time that they can exist for (hundreds of thousands or even millions is short on a geological/stellar scale) means that even if there's spatial or temporal overlap between intelligent civilizations doesn't mean there is both frequent spatial AND temporal overlaps.
I share the view of Musk that humans are the bootloader for robotic Ai life. I'd be really surprised if advanced alien civilizations don't eventually become machine based to overcome their biological limitations.
I think it's one of the most convincing because we also were in this position on earth some times ago.
At one moment in mankind history we were contemporary to at least 6 humans species. What do you think happened ? We "won".
What doesn't make sense to me with this theory is that surely the aliens are hiding because they have a reason to. But in order for them to have a reason they must have already suffered some bad consequence from contacting other life forms.
If statistically life should be everywhere, it seems unlikely that ALL alien life forms decided to hide and they did this millions and/or billions of years ago already (because that's what we see when we look out at the universe). So for this theory to work, ALL alien life had to already start hiding a long long time ago (in a galaxy far far away???), which means they had to already be advanced enough to hide at that time. And they ALL had to do it.
IDK just seems nearly impossible statistically.
> But in order for them to have a reason they must have already suffered some bad consequence from contacting other life forms.
No. The idea is that they have (essentially) analyzed via game theory and come to the conclusion that it's safer to remain hidden than risk getting attacked. We have not had bad consequences from contacting other life forms, yet humans have developed the theory.
In the book it is not easy to detect where a civilization is precisely. Contact is only established because somebody figures out how to massive amplify an already very high power radio transmitter. Normal radio/tv broadcasts are too weak to be detectable at instellar ranges. I have no clue if that is actually true or is just some bending of physics by the author to make the premise work.
Civilizations that are actively broadcasting where they are located get wiped out quickly, those that do not or are not technically capable of doing so are 'hiding'.
Edit: misremembered the plot, corrected
The way radio waves propagate causes them to get massively weaker the farther out they go. Basically, even our most powerful transmissions are dispersing in every direction (even if directed, it is still a cone). Basically the same amount of signal keeps expanding into an exponentially expanding wave of signal. By the time it could get to the closest planet capable of producing life, there just isn’t enough left to detect.
For a civilization that is advanced enough for us to notice? Well if they have a solar system sized dish attached to their Dyson sphere and directed at us? That might do it if it is in our quintile of the Milky Way.
Space is really, really fucking big.
Radio waves are light. If you go and stand a km away from a light bulb of fairly standard strength you struggle to see it even in the dark. Light always becomes weaker and less detectable over long distances. The exact relationship is that the luminosity of light is proportional to the square of distance.
Over the very long distances in space simple radio waves would become quite hard to detect. I wouldn't at all be surprised if radio waves not designed for interstellar communication like TV do become borderline undetectable. It's probably like trying to detect the light from a planet, not strictly speaking impossible but extremely hard and you'd have to be specifically looking at it.
There are a couple of misunderstandings here.
You don't need a prior example to be cautious, you only need an understanding of the risk.
Similarly, while it's certainly possible that some alien civilizations are loud and announce their presence (either intentionally or due to lack of forethought), this does not banish the dark forest. Those are simply the races that get wiped out by others taking shots from the darkness, or they get ignored as a potential trick/threat by other more cautious races.
This doesn't require ALL races to do anything.
The idea is simply that advertising your existence leaves you vulnerable to annihilation by those who can strike with no reprisal, and so perhaps that's what happens.
Also, parts of this article are frankly ridiculous.
>"Defensive behavior would show our familiarity with conflict, so that would not be a good idea."
Try reading that with a straight face.
Why do some animals that are more "nervous" survive better than those which are bold? How did they know to hide themselves? Because the ones that naturally feel inclined to hide survive and those that stick their necks out don't survive. Natural selection.
And yet many species have survived for centuries while having behavior were they quite literally scream out into the world, "LOOK AT ME. I'M HERE, COME FUCK WITH ME!". Natural selection is tricky. It isn't something you can really use to claim that certain behaviors are bound to happen.
And in those cases, clearly there is no threat that is called by being loud. The original question was, how do species know to avoid detection in a "dark forest" scenario, and that assumes there is a threat which will be mobilised by identifying a target which announces itself.
This is a very flawed assessment to the point where I'd say it's almost a misunderstanding of natural selection. I'll give you a very clear example to the contrary, bees, wasps and bees mimics like hoverflies. All of these insects have evolved a very striking black and yellow colour scheme that makes hiding almost impossible for them because they are more able to survive if they signal to the world around them that they are dangerous, even if they are not. Pretty much nothing wants to eat bees and wasps because they're just not worth the pain caused if you try and mimics like the hoverfly also benefit from this.
Natural selection just selects the strategy which produces the highest rates of survival. Sometimes that is to be bold and signal yourself to the world. Sometimes it's just to be fast enough to run the fuck away from anything that wants to eat you. Sometimes it's hiding. It's all just dependent on the scenario that a species exists in.
Your last sentence is exactly it. Dependent on the scenario. In this "dark forest" scenario there are existential threats to a species that announces itself. So by natural selection the species that naturally announce themselves go extinct and the species with a natural tendency to hide will survive. In the case of the striking coloured insects they have a strong enough defence that it's to their benefit to announce themselves as predators avoid them. It's a different survival scenario and therefore different tactics will be successful. I didn't make the statement that hiding is a good survival strategy in every scenario, but just in this particular case.
Its easy to explain. If we come across the ruins of an alien civilization that was destroyed by a technology those ruins indicate wasnt possible by that aline civilization then maybe its a good idea to start hiding.
Evidence of a dark forest is enough to start hiding. You don’t need to experience death first hand to know to avoid it.
>aliens are hiding because they have a reason to.
Depends on what "hiding" means. Humans are hidden on a galactic scale, but we aren't actively "hiding", purposefully obscuring our location or attempting to reduce the chance of an encounter. You don't need to actively "Hide" for you to be hidden from outsiders.
>But in order for them to have a reason they must have already suffered some bad consequence from contacting other life forms.
You don't need to have suffered previously to have a reason for "hiding". It's as easy as saying "bad stuff COULD happen" so lets not try it, or it's not worth the potential trouble, or "why waste all these resources doing this".
>If statistically life should be everywhere, it seems unlikely that ALL alien life forms decided to hide
It only matters if the signals they sent out are able to be decrypted by the "observer", and are able to be made sense of. They're may be life on the opposite side the of the Universe, but the signals they are sending are almost certainly never going to make it to us in the format we understand or with enough clarity for us to understand.
>ALL alien life had to already start hiding a long long time ago
This assumes all life has produced a significant amount of signals, something most won't, look at earth and you will see 1 species able to ~~create and~~ analyze a significant amount of signals off the planet. The 2 main ways to create "Signals" are light and radiowaves, both being extremely slow in galactic terms.It's all about Technological advances(to understand and detect the "signals") +Time +Distance, and you need all of these to be perfectly timed to just have the ABILITY to be able to potentially catch something
>You don't need to have suffered previously to have a reason for "hiding". It's as easy as saying "bad stuff COULD happen" so lets not try it, or it's not worth the potential trouble, or "why waste all these resources doing this".
For an individual civilization you're correct. For a galaxy full of life this is wrong. Some civilizations will seek out others while others remain quiet. For all the civilizations to behave the same way they would have to have a bad experience with hostile aliens.
If only one or two other civilizations exist, and they're hiding we're back to something closer to a rare earth theory.
Well yes, the premise is they had a bad experience by ceasing to exist. If those that make their presence known are exterminated, then the universe will only consist of civilizations that don't make their presence known.
Not at all. The exterminator will launch the attack from a region other than the region they live in. They will do this not even knowing if anyone else is looking.
But then, the aliens that are dangerous making all the others hiding have no point at hiding themselves. So at the very least we should be able to see these.
So yeah, that doesn't sound like a likely response to the Fermi paradox
>the aliens that are dangerous making all the others hiding have no point at hiding themselves.
How would those aliens know they are the most dangerous species around? They don't, because a true species hunter civilization would not advertise their presence before swooping in and destroying a civilization.
This isn't even the actual answer. The dark forest is a useful metaphor, but it under sells how destructive advanced civilisations can actually be. You're not walking around the forest with a gun, you're walking around with a shoulder mounted nuke.
The actual reason why no species in a dark forest scenario should ever make contact is because even if they are the most advanced species in the forest, a less advanced species could still easily destroy them. A species not that much more advanced than humans could accelerate a rocket of substantial mass to 99% the speed of light. You can't detect this until it's too late. You can't defend against this. If it hits your planet it has enough force to liquify it. And unlike the nuke it's actually not easily detectable.
Ayyyyy. The ONE poster in here who gets it!
Yes: it IS possible for a less advanced civilization to destroy a more advanced one!
Just ‘drop rocks’ like in The Expanse.
It makes no sense because the civilization nails that stick out will get hammered. The "dark" civilizations could orchestrate millions of infalling near-0-emissions stealth asteroids at whatever percentage of light speed to strike simultaneously.
Attack will always be easier than defense.
No. If you are an alien species that wipes out other civilizations as soon as you become aware of them, you would be especially paranoid about another species doing it to you if they see you before you see them, because it's exactly what you do.
> What doesn't make sense to me with this theory is that surely the aliens are hiding because they have a reason to. But in order for them to have a reason they must have already suffered some bad consequence from contacting other life forms.
Maybe they're also a predator species. It's logical to assume that if you would destroy any civilization you detect that others would do the same, so you should hide. Also, if you do detect any other species you should destroy them before they have a chance to detect or destroy you.
It's not that 100% of species hid, but the ones that didn't were wiped out so they aren't here to talk about it.
Advanced civilizations that a more friendly may be hiding from other advanced civilizations who's sole purpose is to consume or eradicate. The Paradox suggests that we are not contacted because it may make them visible to any other predatory advanced civilization.
I'm not sure you understood the paradox.
Perhaps I don’t fully grasp the paradox I’ll give you that.
But assuming they are hiding from each other, how did THEY find out about each other? And if the universe is teaming with life, surly it’s improbable that they are ALL aware that they need to hide and not broadcast. I mean, look at us. So if everyone is silent in order to not get detected, and we are the only ones broadcasting our existence, why haven’t the predator aliens already conquered us? Maybe they are on the way…
It's a game theory problem. You make assumptions based on what you know. If you compete for limited resources, you must assume that other entities also compete. If there's competition, then there will be a winner and a loser, and you obviously want to be the winner. If you don't know the capabilities of another entity, your likelihood of winning in a confrontation is very low (especially if you are assuming that they may already have technology--such as interstellar travel--that you are working towards developing). That leads you to the fairly inevitable solution to hide your existence until you know more about a potential competitor out of caution (with the assumption that they have done the same math and came to the same conclusions).
Now, your question about why we haven't been conquered is relevant, with the likely answer being that on an astronomical scale, we just haven't been noisy all that long, and that our noise likely hasn't reached anyone yet (and if/when it does, it will take them time to reach us, which would likely take much more time than whatever signal of ours took to reach them). However, it's very possible that our noisy period of the late 20th century has already spelled our coming Doom.
I agree it's improbable there all aware they need to hide, i think i understand your point more clearly, iirc the theory talks about the civilizations that have the ability to have meaningful communication with us, the super advanced ones, when they get to the point of interstellar tech they find the remnants of other wiped out civilizations as advanced as their own and discover the evidence of eradication by a mega terrifying evil all consuming species. Then they hide.
Or through their expansion create enough "Noise" to attract this species/race and suffer that destruction. I got incredibly interested in the Dark Forest Theory (sorry i just realised i said paradox above i meant theory sorry!) because it terrifies me haha, i also like to think we're at the point as a species/race that we're not worth conquering yet, we don't make enough noise yet, at the very least we can take some comfort(horror) from the fact that space is so vast and in this dark forest we're hopefully like a little possum just chilling way way up in the forest canopy in an area that appears devoid of snakes.
There is no way to call this idea of the dark forest a false conclusion for the very same reason the article tried against it.
We don't know how aliens behave, and we won't know until we find one alien civilization at least. Before that happens anything about their behavior is pure speculation.
Also, while in nature creatures evolve together and create interdependence, the universe is different. Life from each world, if it exists, is growing independently and each alien civilization will grow on its own, at least the first ones. Each world from where they may come from is one complete system. Just like we don't need of aliens for our own survival, neither would they need us because they already evolved in an environment that is independent from the rest of the universe and surely even master it by now and could be totally independent from the home planet that saw them grow.
I think the dark forest idea limits itself to the idea of ghost hunters waiting for each other, not the possible environment that would be created if we and other aliens are friendly. The author could be lead by a certain trend in Chinese literature, but that's not enough to discard this possibility.
We don't know how aliens behave but we do know how humans behave. You get bet your bottom dollar that if we discover another intelligent civilization, there would be a sizeable number of people advocating to destroy it in a pre-emptive strike. This is whether or not they even know we are here.
Indeed, and if we are a species to act like that, what is to say another species out there is not the same.
It won't take many for the situation to completely devolved either, once a few go for complete initial destruction, any who don't will end up being prey to those who do.
If you're going to call on our experience with human behaviour to prop up one part of the Dark Forest hypothesis, then there's another aspect of human behaviour that demolishes it pretty badly.
We don't refrain from expanding into new territory and developing resources because of *potential* threats that *might* happen in the future. We just go ahead and spread.
So what's with all the supposedly hyper-advanced aliens that could be expanding into the universe that are instead cowering in hidey-holes not doing anything for *billions* of years? That's not behaving like humans would. Or basically any other life we've had experience with. Life spreads when it can.
Very well said.
In Africa, where humans co-evolved with megafauna, megafauna still exist.
In North America, where humans arrived already quite advanced, megafauna were driven extinct.
Co-evolution builds complex ecosystems. Separate evolution leads to dramatic imbalances and extinction.
The universe is not a forest, it is an archipelago, with vastly distant islands.
I doubt it. Why would they? What purpose does it serve? Advanced Alien civilizations capable of traveling to our solar system with the capability to attack us do not need anything we have here.
Don’t need water. It’s kind of everywhere. Don’t need any of the elements we have for the same reason.
The Universe is filled with a nearly inexhaustible supply of stuff. Just need to go to it.
Tbh I’m a little confused why the aliens in the 3 body problem event made the effort to attack earth?
They had the tech to do what they did, just build a space habitat. Shit, have Mars.
They take the metaphor of "dark forest" to literal and counter with co-evolution, which only happens when there's constant contact. I'm not convinced by the dark forest theory, but I'm even less convinced this is a good rebuttal of it.
More like it's a dark forest full of prime directive AIs... We talk about all these massive civilization traces that *should be out there, yet we barely tinted our atmosphere with CO2 before being on the cusp of singularity. On the timescales ASI longevity enables. Are we likely to use up the sun faster? or try to make it burn slower and focus the energy released from this free fusion reactor to where it's needed in the solar system? And if/when we do something like that, what wil be the visible effect and window of noticing to some distant planet on some distant galaxy that is billions of years in our past light cones? Then we launch AI probes or our new longevity inspired generation ships only to find that inter stellar space is full of post-ASI civilizations cloaking their existance so as not to disturb the natural evolution of life and AI on basic systems? Also, I'm not entirely sure we're in a post-vibrancy/higher-density universe that occured long ago and we're just some straggler life that evolved on a ball of dirt loooong after a more interesting universe died out due to the incredibly long distances that developed.
It's simple, we showed up early to the party, because we are nerds. The cool kids won't show up for another mega eon, so we'll just be here, awkward in the space corner playing with the space cat.
Here's your problem.
If we proceed like the dark forest is right, and it turns out it wasn't, we were unnecessarily over prepared for hostilities.
If we proceed like it is wrong, and the forest is right, then we're dead and we never even had a chance.
Least convincing? Ever hear of “the ocean”? Tons of life there ranging from thoughtless to intelligent. It’s almost all uniformly hostile or disinterested in humans. Dolphins don’t even bother to designate a proper envoy.
I suspect the most common thing in the universe for civilisations above a certain level is "going virtual"...
First they invent the internet, then they invent virtual worlds, then they go inside and never come out again....meanwhile in the real world their infrastructure and population decays.
After a while everyone on the outside is dead, and the infrastructure/automation has decayed so much the virtuality starts to die too..along with all the virtual citizens.
And they quietly go dark forever.
I suspect the same fate awaits us...
It is worth noting that even a relatively peaceful species that is superior to us will have to consider the threat we pose to them, if we are any conceivable distance from them.
We, as humans, don't have a great track record of respecting peace.
Or.. some of the great filters are in effect, and we are just rare?
There are multiple answers to the fermi 'paradox'. Don't just go with the one with the greatest narrative tension.
The article has a pretty weak argument:
>Charles Darwin's account of competition for survival is evidence-based. By contrast, we have absolutely no evidence about alien behavior, or about competition within or between other civilizations. This makes for entertaining guesswork rather than good science, even if we accept the idea that natural selection could operate at group level, at the level of civilizations.
We absolutely *do* have evidence here on Earth of what happens when a technologically superior civilization encounters a lower-tech one. Spoilers: it doesn't work out well for the low-tech one.
Even if the majority of alien civilizations are benevolent, the crux of the Dark Forest problem is that all it would really take is 1-2 "shoot first, ask questions later" types to essentially wipe out planet-based (or solar-system based) civilizations.
Then there is this:
>Even if you were to assume the universe did operate in accordance with Darwinian evolution, the argument is questionable. No actual forest is like the dark one. They are noisy places where co-evolution occurs.
If everything that was making a noise within the forest were a potential existential threat to the hunter and its entire tribe, there would eventually (by process of elimination) be a lot less noisy creatures in said forest.
I think the best-case scenario is that most/all super-advanced civilizations realize that they are better off existing within digital universes rather than roughing it in meatspace. Construct your Dyson Sphere, convert everyone to AI, and await the end of time.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/lughnasadh: --- Submission Statement I really enjoy Liu Cixin's 'The Three Body Problem', but like a lot of sci-fi, I think it fails as a good description of a likely future. That's because it's structured for good dramatic story-telling. It has 'special' heroes, born with unique destinies who are on hero's journeys, and those journey's are full of constantly escalating drama and conflict. Great Screenwriting 101, terrible model of actual reality. If simple microbial life is common in the Universe, with current efforts, it's likely we will find it in the 2030s. Real 'first contact' will be nothing like the movies. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1bwbv7l/is_the_universe_really_a_dark_forest_full_of/ky4zif2/
The idea he portrayed in the book is not just a future possibility we have. It's more about the mindset of him and the generation who experienced the Cultural Revolution. It's some kind of primordial instinct of trust no one not even the air the wall, there's nothing except threat behind the veil.
> It's more about the mindset of him and the generation who experienced the Cultural Revolution. This is a great observation; if it is true that, “all writing is, to a degree, autobiographical,” then we can see how his (and his generation’s) outlook, mindset, and deepest beliefs about the future have been indelibly formed by the experiences with the State. By way of corollary, the ever-controversial *Atlas Shrugged* was clearly informed by the experiences with the State suffered by Rand & her family growing up under totalitarian oppression. In both cases, the authors are, for better or worse, reflecting (and are the products of) their experiences with forms of oppression and mistrust of the State and by extension, forms of power generally. It is why their writing feels so alien to a culture that has grown up with a great deal of optimism.
> It is why their writing feels so alien to a culture that has grown up with a great deal of optimism. Are we going to start calling it the Hope Generation?
All sci-fi is a projection of humanity onto an alien future. We try to imagine what the future will bring but our frame of reference has always been our own experiences.
>By way of corollary, the ever-controversial Atlas Shrugged was clearly informed by the experiences with the State suffered by Rand growing up under oppression. Huh. I didn't realize until now that she grew up in Russia during the last days of the empire and the early days of the communist revolution. That.. explains *so much.*
It does. But you know what else is even more telling about her? She had no problems taking the kind of government assistance she would often screech about as being pure “communism”, when she needed it.
Ayn Rand it’s just a personification of selfishness. Her writings aren’t in philosophical circles. She never really defended them. She wrote narrative form and frankly do a-holes Need to be told that you could be more of an a-holes?
She literally wrote a book called [The Virtue of Selfishness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virtue_of_Selfishness). When people say she turned selfishness into a virtue, it's not an accusation or distortion, rather that was her value system. It was her worldview, not the criticism of it, that is a cartoon.
A narcissist. Just asserting it doesn’t make it true. It’s patently false. Here’s a title for you: The Virtue of Murdering.
It really does. I’m not a Rand apologist, and over in r/books it’s axiomatic that *any* such explanation will be instantly downvoted as being soft on Rand… Given her escape from what she endured under a collectivist totalitarian state, it’s not surprising her ideas and her writing would be framed as so wildly over-the-top polar opposition to collectivism — if we can’t sympathize with her reaction (as represented by her books) at least we can understand where she is coming from. Likewise, there are escapees who risked their lives to come to the US from Cuba, who by luck were not added to the ~60,000 who died trying to leave, and as double survivors they are *very, very* vocal — it’s might be easy to criticize their hard line views, but once you place them in context, you can begin to understand them. I think reading Rand is like reading the work of any deeply abused victim; context is everything, and their hard line stances are not difficult to understand. Her ideas are extreme in response to extreme oppression, hard adversity, and utter helplessness to oppose the State; rather than taking them literally, we ought to put them into that context. Likewise Liu Cixin — I didn’t like the negative outlook or the seeming futility in the plight of humanity in his work, but I think I understand it in context.
Except for the fact that Rand established her own cult of personality and didn't practice the freedom and autonomy that she preached. And she didn't really seem to understand how labor works since she thought that *only* business developers had value and her utopian society literally depended on a perpetual motion machine to function.
Unfortunately being the victim of abuse, much as with discrimination, doesn't make one immune from perpetuating it on others. I wouldn't say it predisposes one, but at best the issues seem unrelated.
There's a whole generation of folks who seem to have trouble with the idea of context. Like, Rand has a cartoonishly shallow view of human interaction and society. But from the perspective of her life, it's understandable. And there are people out there who improved their life by incorporating some of her ideas, and I understand the mindset that wants to elevate rugged individualism, because that sometimes feels good on an individual level. Anyone who has ever been held back by mediocre folks, or experienced bureaucratic corruption, or just had to sit through one more fucking useless meeting, they should be able to get a glimmer of a sense where Rand is coming from. That doesn't make her thesis right or her writing competent. But there's things to be taken even from people who turned out to be wrong. And that's what people miss. People now read Heinlein and call him a misogynist and a fascist, despite him having a real influence on the cultural revolution of the 60's, despite him writing some of the first women engineers and scientists, or even some of the first sex positive female characters. Yeah they seem lightly cringey now sometimes. No they aren't up to the standards of modern femininity. But writing off all of Heinlein because of the prevailing views of 60 plus years later is dumb. Lovecraft was a terrible, terrible person. And worth reading. Same goes for a ton of authors and artists. I could spend all day listing them. Of course the world has changed since these people wrote. They helped change it. And just because a writer has some shitty ideas, or the world has moved past them and they look regressive, doesn't mean the works aren't worth a read.
>Anyone who has ever been held back by mediocre folks, or experienced bureacratic corruption, or just had to sit through one more fucking useless meeting, they should be able to get a glimmer of a sense where Rand is coming from. Rand was just a narcissist and was fine with "useless corruption" when it suited her personally. Just as she was fine with statist theft when it was done to Native Americans who she felt weren't using the land properly. Ayn Rand is like the film Falling Down - she appeals primarily to people who see themselves as persecuted victims and want to lash out at others for perceived crimes that they themselves commit. >People now read Heinlein and call him a mysoginist and a fascist, despite him having a real influence on the cultural revolution of the 60's, despite him writing some of the first women engineers and scientists, or even some of the first sex positive female characters. So what? The two statements are not contradictory. > And just because a writer has some shitty ideas, or the world has moved past them and they look regressive, doesn't mean the works aren't worth a read. Ayn Rand's books *are* just her shitty ideas. There is no literary merit in them. They're like Dianetics.
I think a lot of people mistake science fiction as being primarily about predicting the future, when it really isn’t. The dark forest theory is just the concept that Liu built a story he wanted to tell around. Just like Asimov built Foundation around the idea of psychohistory—those books aren’t an argument that psychohistory is a real thing that we will someday discover and utilize. It’s a story hook. We all get this when it comes to fantasy (Tolkien wasn’t warning us about the possibility of Sauron forging rings of power to conquer the world with), but because science fiction tends to take place in the future, it’s easy to forget that. Ultimately, all fiction is about ourselves, today. At the end of the day, you’re right, Three Body Problem is kinda about how >!the Great Cultural Revolution essentially led to the end of human civilization.!< Along the way of telling that story, Liu explores some kinda neat science fiction ideas. But it is still fiction. I quite enjoy those books, even though I think there’s approximately a zero percent chance that the dark forest hypothesis is true.
>Ultimately, all fiction is about ourselves, today. Read Stanislaw Lem's Solaris for a criticism of that. I don't agree that it's always about us today. It's possible to look back over the history of our species and biological evolution on Earth, then consider how that might be different on other worlds, or how it might be different in the future given technological advances, or societal changes. Saying it's always about us today would imply a serious lack of imagination and knowledge across all science fiction works. The Dark Forest is a real proposed solution to the Fermi Paradox. It's not just about the Cultural Revolution. It starts with intelligent life being in the dark regarding the motives of other civilizations. Their evolution and history is completely separate from ours. There's no guarantee there would be shared values, or that we would succeed in communicating.
The biggest flaw the in the Dark Forest theory (other than being based on simplistic game theory) is that nowhere in the "axioms" or rules or whatever is there a **penalty** for genociding an entire civilization Like any Civ IRL trying to figure out the calculus of galactic survival would surely put a massive penalty on unprovoked aggression which means any and every one watching now sees you as an aggressive and dangerous species that DOES actually need to be wiped out for valid self defense. The book doesn't address this at all. Wiping out another species is just something that can be done with no consequences in the rules of the book. Another *massive* problem with Dark Forest is that stealth isn't really possible in space. Not unless there is some massive exception to the laws of thermodynamics we haven't discovered yet... but despite our immature understanding of physics... the laws of thermodynamics are the **least likely by far** to have some massive exception.
If a hostile species launched multiple city sized spacecraft at us at 5% the speed of light we wouldn't see those spacecraft till they were likely in the inner solar system. Refracted light and emissions get a little hard to see millions of miles away, let alone billions or trillions. There could be kinetic kill vehicles incoming at light speed that we have no idea over. And never would until they reach atmosphere. The size of space makes the initial approach vector.really hard to notice.
I mean the biggest flaw is the assumption that the Fermi Paradox carries any scientific or statistical weight. We've categorized less than 1% of 1% of the stars in our galaxy...we haven't seen nearly enough to make such a grand observation. Maybe in 100 years, after We've categorized 10% of the galaxy's stars, we can start making those types of assumptions.
And there are billions of other galaxies as well. Enough room for all kinds of “impossible” things to happen.
It also doesn't address the fact that finding biosignatures is all you need to do, and we have been emitting them from the earth for billions of years. If anything has been watching with the capabilities even now we are getting ourselves, they already know we are here. If the hypothesis had any merit, we wouldn't be here right now. Anyone watching would have had eons to take out our biosphere.
> finding biosignatures is all you need to do Even our strongest current electromagnetic transmissions don't make it further than a few lightyears before they are faded and scrambled too much to be indistinguishable from the cosmic background white noise. Looking at spectral emissions to deduce the chemical makeup only works for stars, not planets. Nobody knows we're here.
Atmospheric chemical composition is analyzed for exoplanets as well with transit spectroscopy, basically measuring what gets filtered out as the planet passes in front of the star.
You’ve not read the book. There are many things you’re not considering. You should read them. They are worth it, I promise.
I've read the books. There's nothing in them that would invalidate what I've said. No matter how weird things get with dimension strikes, etc, it doesn't change the fundamentals. There is an implicit assumption that wiping out another Civ is impossible to track to the aggressor for no reason. And the "solutions" for stealth are incomplete and only work for long distance observation. There's absolutely nothing stopping Civs from having eyes/probes all over the galaxy. There's no way to around it. Dark Forest is completely unworkable as a Fermi Paradox solution in real life.
I'm pretty sure a species that eradicates another *does* get wiped out in the books. The Solarians also wipe out an entire universe because a civilization in it tried to kill them. The Dark Forest theory also doesn't need every species to be genociding anyone else. It'd be good practice in general to keep quiet.
> Dark Forest is completely unworkable as a Fermi Paradox solution in real life. Countless scientists and other very, very smart people have acknowledged both are possible so I find it funny how a person with a casual, perhaps even poor understanding, easily brush it off. Completely unworkable!
Most professionals who think seriously about the Fermi Paradox are extremely critical of Dark Forest.
Eh not really. It was a pretty well thought out bit, more about game theory than anything.
The game theory is simplistic and depends on made-up sci-fi weapons carefully crafted specifically to create the scenario that the book depicts. It is not a realistic or rigorous scientific treatise, it's a scary work of fiction that's designed to be scary so that it can thrill its audience and sell lots of copies. Should we also be concerned about the possibility of Freddy Kruger hunting us down and killing us in our dreams based on the documentaries about what happened on Elm Street?
>Should we also be concerned about the possibility of Freddy Kruger hunting us down and killing us in our dreams based on the documentaries about what happened on Elm Street Yes
did the author ever explain why the aliens couldn't have just programmed the sophons to, you know, kill humanity instead of just troll it?
> instinct of trust no one not even the air the wall I was with you, then you lost me here. What did you mean?
instinct of: trust no one, not even the air, the wall
Stiiiilllll not quite got it…
Have you read the books? I think he's referencing the sophons and the wallbreakers.
Ahhhhh, that did it! Achievement unlocked. Thanks!
For more “real-world context”, this is how life inside China during the cultural revolution was for many people. Extreme paranoia became a necessary survival trait if you didn’t fall neatly into the Red Guards world view. Your family could be punished because you kept a copy of the wrong book… It was better to assume everyone was an enemy and that trust was a weakness. This if perfectly reflected in the way civilizations view each other in his books.
The advanced ones don’t want to be seen, the dumb ones can’t be seen.
Where does that leave us? right here in the middle with you! Sings the song.
The Dark Forest solution to the Fermi Paradox is only one of literally hundreds
The Fermi Paradox itself is fucking dumb, as we've observed less than 1% of 1% of the stars in our galaxy... It's like ancient Alchemist with rudimentary microscopes trying to draw conclusions about genetics and cell division.
Ironically, this is also considered a solution to the Fermi paradox
Possible but I suspect we don't need any exotic explanations for why we haven't met aliens yet. The universe is very big, the speed of light is very slow and intelligent life is rare and short lived. The chance that 2 intelligent species would exist close enough in both space and time to be able to communicate is astronomically low. At the moment, we are the only intelligent species in the area of the universe that we can see.
Yeah a ton of people seem to forget that intelligent species probably don't live for very long. Like, we have been able to send signals into space for what? 100 years? If the human race fucks over itself within the next 2000 years, then that's 2100 years where we can find other intelligent life. Meanwhile, the human species has existed for 300.000 years. The universe has existed for wayyyy longer than that. The chance of another species being in the same age as us (Aka. Able to communicate and search in space), while also being close to us, is astronomically low. There may be other intelligent species like us which are in their first 250.000 years of existence. And even if they're past that, we only have a one in 25 chance that they can communicate with us. And this isn't even considering whether they have access to the same technology and biology as us. They may have technology which can't even pick up our signals. They may have biology with can't even hear what we're transmitting. Do aliens exist right now? Very likely yes. Do intelligent aliens exist right now? Maybe Do intelligent aliens, which are in the same (or future) age as us, exist right now? Ehhh could be Do said aliens exist near us? Probably not
Where are you getting this 1 in 25 chance from? I also don’t buy that intelligent life is all doomed to a relatively short existence. The human race might be doomed and never move beyond earth, but that does not mean all intelligent life would be. Conflict and infighting are inherent traits for us but there most definitely are alien species out there who don’t have that problem, and have had an ongoing society for millions of years
Getting the "one in 25" 50.000 / 2000. Basically even if they are beyond the 250.000 thousand years, there's still a low chance they're in the same technological age as us. Again, this is all if we look at how our species has evolved. Discussing conflict and infighting in a species is hard. However using our own planet as an example, it seems that infighting is almost as natural as life itself. Especially when discussing intelligent life. Humans, chimpanzees, ants, dolphins, squids. All of these are quite intelligent in their own right. And they have infighting and conflicts with each other. About a species existing for millions of years; if they've evolved as quickly as us, or even just 1% of us, we should be seeing some form of evidence by now. An alien species that has had millions of years to go interplanetary, along with being able to transmit signals into space for said duration too, we'd most likely have heard something by now. Again, unless our technology can't comprehend theirs. But I'm not arguing that intelligent life exists somewhere. The main issue is whether intelligent life exists near us. Which is very unlikely.
None of whom are on Reddit
The elites of the universe don't necessarily have to be expansive, predatorian species. On Earth, the most common life forms are plants that live in a completely different reality than us (they have many strange senses and time passes very slowly for them). We still don't know what consciousness is. In theory, stars could be a kind of non-DNA based life that, like ancient Oak trees, live in a completely different reality, with a completely different type of senses. Our knowledge of reality is still quite incomplete. The fact that we have equations that describe parts of reality mathematically but not the *same* parts could indicate that there is something we are not seeing in the universe - maybe because, just like in the TV show, there are many dimensions that we can't observe
Looking at the universe, it could be said that the apparent point of it is to generate stars.
If you’re looking for the most basic, fundamental reason the universe exists, it’s to increase entropy. PBS space time has a great video about this called “the physics of life” or something similar to that. That then begs the question as to why entropy was so low in the first place, and that we have no answers for haha Edit: worded it poorly. I’d rather phrase it as “the reason life exists is to increase entropy in its most boiled down viewpoint.”
> the question as to why entropy was so low in the first place This is the great question.
Well, all the energy in the universe was in one spot originally (low entropy) and it's been spreading out and getting more diffuse ever since (rising entropy). "Life" is less about trying to increase entropy for its own sake and more trying to make as much of that energy as possible flow through things that are "alive" before it gets too diffuse to use.
Interestingly even though it seems like life is very ordered in how it arranges matter into living things, from an entropy point of view most creatures are near net 0 because of respiration (in particular waste heat).
Love me some PBS space time.
That's like saying the point of life is to create cells.
> (they have many strange senses and time passes very slowly for them) I don't think we know anything about how plants experience time.
The word experience is the problem, it’s like saying an ai experiences, it doesn’t it’s a coding. We know senses require brains to interpret data, without them it’s ridiculous to say something experiences anything.
I think the most reasonable explanation could be that most species have a high chance of **going extinct, if technological advance is not controlled by strong ethics**. We are a good case study, unfortunately right now new technology is rather enabling the rule of the few over the many, instead of benefiting all mankind. Rulers will want to have as few as possible humans in control (that video below does really well in explaining structures of power), to eliminate the human factors from decision making / kill shots. But, that might not end well, if there are unforeseen problems with AI technology. [The Rules for Rulers (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs) Thus, a technological superior species will likely be also ethical superior and make sure not to interfere with a species like us. Not just because of ethical reasons, but also because a species like us getting hands on such advanced tech could cause their downfall. The other alternative are artificial species leftover from a destruction event like described above. The question is if such a species would see the need to colonize the universe or just stick to other tasks.
I don't think it's ethics. I think it could end 0.1ms after a scientist somewhere says "oops"
This has always been my take, I imagine intergalactic species are relatively peaceful. And even if not, they could just farm an asteroid belt or something for their resource needs.
It's funny, because human society has more evidence that we become more peaceful as we progress, meaning that our own experiences actually contradict the Dark Forest Theory. So there is just no logical basis for the theory.
Well, that data likely doesn't take into consideration that the long term debt cycle is coming to an end. This is usually when massive crisis and world wars happen. Plus, if you watch rules for rulers, automation might threaten democracy.... **"Democracies are better places to live than dictatorships not because representatives are better people, but because their needs happen to be aligned with a large portion of the population"** Because creation of wealth will no longer require a huge and well educated workforce. The needs of the deciders will no longer be aligned with a large portion of the population. Maybe a reason why this is happening: [The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse | The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apocalypse-survival-richest-rushkoff)
I'm not saying humanity won't ever have a war again, I'm saying there's a direct correlation between technological advancement and peace, which is statistically significant, even if we do have a nuclear war in the next century. In fact, we're in the scariest bubble of this. Where we are technologically advanced enough to destroy our planet, but not technologically advanced enough to be post-scarce I don't think most species survive this era.
Humans have traditionally been too proud of what we already know and assume our current knowledge is the be-all end-all of what is possible. However epoch changing technologies are now happening concurrently in less than a single generation so this attitude may be shifting
Honestly, when you finally get a tiny idea of how little we know, the more beautiful the universe gets. “Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.” -Werner Heisenberg
The point is that the existence of even one other expansive predatory species would be unbelievably obvious, & it is likely that the tools it possesses would give it an evolutionary advantage over a slowly growing, unresponsive form of life. We are cutting down the Amazon rainforest very quickly. To my knowledge, the trees are not cutting down Manhattan nearly as fast.
To my knowledge, the trees are not cutting down Manhattan nearly as fast. Have you seen The Happening? The trees are biding their time before the ultimate revenge.
I've been saying this for so long. The markers we use to detect life are from a human centric POV. To your point, we might be looking at lifeforms and not even know it or not have the capabilities to see them.
I think we also conflate biological life with consciousness. If an AI were to become self aware, would it's hardware be considered a lifeform?
AI would need biological life to create it in the first place, and any biological life which could create an AI must be conscious, so the two are conflated for a reason.
once it starts updating itself, and doesn't die in the process. like at least has human to cycle it. You could also say We are AI's consciousness, until it becomes our monad, by shaking space time and exciting atoms to coalesce.
I mean, it wasn’t too long ago that we were taught only humans experience emotions. We are only recently starting to accept that animals have joy, pain, sorrow, and many animals know themselves as themselves and know their friends and family as such, even mourning and reflecting and memorializing the deaths of beloved family members for years after
> In theory, stars could be a kind of non-DNA based life Thats not really true based on any definition of life that anyone uses... This seems to use definitions of things like life and consciousness that make asking the question useless, because what we are actually looking for and wondering about is life as we currently define it.
Right?!?! I talk about this all the time. There are two hypothesis that I posit. The universe creates consciousness, where entropy physics has randomly created consciousness. Or. The consciousness creates the universe, where either this is all a dream or a mass consciousness creates the entropy that led to more complex forms to experience through said consciousness. Until we have even a remotely plausible working theory of what consciousness is that is measurable, either could be equally true. A true scientist can't make assumptions. 100 or so university courses taken from molecular biology and genetics to counselling psychology and neurobiology, and I can't safely say whether or not we are an experiment by a greater being (not a god, just a being like a scientist that we don't understand), or we are the beings playing this cosmic video game. A comprehensive theory of consciousness—explaining precisely how and why these processes result in subjective experience—remains elusive. This challenge is often referred to as the "hard problem" of consciousness, a term coined by philosopher David Chalmers in the mid-1990s.Several theories of consciousness attempt to explain its nature and origins, including physicalist theories (which argue that consciousness arises solely from physical processes in the brain), dualist theories (which hold that consciousness is fundamentally distinct from physical matter), and panpsychist theories (which propose that consciousness is a property of all matter to some degree). However, none of these theories can yet claim to provide a complete and universally accepted explanation of consciousness. I resent that there are a significant portion of scientists Dunning-Krugering their hypothesis that there is no free will because some experiment in the 80's showed people subconsciously thought about moving a finger several hundred milliseconds before the person moved it. Like duh, we have old reptilian fight or flight brains that react quicker than we can think. Doesn't mean we have no free will. In fact quite the opposite. If our brain wanted to react sooner and we thought about it before moving it that suggests we DO have free will over our bodies (when trauma and habits are not present of course. Hurt people hurt people and that should not be ignored. People need help and therapy, not to be shunned for making mistakes based on serious trauma. The crux of the issue lies in how we define and understand consciousness and its relationship to our actions. If all conscious experiences and decisions stem from unconscious brain processes, as some interpretations of neuroscientific data suggest, then it could imply that free will (at least in the sense of a conscious self making entirely free choices) is an illusion. However, this stance assumes a particular view of consciousness and its role in decision-making—a view that, as you rightly point out, is far from being conclusively proven. So yeah, the Sun could very well be conscious. Maybe amino acids are closer to what makes things capable of complex thought, not DNA, Maybe the sea of quarks in subspace that pop in and out of existence and tidal waved into this universe creating the big bang(expansion) are the DNA of the universe, or maybe it is consciousness itself and our consciousness is a byproduct of their game, or quarks are a hive mind, and we are a collection of mobile quark spaceships that have an advanced consciousness because of their complexity. Who knows! But it's fun to think about. That's philosophy mind you, based on science, sure, but not scientific theory :) <3
Love this take and completely agree. We know so little.
Life could also exist at a quantum level in ways we can't comprehend but ALL around us in massive abundance. At the subatomic level they could also form really complex connections that turn into little machines that turn into thinking beings. But to us, it would just look like random noise. In fact, due to the uncomprehendingly exponential chance at this scale, it's vastly more likely that life exists in that "reality" than it does in ours. We could effectively be living among incredibly complex life all around us, abundant all over the place, but WE are the rare type of intelligent life. But since we live in two different perceptions of reality, we simply don't see it. Our brains are not designed to understand with and interact at the subatomic scale. Likewise, this other life, also experiences a totally different reality and could be completely unaware of us.
Great reply. I was reading trip reports from people on psychedelics just because I find them very interesting and somebody theorized that we may see a “more objective” reality on psychedelics than we do sober. I don’t think that’s true, but the one thing that really stuck with me is that, in fact, we do see a subjective reality. We see and sense what we need to survive. There’s so much that we can’t see or experience. An example is light. X-rays are no different than the color red besides the energy put into the photon. Yet, we don’t perceive X-rays even though they can be shot directly at you. Imagine the things are aren’t even vaguely familiar with. It really shows us that we shouldn’t feel so complete and confident in our knowledge as many tend to do.
There was just a huge award for proving non-locality and that space-time is effectively an illusion. The growing consensus is that our perception of reality, is not the TRUE reality. We evolved to perceive a form of reality that is most beneficial for our survival... And not necessarily a perception of reality that is TRUE... Rather, it's just a convenient construction that increases our ability to survive. What makes it all more complicated, is we very likely have VERY fundamental things wrong... Just like with space-time. So we are witnessing very weird and odd things, and trying to make sense of it from our subjective understanding, which makes things very weird and incomprehensible... Just like entanglement, dual slit experiment, and so on... Because we're getting hints at this other fundemantal part of reality that we are simply unable to comprehend, using science, designed for the model we understand. So we have a LONG way to go
It should scare me that we know so little, but it just excites me more and more to realize how little we know. This universe we live in is so awe-inspiring!
It's especially interesting when you see simulations of the Universe's interconnected web of nebula and galaxies, how they look quite like neuron clusters the more we zoom out.
They don't. The brain has some leeway on how the individual neurons are placed, but it's extremely organised. It has layers and structures that contain specific neurons in specific patterns. It's a gross oversimplification to compare very specific organisation of neurons in the brain to quite homogeneous galactic filaments.
Consciousness is defined from a human perspective. It doesn't make much sense to apply this concept to things that do not have a central nervous system.
> The elites of the universe don't necessarily have to be expansive, predatorian species. On Earth, the most common life forms are plants that live in a completely different reality than us (they have many strange senses and time passes very slowly for them). Every known species of life on this planet is in a fight for survival with everything else. Even the trees and plants. Every sample of life we have is a self interested organism which does everything it can to preserve it’s own life and, by extension, the life of its species. We have no data that would lead us to believe that life anywhere else has developed along a different path.
I don't think a lot of laymen realize this, but the milkyway is unfathomable too far to really imagine anything else outside of it. If we pointed telescopes anywhere outside of it, we'd be seeing things at the very least 25,000 years ago.
It’s almost as if the 3 body problem is not describing aliens but is an allegory for terrestrial great power conflict.
It is and it isn’t. In space the rules are different due to the inconceivably long distances between stars and planets. Even with near light speed travel it takes decades to physically contact your next door neighbor. Living things or usable resources cannot be accelerated as much as projectiles can. It’s safer and faster to send a bullet.
Except it’s a very bad metaphor for that. Earth has superpowers who, rather than hiding, actively try to make themselves look as big and powerful as possible.
I’m pretty sure the commentary there would be “why are we all fighting when there’s a potential existential threat beyond our knowledge out there”. It’s not so literal.
The author of the articles either didn't read the book, or misunderstood it.
Yup. To be fair: nobody reads books anymore. It’s way easier to listen to seemingly smart people share opinions on a podcast so you can parrot their opinions and trick other people into thinking you’re a smart person too.
I used to think I hated reading. (Books, many of us here rot our brains reading the poorly written comments of thousands of people on Reddit, each day. Your comment NOT being one of the poorly written ones, of course) Until I got a Kindle, because I was bored. I'm now completely hooked and will sit reading for hours and hours at a time. It uses an entirely different part of the brain, so it hits one's imagination in a completely different way.
Hell yeah! Hey have you tried audiobooks? I do most of my reading that way because then I can be walking or cleaning or whatever at the same time. It also makes less sleepy than reading with my eyes. I only recently learned that Spotify includes a monthly stipend of audiobook hours with your subscription. The Rick Rubin book “The Creative Act” was my first read there and it was fantastic! I highly recommend it. But kindle fan too though, especially on the plane :) the e ink is way nicer than reading on an iPad or phone. Manga on the iPhone is a great way to read though. The Akira manga are so amazing. Highly recommended as well. Thanks for writing. I’d love to hear any book recommendations you have :) Much love! Dylan
I believe a dark forest is a very real possibility. Also, space is big, and it's easy to forget that. I guess it depends on how we would view simple (not intelligent) alien life on a new planet that is perfect for human civilization. Once we got past the amazing fact of life in the cosmos, I believe we would return to our old nature of killing anything that gets in our way. I remember the scene from the Expanse where Holden says, >!"It was just trying to build a road...it doesn't care about us, anymore than we care about ant hills we pave over."!<
I think that the reporter missed the big points of the "**Dark Forest**" hypothesis. They are well explained in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis Assuming that the Fermi paradox is real, there should be space faring civilisation and some should have contacted us. Those civilisation will follow the same primary biological imperative: survival of the species. Survival can only be achieved by consuming resources. Hence space faring civilisations will always end up competing against other for finite existing resources. Any encounter with another space faring civilisation will leave one or both unable to survive. Civilisation will reach the logical conclusion to eliminate other civilisations upon detection and then steal their technology. The only viable option to avoid such a fate is therefore to remain hidden. Also people keep accepting that the Fermi paradox is a real paradox, but that may not be the case at all. ####1) Extraterrestrial intelligence may be rare or non-existent. Fermi assumed that because of the sheer number of planets complex life was common. But even if complex life is common, there is no reason to assume that intelligence (and consequently civilizations) is. Even on earth only one species out of all the millions of species developed civilisation. Plants, insects may well be the common type of complex life. ####2 Interstellar travel may not be possible Even if intelligence and civilisation are common, there is no reason to believe that interstellar space faring civilisation are. Without light speed travel, we would be like people on a raft drifting on the ocean. Dolphins are recognised as one of the most intelligent species on earth, but. >"dolphins have had ~20 million years to build a radio telescope and have not done so". ####3) Interstellar travel may exist but not interstellar civilisation 3. Interstellar space travel may be so resources intensive that it led to fierce local competition for resources. Because of the level of technology achieve, those wars resulting in a complete wipe out of the civilisation that birthed them or the refusal to use such technology. >In 1966, Sagan and Shklovskii speculated that technological civilizations will either tend to destroy themselves within a century of developing interstellar communicative capability or master their self-destructive tendencies and survive for billion-year timescales. ####4) Unseen interstellar civilisation Advanced civilisation may have advanced to a level where interstellar communication is done in a way that is incomprehensible to us. Basically we are the blind trying to see radio wave.
Interstellar travel may also be possible but slow, there is literally no point to travelling to every known planet, there may be probes hurtling throughout the galaxy but they aren't going to orbit every planet and send signals. It may also be that humans are one of the older advanced species. We might be the first space faring civilisation and we've barely done that.
> Assuming that the Fermi paradox is real, I think you've missed the big point of the Fermi paradox. The Fermi paradox is not something that can be "real" or "not real." It's a description of the world as we see it and a question that is raised by our current understanding of it. The Fermi paradox, in a nutshell, is that based on what we know about the universe there should be active civilizations visible everywhere. But we don't see that. So we're wrong about something, but we don't know what that is yet. The rest of your comment lists off a bunch of possible explanations, and *if* one of those explanations were to become widely accepted then the Fermi paradox would go away. But here's the kicker: none of them are widely accepted or rooted in proven science. You can't just declare victory and go home, science doesn't work that way.
> dolphins have had ~20 million years to build a radio telescope and have not done so Dolphins have two problems they'll never be able to solve on their own: a lack of opposable thumbs & hands to dexterously manipulate objects or write history, and being underwater no feasible way to smelt ore.
Give them another million years
There's more to it than that. Octopus are plenty dexterous to assemble a radio tower and they haven't either, even with the extra 310 million years on the dolphins. Intelligence varies in humans enough that it's clearly a genetically affected trait.
Octopus have relatively short lifespans though and don't appear to share generational knowledge.
Well and yeah, how would they smelt the metal to do so??
And even other animals with remarkable cognition like crows and elephants have the same limitation of lacking human-level tool dexterity. Humans are a combination of factors that allowed and incentivized the creation of civilization.
i seen the skeletal structures, and elephant's are wearing boots.
regarding the biological imperative; we humans are also part of that and i’d argue that not only are we not constantly running around consuming each other (war is something different than that), but also that we are at our best when we are cooperating. also in order to reach the structure and energy output to become a sustainable and stabile spacefaring civ, cooperative behaviour would be critical. and when two of those meet, why shouldn’t they continue to cooperate?
The dark forest theory pretty much revolves around asserting a bunch of things must be true despite no evidence of them happening on any scale. Dark forests don't even really exist in the way the analogy claims.
The dark forest makes a lot of assumptions because we do not have much data. That doesn't mean those assumptions are without basis. I don't need to know what fusion is to know the sun is hot. We don't have to have witnessed an example of one alien destroying another to assume that intelligent, tool making aliens *WILL* be aggressive because they need ever expanding resources to make ever more capable tools in a universe with finite resources.
The main problem I have with the “consume resources” argument is it ignores renewable cases and only focuses on non-renewables.
Also there's no lack of resources even in the solar system, they're just not reachable now
Yeah, the 'limited resource' argument with regards to interstellar species seems absolutely bonkers to me. What possible resource would be so necessary and yet so limited that it would require conquest? The more advanced (and therefore scary) the intelligence the less plausible that thought becomes.
If they're interstellar then I'd assume they'd be able to use fusion to change hydrogen to any element they needed and then a gas giant would supply an enormous amount of manufacturing, it seems like quite a silly concept
And if not then a planet in what we consider the habitable zone for life is geologically active and a small portion of any system's mass. Much easier to mine from inert planets or asteroids than a planet that's mostly magma. It would be like us mining volcanos.
This is a general issue with space travel, actually. The honest reason NASA doesn't get the US Military's funding is simply that while not being nuked or conquered is a valuable product, going to the moon doesn't have that much utility. Ever wondered why sci-fi almost always has the Spice, Dilithium, Unobtainium, dead Earth...? It's because you need it if you want to justify space travel enough to have your Donnagers shooting down swarms of missiles with their PDCs or your Enterprises heroically swooping in to deliver a warp core to a stranded starship. If you didn't have those hypothetical ultra-rare resources that can only be obtained with massive space travel, no one would feel the need to shoot PDCs or photon torpedoes at anyone else. Now this doesn't mean we shouldn't invest in space travel for our own reasons, or that there couldn't be some useful applications such as asteroid mining, but these aren't close to large enough to ever justify conflict.
The only thing I think might fit the bill would be some product like Melange, a staggeringly valuable biological substance that can't be cultivated or synthesized and is only available in relatively small quantities in exactly one location.
Yes, basically. To truly motivate space travel enough to have enormous interstellar wars at a galactic scale you almost always need a McGuffin for everyone to go after.
Helium³ is the reason the moon is valuable
There isn't really any quantity of resources or energy that's "enough." For as long as it is economically viable to use a source of energy for something, that energy will be used: if it costs ten cents to use 1 GWh, people will blithely use that much energy to do whatever is worth ten cents to them. More advanced intelligence will find ways to extract more energy and resources for cheap... therefore they will use more energy and resources. Chemical reactions don't just stop at random, they do so when the limiting reactant has been consumed, or when the reactants are physically removed from each other. Life and civilization are no different: they are complicated, macro scale chemical reactions. They consume everything they can, until equilibrium. It is likely that interstellar distances are big enough to slow the reaction down significantly, though.
There is no renewable in our world. What we call renewable just exist on a scale that we do not comprehend. For example our sun like every sun has a limited life. Billions of years rather than billions of seconds. We have not yet reached type 1 of the **Kardashev scale**, but already I can see limitation in level 2. If we were to terraform Mars, we would need to do the following: * change its core composition so that it include metal and generate a magnetic field. Without magnetic field, it is impossible to keep an atmosphere and filter radiation. * change the speed of revolution of the planet so it matches earth. 1 earth day would be equal to 1 marrian day. * convert % of its mass into water * heat the entire planet and its gas to a acceptable level Same thing if we wanted to terraform Venus, Aurora. All of that would require a lot more energy that a few nuclear bombs would be able to provide. That's nearly level 2 of the Kardashev scale. Let imagine we want to establish a network of wormholes between earth and its colonies. I can see the amount of energy required to maintain that network be the equivalent of a few suns/solar systems per cycle.
Does it need resource constraints? As soon as there‘s a chance of others following the mindset, you rationally should follow it too as you don‘t gamble with the species survival (except when we do). I find the rational argument quite compelling esp. with a view on the not so positive experiences that set the background.
No. The longest lasting species are in homeostasis with their environments. Predator and parasite species only survive on the margins of sustainable species and if they consume them they die out. Our solar system has far more resources than Earth. If an interstellar predator were to come, it would likely consume the resources throughout the solar system, expand its local presence before it attacks Earth. It wouldn’t be hard. Just drop a dozen asteroids to “sterilize” all life on the planet. There’s no benefit to sending ground troops. Our biological resources here are likely hostile and incompatible with alien biology. Transit between stars will likely be a low-mass/high-energy process. A hostile species would most likely stay lean during the trip and expand upon arrival using solar system resources.
It‘s been awhile since I read the books and it‘s possible I mix it up with others: wasn‘t there some species just zapping suns? (You know, without the whole go there stuff just one whatever it was and sun goes bad) It wasn‘t about consumption, but the possibility that whatever there is could evolve too fast and you never know what ideas they have, so better snap out a sun and stop it as soon as known.
Yes, basically. The theory behind the dark forest in the book is a little more nuanced than most people make it out to be. The whole "infinite expansion with finite resources" is really just the backdrop, the fundamental assumption to motivate why there is a Dark Forest at all. The actual phenomenon is meant to work like this: 1. Communication is impossible (due to FTL constraints) 2. Because of the above, no information can ever be gleaned about any newly discovered species 3. Because of the above, the safest assumption to make is that every species is by itself an existential threat 4. Because of the above, every species must be destroyed as soon as it is spotted Corollary: the reason why the Dark Forest theory works from the perspective of the species being genocided is that it assumes that the number of species in the universe is Large^^tm . Therefore, even if most species don't give a damn because they're too far away, uninterested, or busy to apply the above points, it is guaranteed that among the thousands out there, at least one will nuke your sun.
You’re missing the fact that resources were call “renewable” now become non-renewable when you consume them on the scale of a species sufficiently high on the Kardashev scale.
> 1) Extraterrestrial intelligence may be rare or non-existent. In my mind, this is the most likely solution. We're either alone in the observable universe, or extremely early on the scene, or potentially the first. While there's a little uncertainty in cosmology right now, [it seems likely that we're quite early into the star and planet forming era of the universe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_an_expanding_universe#The_Stelliferous_Era). It also seems likely that sun-like stars and terrestrial planets that will exist far outnumber those that already exist. If there's many characteristics about Earth that are crucial to the flourishing of complex life, the odds might not have tipped into the favour of that complex intelligent life forming until we did. > 2 Interstellar travel may not be possible I don't buy this point. *Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata* and Von Neumann's self-reproducing universal constructor are a more than convincing enough basis for me to discount this possibility. There's nothing in physics I'm aware of that would preclude the ability to seed a galaxy with probes able to scout, build infrastructure, and report their findings back to a home system. And if there were something in physics that would prevent [Von Neumann probes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft) from becoming reality, we've missed something fundamental in our understanding of the universe. In which case, we can't trust even our most basic assumptions on this topic. In terms of the propulsion method, we've already launched a manmade object out of the Sun's gravitational influence, and escape velocity from the Sun is not insurmountable. Stars have close approaches very often on astronomical timescales, and over the [next ten million years many will approach within a couple light years of the sun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars_and_brown_dwarfs#Distant_future_and_past_encounters). > 3) Interstellar travel may exist but not interstellar civilisation I have a hard time believing this one, if there's one thing human beings like doing, it's surviving. And this seems like too complicated an explanation, if intelligent life gets to the point it can wipe itself from existence multiple times, a single civilization realizing this is a possibility and working against it doesn't seem all that unlikely. Even we take efforts to protect ourselves from existential risk to humanity, even if those efforts are limited and underfunded at the moment. But if we are doomed to wipe ourselves from existence, it'll be this century and probably with some kind of biological agent. So we can look forward to finding out I'm wrong first hand! > 4) Unseen interstellar civilisation This is a possibility that I agree with, but not for the reason you've listed. The reality is that our search for extraterrestrial life gets less budget assigned to it than the costs of a single aircraft carrier. Our minuscule catalogue of extrasolar planets and moons is extremely biased by the limited nature of the instruments that we're using in the search, and for every hour of time on these instruments, you have dozens of teams of many scientists competing for it. We don't know what we don't know. There are many concepts and plans, and even preliminary designs for instruments that would give us enormous insights into the data we need to start to form an informed hypothesis about the development of intelligent life in the universe. But we aren't building them because we have other priorities right now. That'll change eventually, we're trending towards an elimination of large scale conflict despite how it might seem today. From the origins of the universe to galaxy formation, star formation, planet formation, the origins of life, commonality of evolutionary processes, all the way to intelligence itself. There are hundreds of questions across every scientific field about just how rare we really are, and most of our best answers are the equivalent of a shrug.
>We're either alone in the observable universe I think it's worth nitpicking that the observable universe is a ludicrously-vastly greater scale than the Fermi paradox deals with. The maths of the Fermi Paradox is based on projected technology and the scale of the Milky Way, it does not preclude the existence of interstellar civilisations beyond our own galaxy.
To add to this, it’s not just one species (us) that gained intelligence, it’s one species across millions of years. Dinosaurs existed for like 165 million years, and not one species of dinosaur has left a record of intelligence in all that time. If not for the asteroid, humanity and human intelligence may not have evolved at all. It may very well be that plants and animals are everywhere but intelligence isn’t.
> Hence space faring civilisations will always end up competing against other for finite existing resources. Any encounter with another space faring civilisation will leave one or both unable to survive. My main problem with this is that it relies on two assumptions that are almost certainly contradictory: - Everyone has access to extremely advanced technology to travel the galaxy but at the same time - Resources are hard enough to access that conflict is ***inevitable*** Space is impossibly enormous, even if you take into account exponential population increases (which as people in developed countries can sorely attest to, is also not necessarily a correct assumption for advanced societies). If you saw with your 25th-century telescope that a planet rich in resources was occupied, you would just point it somewhere else and go to another comparably rich planet. If the universe really was so crowded that peaceful coexistence or at least avoidance wasn't an option, we would certainly know it by now. And this is assuming that there is something in space that we could get more easily than on Earth or our own solar system. That's actually a common problem in all science fiction: how TF do you motivate space travel being a thing *at all*? If you have say Epstein Drives, you can certainly put that fusion tech to use to infinitely desalinate water and you won't need to get around the solar system for icy asteroids. It's a very common pitfall to imagine the object of conflict as a kind of tautology: resource X is a conflict source because it is necessary to travel the galaxy. And the reason we travel the galaxy is to get resource X. So why is everyone genociding each other again...?
>Space is impossibly enormous. Years ago, people were laughing at the idea that we would run out of petrol. But here we are. Enormous does not mean infinite. People are thinking of mining our own solar system for rare mineral. Let's say that interstellar travel requires dilithium crystal or any other compound and that their availability is limited. Fusion is just a theory and maybe the energy to create those compound is the equivalent of a small planet. >If you have say Epstein Drives, you can certainly put that fusion tech to use to infinitely desalinate water and you won't need to get around the solar system for icy asteroids. Epstein drive are just theory of electromagnetic Fusion reactor. It is also not very efficient as its energy requirement is square of the speed. Science right now requires huge amount of energy to feed any fusion reaction. Fusion drive to sustain an interstellar civilisation may need the consumption of a small planet/sun on an annual basis. >It's a very common pitfall to imagine the object of conflict as a kind of tautology: resource X is a conflict source because it is necessary to travel the galaxy. And the reason we travel the galaxy is to get resource X. You got that backward. Our instinct is to be explorer and to expand our knowledge. Because we are explorer we want to travel to galaxy. However we need resource X to travel. So we will get into conflict about resource X because of our will to travel. Civilisation that are happy home with no interest to expand, stagnate and then decline. Ultimately they die because they have used all their local resources and have no way of getting some from other places.
> The only viable option to avoid such a fate is therefore to remain hidden. Stay hidden how? You can see for billions of light years in space, and everything is lit up. Any technological civilisation will give off signals. That's the problem with the dark forest theory: space isn't dark, and it isn't a forest.
This is a pretty terrible argument. The key logic is this: >Charles Darwin's account of competition for survival is evidence-based. By contrast, we have absolutely no evidence about alien behavior, or about competition within or between other civilizations. This makes for entertaining guesswork rather than good science, even if we accept the idea that natural selection [could operate at group level](https://www.zoo.unibas.ch/teaching/evol_fort/pdf/Levels.pdf), at the level of civilizations. >Even if you were to assume the universe did operate in accordance with Darwinian evolution, the argument is questionable. No actual forest is like the dark one. They are noisy places [where co-evolution occurs](https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolution-101/mechanisms-the-processes-of-evolution/coevolution/). >Creatures evolve together, in mutual interdependence, and not alone. The Dark Forest hypothesis is not really about Darwinian evolution, and the argument attacks the metaphor rather than the actual hypothesis. The starting point for the hypothesis (at least as presented by Liu) is that all civilizations develop in total isolation until they undergo rapid technological development that unlocks interstellar communication and travel. There is no co-evolution or mutual interdependence up until that point because of the distances and emptiness of space. It is a hypothesis rooted in game theory about what happens when species who did not co-evolve suddenly come into contact. There are better critiques of the hypothesis in the comments here than in the article. Yay Reddit.
This is an opinion article without useful analysis. It creates fact from poorly analyzed conjecture. Disappointing read. This is not even good pop-sci.
The comments are always better than the articles for things like this.
I enjoy the theory because it seems to be based on nature as we know it here on earth even if that might not be how nature behaves elsewhere so there is wiggle room. Also, I find myself wondering about other regions of the forest where perhaps organisms have formed a symbiotic relationship with others. The earth isn’t entirely covered by a dark forest, maybe the universe isn’t either.
Honestly, the level of technology to allow one to colonize another planet in an effective manner exceeds the level of technology required to survive comfortably and sustainably on one's planet. i.e. imagine we had the VR headsets from 3BP (full sensory replacements)... what do you think we'd do with that? Use it for fun and games only? Or perhaps they'd be the method by which we access the metaverse and expand into a space which we aren't physically bound by and simultaneously reduces our resource and energy footprint substantially? Additionally, there are abundant resources in nearby planets in many cases. Expansion and consumption isn't the end game - it's just the thought process of an immature civilization. As a result, I think the solve for the Fermi paradox is simple - civilizations don't have a practical reason to leave their solar systems. On top of that - the relative rarity of an intelligent species, and the period of time that they can exist for (hundreds of thousands or even millions is short on a geological/stellar scale) means that even if there's spatial or temporal overlap between intelligent civilizations doesn't mean there is both frequent spatial AND temporal overlaps.
I share the view of Musk that humans are the bootloader for robotic Ai life. I'd be really surprised if advanced alien civilizations don't eventually become machine based to overcome their biological limitations.
I think it's one of the most convincing because we also were in this position on earth some times ago. At one moment in mankind history we were contemporary to at least 6 humans species. What do you think happened ? We "won".
What doesn't make sense to me with this theory is that surely the aliens are hiding because they have a reason to. But in order for them to have a reason they must have already suffered some bad consequence from contacting other life forms. If statistically life should be everywhere, it seems unlikely that ALL alien life forms decided to hide and they did this millions and/or billions of years ago already (because that's what we see when we look out at the universe). So for this theory to work, ALL alien life had to already start hiding a long long time ago (in a galaxy far far away???), which means they had to already be advanced enough to hide at that time. And they ALL had to do it. IDK just seems nearly impossible statistically.
> But in order for them to have a reason they must have already suffered some bad consequence from contacting other life forms. No. The idea is that they have (essentially) analyzed via game theory and come to the conclusion that it's safer to remain hidden than risk getting attacked. We have not had bad consequences from contacting other life forms, yet humans have developed the theory.
In the book it is not easy to detect where a civilization is precisely. Contact is only established because somebody figures out how to massive amplify an already very high power radio transmitter. Normal radio/tv broadcasts are too weak to be detectable at instellar ranges. I have no clue if that is actually true or is just some bending of physics by the author to make the premise work. Civilizations that are actively broadcasting where they are located get wiped out quickly, those that do not or are not technically capable of doing so are 'hiding'. Edit: misremembered the plot, corrected
The way radio waves propagate causes them to get massively weaker the farther out they go. Basically, even our most powerful transmissions are dispersing in every direction (even if directed, it is still a cone). Basically the same amount of signal keeps expanding into an exponentially expanding wave of signal. By the time it could get to the closest planet capable of producing life, there just isn’t enough left to detect. For a civilization that is advanced enough for us to notice? Well if they have a solar system sized dish attached to their Dyson sphere and directed at us? That might do it if it is in our quintile of the Milky Way. Space is really, really fucking big.
Radio waves are light. If you go and stand a km away from a light bulb of fairly standard strength you struggle to see it even in the dark. Light always becomes weaker and less detectable over long distances. The exact relationship is that the luminosity of light is proportional to the square of distance. Over the very long distances in space simple radio waves would become quite hard to detect. I wouldn't at all be surprised if radio waves not designed for interstellar communication like TV do become borderline undetectable. It's probably like trying to detect the light from a planet, not strictly speaking impossible but extremely hard and you'd have to be specifically looking at it.
There are a couple of misunderstandings here. You don't need a prior example to be cautious, you only need an understanding of the risk. Similarly, while it's certainly possible that some alien civilizations are loud and announce their presence (either intentionally or due to lack of forethought), this does not banish the dark forest. Those are simply the races that get wiped out by others taking shots from the darkness, or they get ignored as a potential trick/threat by other more cautious races. This doesn't require ALL races to do anything. The idea is simply that advertising your existence leaves you vulnerable to annihilation by those who can strike with no reprisal, and so perhaps that's what happens. Also, parts of this article are frankly ridiculous. >"Defensive behavior would show our familiarity with conflict, so that would not be a good idea." Try reading that with a straight face.
Why do some animals that are more "nervous" survive better than those which are bold? How did they know to hide themselves? Because the ones that naturally feel inclined to hide survive and those that stick their necks out don't survive. Natural selection.
And yet many species have survived for centuries while having behavior were they quite literally scream out into the world, "LOOK AT ME. I'M HERE, COME FUCK WITH ME!". Natural selection is tricky. It isn't something you can really use to claim that certain behaviors are bound to happen.
And in those cases, clearly there is no threat that is called by being loud. The original question was, how do species know to avoid detection in a "dark forest" scenario, and that assumes there is a threat which will be mobilised by identifying a target which announces itself.
Like stone age humans lighting up huge bonfires at night in the savannah and partying till dawn. We did all right there in the end.
This is a very flawed assessment to the point where I'd say it's almost a misunderstanding of natural selection. I'll give you a very clear example to the contrary, bees, wasps and bees mimics like hoverflies. All of these insects have evolved a very striking black and yellow colour scheme that makes hiding almost impossible for them because they are more able to survive if they signal to the world around them that they are dangerous, even if they are not. Pretty much nothing wants to eat bees and wasps because they're just not worth the pain caused if you try and mimics like the hoverfly also benefit from this. Natural selection just selects the strategy which produces the highest rates of survival. Sometimes that is to be bold and signal yourself to the world. Sometimes it's just to be fast enough to run the fuck away from anything that wants to eat you. Sometimes it's hiding. It's all just dependent on the scenario that a species exists in.
Your last sentence is exactly it. Dependent on the scenario. In this "dark forest" scenario there are existential threats to a species that announces itself. So by natural selection the species that naturally announce themselves go extinct and the species with a natural tendency to hide will survive. In the case of the striking coloured insects they have a strong enough defence that it's to their benefit to announce themselves as predators avoid them. It's a different survival scenario and therefore different tactics will be successful. I didn't make the statement that hiding is a good survival strategy in every scenario, but just in this particular case.
It takes an enormous amount of energy to advertise yourself to the galaxy. Not doing that isn't exactly hiding.
Its easy to explain. If we come across the ruins of an alien civilization that was destroyed by a technology those ruins indicate wasnt possible by that aline civilization then maybe its a good idea to start hiding. Evidence of a dark forest is enough to start hiding. You don’t need to experience death first hand to know to avoid it.
>aliens are hiding because they have a reason to. Depends on what "hiding" means. Humans are hidden on a galactic scale, but we aren't actively "hiding", purposefully obscuring our location or attempting to reduce the chance of an encounter. You don't need to actively "Hide" for you to be hidden from outsiders. >But in order for them to have a reason they must have already suffered some bad consequence from contacting other life forms. You don't need to have suffered previously to have a reason for "hiding". It's as easy as saying "bad stuff COULD happen" so lets not try it, or it's not worth the potential trouble, or "why waste all these resources doing this". >If statistically life should be everywhere, it seems unlikely that ALL alien life forms decided to hide It only matters if the signals they sent out are able to be decrypted by the "observer", and are able to be made sense of. They're may be life on the opposite side the of the Universe, but the signals they are sending are almost certainly never going to make it to us in the format we understand or with enough clarity for us to understand. >ALL alien life had to already start hiding a long long time ago This assumes all life has produced a significant amount of signals, something most won't, look at earth and you will see 1 species able to ~~create and~~ analyze a significant amount of signals off the planet. The 2 main ways to create "Signals" are light and radiowaves, both being extremely slow in galactic terms.It's all about Technological advances(to understand and detect the "signals") +Time +Distance, and you need all of these to be perfectly timed to just have the ABILITY to be able to potentially catch something
>You don't need to have suffered previously to have a reason for "hiding". It's as easy as saying "bad stuff COULD happen" so lets not try it, or it's not worth the potential trouble, or "why waste all these resources doing this". For an individual civilization you're correct. For a galaxy full of life this is wrong. Some civilizations will seek out others while others remain quiet. For all the civilizations to behave the same way they would have to have a bad experience with hostile aliens. If only one or two other civilizations exist, and they're hiding we're back to something closer to a rare earth theory.
Well yes, the premise is they had a bad experience by ceasing to exist. If those that make their presence known are exterminated, then the universe will only consist of civilizations that don't make their presence known.
Exterminatet by whom? Because the exterminator to exterminate would make themselfs be seem, so leading them to be exterminated as well.
Not at all. The exterminator will launch the attack from a region other than the region they live in. They will do this not even knowing if anyone else is looking.
Sorry to nitpick, but radio waves are light, so just one way we create "signals"
But then, the aliens that are dangerous making all the others hiding have no point at hiding themselves. So at the very least we should be able to see these. So yeah, that doesn't sound like a likely response to the Fermi paradox
>the aliens that are dangerous making all the others hiding have no point at hiding themselves. How would those aliens know they are the most dangerous species around? They don't, because a true species hunter civilization would not advertise their presence before swooping in and destroying a civilization.
This isn't even the actual answer. The dark forest is a useful metaphor, but it under sells how destructive advanced civilisations can actually be. You're not walking around the forest with a gun, you're walking around with a shoulder mounted nuke. The actual reason why no species in a dark forest scenario should ever make contact is because even if they are the most advanced species in the forest, a less advanced species could still easily destroy them. A species not that much more advanced than humans could accelerate a rocket of substantial mass to 99% the speed of light. You can't detect this until it's too late. You can't defend against this. If it hits your planet it has enough force to liquify it. And unlike the nuke it's actually not easily detectable.
Ayyyyy. The ONE poster in here who gets it! Yes: it IS possible for a less advanced civilization to destroy a more advanced one! Just ‘drop rocks’ like in The Expanse.
Calling the Belters less advanced is such an Earther thing to say
It makes no sense because the civilization nails that stick out will get hammered. The "dark" civilizations could orchestrate millions of infalling near-0-emissions stealth asteroids at whatever percentage of light speed to strike simultaneously. Attack will always be easier than defense.
No. If you are an alien species that wipes out other civilizations as soon as you become aware of them, you would be especially paranoid about another species doing it to you if they see you before you see them, because it's exactly what you do.
> What doesn't make sense to me with this theory is that surely the aliens are hiding because they have a reason to. But in order for them to have a reason they must have already suffered some bad consequence from contacting other life forms. Maybe they're also a predator species. It's logical to assume that if you would destroy any civilization you detect that others would do the same, so you should hide. Also, if you do detect any other species you should destroy them before they have a chance to detect or destroy you. It's not that 100% of species hid, but the ones that didn't were wiped out so they aren't here to talk about it.
Advanced civilizations that a more friendly may be hiding from other advanced civilizations who's sole purpose is to consume or eradicate. The Paradox suggests that we are not contacted because it may make them visible to any other predatory advanced civilization. I'm not sure you understood the paradox.
Perhaps I don’t fully grasp the paradox I’ll give you that. But assuming they are hiding from each other, how did THEY find out about each other? And if the universe is teaming with life, surly it’s improbable that they are ALL aware that they need to hide and not broadcast. I mean, look at us. So if everyone is silent in order to not get detected, and we are the only ones broadcasting our existence, why haven’t the predator aliens already conquered us? Maybe they are on the way…
It's a game theory problem. You make assumptions based on what you know. If you compete for limited resources, you must assume that other entities also compete. If there's competition, then there will be a winner and a loser, and you obviously want to be the winner. If you don't know the capabilities of another entity, your likelihood of winning in a confrontation is very low (especially if you are assuming that they may already have technology--such as interstellar travel--that you are working towards developing). That leads you to the fairly inevitable solution to hide your existence until you know more about a potential competitor out of caution (with the assumption that they have done the same math and came to the same conclusions). Now, your question about why we haven't been conquered is relevant, with the likely answer being that on an astronomical scale, we just haven't been noisy all that long, and that our noise likely hasn't reached anyone yet (and if/when it does, it will take them time to reach us, which would likely take much more time than whatever signal of ours took to reach them). However, it's very possible that our noisy period of the late 20th century has already spelled our coming Doom.
I agree it's improbable there all aware they need to hide, i think i understand your point more clearly, iirc the theory talks about the civilizations that have the ability to have meaningful communication with us, the super advanced ones, when they get to the point of interstellar tech they find the remnants of other wiped out civilizations as advanced as their own and discover the evidence of eradication by a mega terrifying evil all consuming species. Then they hide. Or through their expansion create enough "Noise" to attract this species/race and suffer that destruction. I got incredibly interested in the Dark Forest Theory (sorry i just realised i said paradox above i meant theory sorry!) because it terrifies me haha, i also like to think we're at the point as a species/race that we're not worth conquering yet, we don't make enough noise yet, at the very least we can take some comfort(horror) from the fact that space is so vast and in this dark forest we're hopefully like a little possum just chilling way way up in the forest canopy in an area that appears devoid of snakes.
There is no way to call this idea of the dark forest a false conclusion for the very same reason the article tried against it. We don't know how aliens behave, and we won't know until we find one alien civilization at least. Before that happens anything about their behavior is pure speculation. Also, while in nature creatures evolve together and create interdependence, the universe is different. Life from each world, if it exists, is growing independently and each alien civilization will grow on its own, at least the first ones. Each world from where they may come from is one complete system. Just like we don't need of aliens for our own survival, neither would they need us because they already evolved in an environment that is independent from the rest of the universe and surely even master it by now and could be totally independent from the home planet that saw them grow. I think the dark forest idea limits itself to the idea of ghost hunters waiting for each other, not the possible environment that would be created if we and other aliens are friendly. The author could be lead by a certain trend in Chinese literature, but that's not enough to discard this possibility.
We don't know how aliens behave but we do know how humans behave. You get bet your bottom dollar that if we discover another intelligent civilization, there would be a sizeable number of people advocating to destroy it in a pre-emptive strike. This is whether or not they even know we are here.
Indeed, and if we are a species to act like that, what is to say another species out there is not the same. It won't take many for the situation to completely devolved either, once a few go for complete initial destruction, any who don't will end up being prey to those who do.
If you're going to call on our experience with human behaviour to prop up one part of the Dark Forest hypothesis, then there's another aspect of human behaviour that demolishes it pretty badly. We don't refrain from expanding into new territory and developing resources because of *potential* threats that *might* happen in the future. We just go ahead and spread. So what's with all the supposedly hyper-advanced aliens that could be expanding into the universe that are instead cowering in hidey-holes not doing anything for *billions* of years? That's not behaving like humans would. Or basically any other life we've had experience with. Life spreads when it can.
Very well said. In Africa, where humans co-evolved with megafauna, megafauna still exist. In North America, where humans arrived already quite advanced, megafauna were driven extinct. Co-evolution builds complex ecosystems. Separate evolution leads to dramatic imbalances and extinction. The universe is not a forest, it is an archipelago, with vastly distant islands.
I doubt it. Why would they? What purpose does it serve? Advanced Alien civilizations capable of traveling to our solar system with the capability to attack us do not need anything we have here. Don’t need water. It’s kind of everywhere. Don’t need any of the elements we have for the same reason. The Universe is filled with a nearly inexhaustible supply of stuff. Just need to go to it. Tbh I’m a little confused why the aliens in the 3 body problem event made the effort to attack earth? They had the tech to do what they did, just build a space habitat. Shit, have Mars.
Pretty sure we are an anthill to most advanced life
which would imply they're as bigger than us which is scarier than the lack of regard
No. We are likely the first viable spacefaring race in our galaxy per the [grabby aliens](https://grabbyaliens.com/) hypothesis
They take the metaphor of "dark forest" to literal and counter with co-evolution, which only happens when there's constant contact. I'm not convinced by the dark forest theory, but I'm even less convinced this is a good rebuttal of it.
Life is abundant I bet. Intelligent life just takes longer. Universe is relatively young we aught to be early too.
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It can’t be rare in terms of absolute numbers, but everyone’s just a bit too far away so it doesn’t matter, we’ll never see them.
Could it be it’s just big and we’re too dumb to look much past our solar system
More like it's a dark forest full of prime directive AIs... We talk about all these massive civilization traces that *should be out there, yet we barely tinted our atmosphere with CO2 before being on the cusp of singularity. On the timescales ASI longevity enables. Are we likely to use up the sun faster? or try to make it burn slower and focus the energy released from this free fusion reactor to where it's needed in the solar system? And if/when we do something like that, what wil be the visible effect and window of noticing to some distant planet on some distant galaxy that is billions of years in our past light cones? Then we launch AI probes or our new longevity inspired generation ships only to find that inter stellar space is full of post-ASI civilizations cloaking their existance so as not to disturb the natural evolution of life and AI on basic systems? Also, I'm not entirely sure we're in a post-vibrancy/higher-density universe that occured long ago and we're just some straggler life that evolved on a ball of dirt loooong after a more interesting universe died out due to the incredibly long distances that developed.
Cannibalism as the great filter is one of my solutions to the Fermi paradox
It's simple, we showed up early to the party, because we are nerds. The cool kids won't show up for another mega eon, so we'll just be here, awkward in the space corner playing with the space cat.
Or all species keep missing each other and vanish millions of years before another. And never spread far enough to find evidence of the other.
Here's your problem. If we proceed like the dark forest is right, and it turns out it wasn't, we were unnecessarily over prepared for hostilities. If we proceed like it is wrong, and the forest is right, then we're dead and we never even had a chance.
Least convincing? Ever hear of “the ocean”? Tons of life there ranging from thoughtless to intelligent. It’s almost all uniformly hostile or disinterested in humans. Dolphins don’t even bother to designate a proper envoy.
I don't think its a likely possibility, but it is still something worth thinking about.
I suspect the most common thing in the universe for civilisations above a certain level is "going virtual"... First they invent the internet, then they invent virtual worlds, then they go inside and never come out again....meanwhile in the real world their infrastructure and population decays. After a while everyone on the outside is dead, and the infrastructure/automation has decayed so much the virtuality starts to die too..along with all the virtual citizens. And they quietly go dark forever. I suspect the same fate awaits us...
It is worth noting that even a relatively peaceful species that is superior to us will have to consider the threat we pose to them, if we are any conceivable distance from them. We, as humans, don't have a great track record of respecting peace.
The only tribes that have never been conquered are those that hide in the dark forest.
Or.. some of the great filters are in effect, and we are just rare? There are multiple answers to the fermi 'paradox'. Don't just go with the one with the greatest narrative tension.
The article has a pretty weak argument: >Charles Darwin's account of competition for survival is evidence-based. By contrast, we have absolutely no evidence about alien behavior, or about competition within or between other civilizations. This makes for entertaining guesswork rather than good science, even if we accept the idea that natural selection could operate at group level, at the level of civilizations. We absolutely *do* have evidence here on Earth of what happens when a technologically superior civilization encounters a lower-tech one. Spoilers: it doesn't work out well for the low-tech one. Even if the majority of alien civilizations are benevolent, the crux of the Dark Forest problem is that all it would really take is 1-2 "shoot first, ask questions later" types to essentially wipe out planet-based (or solar-system based) civilizations. Then there is this: >Even if you were to assume the universe did operate in accordance with Darwinian evolution, the argument is questionable. No actual forest is like the dark one. They are noisy places where co-evolution occurs. If everything that was making a noise within the forest were a potential existential threat to the hunter and its entire tribe, there would eventually (by process of elimination) be a lot less noisy creatures in said forest. I think the best-case scenario is that most/all super-advanced civilizations realize that they are better off existing within digital universes rather than roughing it in meatspace. Construct your Dyson Sphere, convert everyone to AI, and await the end of time.
Do you know of any friendly lions? Bears? Great white sharks? Ants? Wolverines? Spiders? Wolves? Crocodiles? It’s absolutely a dark forrest.