Spoilers The premise of the series is that the Universe is like a dark forest. A civilization is like a hunter wandering through a dark forest. Any sound is li

Spoilers The premise of the series is that the Universe is like a dark forest. A civilization is like a hunter wandering through a dark forest. Any sound is likely to first be met with a bullet and then curiosity. At galactic scales, by the time you first communicate with a civilisation, they might have advanced immensely from when you first detected them, and the slightest miscommunication could cause war at massive scales with high probabilities of losses on both sides, so you shoot at the first noise you hear with extremely low effort weaponry that will definitely kill an underdeveloped civilization. The universe will end some day, but there's no point in letting your civilization end before that just because someone else decided to kill you when you were being generous. To be clear though, I would rather be optimistic and say that civilizations can learn to work and live together, but the game theory explanation of this situation does make a lot of sense, and is backed up by a fair amount of historic data.