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A bit off-topic, but I've kind of struggled mentally since finishing The Dark Forest. Even though it's science fiction, it actually seems hard to argue with th

A bit off-topic, but I've kind of struggled mentally since finishing The Dark Forest. Even though it's science fiction, it actually seems hard to argue with the theory in the book -- that civilizations must act to eliminate each other or they are overwhelmingly likely to be eliminated themselves. I'd like to believe it's not true, but so long as any two civilizations are likely to have dramatically different rates of technological advancement and so long as crossing the gaps in space between civilizations takes sufficiently long due to the laws of physics, it seems hard to deny that there might be strong reasons for civilizations to fear each other.

empath75 7y ago
People don’t always or even normally act at the level of civilizations. Why would this apply at the civilization and not the town or the state or country or corporate level.
- AgentME 7y ago
  Different groups of people get along because we're all still human and very similarly culturally and understand each other's desires and goals. Things start going badly when there's major social and technological differences. Think of how things went for the natives when America was discovered. Now amplify it. Imagine if different countries were isolated from each other for millions of years, evolving into different species, and advancing technology the whole time, lost track of any commonalities between each other, and were then exposed to each other.
simion314 7y ago
I also had a similar feeling after finishing the book, this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmCTmgavkrQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmCTmgavkrQ made some good points, mainly finding problems with the axioms so it convinced me that the conclusion in the book is probably wrong since the axioms are probably not true.
YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
>> Even though it's science fiction, it actually seems hard to argue with the theory in the book -- that civilizations must act to eliminate each other or they are overwhelmingly likely to be eliminated themselves. This is a great conceit for a sci-fi novel (two, actually) but I wouldn't take it too seriously as a real-life argument. To begin with, it's a theory about essentially evolutionary imperatives. It says that every civilisation, regardless of species, location, or any other condition, will eventually reach the same conclusion about the nature of the universe and the rules defining the co-existence of civilisations inside it. To put it lightly, that is a very long stretch. We have no way to know anything about how a non-human civilisation will think, or even if it will "think" in the same sense that we do (they may be space-faring social insects without a real capacity for conscious thought, say- a classic sci-fi trope). We have no way to know what are the goals and rules that such a civilisation might choose for itself. Some may see it as their duty to protect and help life in the universe, as something unique and irreplaceable. Some might indeed see it as a survival imperative to go out and destroy or conquer other civilisations. Some might choose to develop along a sustainable path that will not end up in them exhausting their local systems' resources (eliminating the second axiom of cosmic sociology). It's a huge universe. There's space for any number of different outlooks on life, the universe and everything. I don't doubt that the Dark Forest theory is one thing that may well have arisen somewhere, somewhen, but to assume that everything that is conscious in the universe will have "developed the hiding gene and the cleansing gene", that's just assuming way, way too much (and first of all- about the way genetic information is transferred). We don't know anything about other technological civilisations. Cautiousness is well advised, but part of that is not assuming that we understand how they will necessarily think.
- beat 7y ago
  Not everyone reaches the conclusions of the Dark Forest. But those who don't reach it are exterminated.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
    In the books, or in the real world? In the real world there are many competing theories about why the universe is silent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
ColanR 7y ago
Sadly, game theory bears out that observation. [1] Trust is difficult to cultivate. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma
- notduncansmith 7y ago
  True, but I think there’s more hope when you take superrationality[1] into account. Multiple actors can independently arrive at compatible cooperative solutions to the survival-and-utility game (which is not zero-sum). Wikipedia says it assumes all other players are also superrational, but I think in practice a successful variant of this strategy is to identify whether other players are superrational and avoid them if not. There is sometimes the option of converting existing self-interested rational players into superrational ones, but that is another subject entirely. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superrationality https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superrationality
  - ColanR 7y ago
    It would be nice if we were all superrational, but that concept just explains away the entire problem of the prisoner's dillemma: the dilemma serves to highlight our mutual lack of trust, and superrationality simply says, 'what if we did trust each other'? Since the assumptions of superrationality would be naive and foolish for any of those prisoners to assume, it solves nothing.
    - notduncansmith 7y ago
      The idea is not to assume that everyone will be superrational or trustworthy at the beginning of the game. I believe it’s possible for the superrational players in a game to become the majority by expressing the superrational strategy in terms that will appeal to rationally self-interested players and demonstrating a superrational strategy working at some non-trivial scale.
      - ColanR 7y ago
YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
Regarding how long it takes to travel between habitable systems- Cixin Liu, like most other hard sci-fi authors, and everybody else who thinks about those things, seems to assume that lightspeed is just as problematic for everyone else as it is for us humans. And yet we have no way to know that for sure. We have no idea what the average lifespan of an intelligent species is. It may just be that humans are particularly short-lived, among all the species in the galaxy, or the entire universe. If a species has a lifetime of a couple thousand years then interstellar travel, even at sub-light speeds, would be a lot more manageable than it is for us. Which to me, means we can relax a little about the risk of being destroyed by hostile aliens. We don't know what we don't know. Chances are, if they were going to destroy us, they would have already done so in the last million years or so. We're probably a lot less appealing, as a world, than we think we are. Perhaps the universe really hates salt water or oxygen atmospheres? Who's to say?
- dmitrygr 7y ago
  Not really, since DFT covers how fast information travels, not biological bodies. Lifespans aren't really part of the equation.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
    That's not to do with Dark Forest Theory, but why do you say it's about how fast information travels? I take it as a theory about the outlook of technological civilisations with respect to each other. And yes, lifespans are important. Perhaps not in the books, but in the real world our science and technology advances at least some in every generation, as new scientists and technologists continue the work of their forebears. If human generations lasted a thousand years, it would perhaps take us a lot longer to make the same technological progress that it now only takes us a few years- if nothing else because the urgency of making progress would be reduced accordingly. Lifespans may also influence the actualy speed by which species form thoughts and communicate. Remember the Ents in The Lord of the Rings? A species that lived ten thousand years may take an Earth day to form a meaningful utterance. Technological advancement would take considerably longer for them than for us.
- 7y ago
jbattle 7y ago
If you are in the market for a good story touching similar topics, I thought Pandora's Star (first of a two-book series) was a great read (I bounced hard off the dark forest)
AgentME 7y ago
Personally, I think it's possible that abiogenesis is so rare that we are the only life within the observable universe. I don't know if that's more or less depressing.
mlcrypto 7y ago
I think with the rate of technological growth an intelligent species can improve to match another quicker than they can travel across space. Or perhaps even surpass an isolated travelling group.
013a 7y ago
Its an interesting theory. IMO: the difficulty of destroying a civilization is probably harder than communicating with them, and the advantages of keeping one around probably outweigh the advantages of killing them if you're already more technically advanced. A big point in TDF is that the speed of light limits our ability to communicate and understand other civilizations. But, by extension, weapons are also limited by that limit. Of course, maybe its possible to break the speed of light, but then communication could also break this limit. So, if you're a technologically advanced alien civilization and you become aware of humanity, you can send an Envoy or you can send some Nukes (or, of course, you can do nothing and watch). Just within the context of The Dark Forest Theory, there's practically no reason to send Nukes; at worst, you discover that humanity sucks and then you go ahead and nuke us. But life is probably special; maybe humanity would make great trading partners, maybe our brains function differently and can solve problems differently, maybe our natural proclivity for war would make us great allies, or maybe we'd make great slaves for the mines on the Vartoth 12 colony. All of these are options for a civilization a thousand years ahead of us; they can pick what they'd like, but none of them would classify as a result of The Dark Forest theory. There's also a possibility that maybe this hypothetical alien civilization tried that course of action in the past with another civilization, and they were friends for a while, helped each other, then fought in a bloody war, and now that civilization is distrustful so they destroy any young civilizations while they still easily can instead of even trying to come to terms. But that's not a Dark Forest theory situation; the Dark Forest Theory suggests that its natural for civilizations to want to kill each other off.
- shmed 7y ago
  Cixin book covers those aspect pretty well. One of the main element behind his version of the Dark Forest theory is something he calls the "Chain of suspicion". He argues that in a world were communication is limited by the speed of light, there's no way to establish a coherent dialog during first contact between two civilizations that would allow you to completely trust the other party. If you cannot trust that the other party will not destroy you given the chance, then the only way for you to be guaranteed not to be destroyed is to destroy them first. Even if both parties want peace, there's no way for you to convince the other party that you want peace without also giving them the time to destroy you. It's basically a game theory situation where trying to go for peaceful communication is way too risky, and the stake in play are the survival of your civilization. It's also implied that civilization that played the "peace" card will simply get eliminated the moment they encounter someone playing the "destroy" card, making you much less likely to actually encounter a peaceful civilization.
asark 7y ago
Oh boy, read Blindsight by Peter Watts. Kinda similar idea but more deeply dreadful. Messed me up for days. Now added to the pile labeled "Existentially Horrifying Crap I have to Not Think About to Make It Through Another Day".
- davesque 7y ago
  I've read Blindsight. It's a good one. Actually, the premise didn't bother me as much as the Three Body trilogy.
- Freaky 7y ago
  Link, along with much of his other work: https://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm https://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm
TeMPOraL 7y ago
Keep in mind that the dark forest theory hinges on two axioms that will likely be true for interstellar relations, while remain false for terrestrial ones. The two axioms are clearly stated in the books: 1) large communication delay, and 2) unpredictable technological jumps. The idea of the dark forest is that communication delay makes it difficult to build trust, and even if you start in superior position, it's possible for the other side to leap ahead of you technologically in the middle of those very long talks. A hypothetical Earth scenario would be an early industrial empire contacting an age-of-sail empire across the ocean via letters sent on whales, only to have the latter suddenly respond with an ICBM.
hannasanarion 7y ago
There are several reasons not to fear Dark Forest, chief among them, 1. Any species that develops a civilization capable of space travel must necessarily have evolved a strong cooperative spirit, and so is more unlikely to exercise homicide as a first resort. 2. If Dark Forest were true, and there was a murderous civilization that wanted to kill every other, we would all be dead already. You can make an entire galaxy's worth of relativistic kill missiles with the mass of a medium size asteroid. Sterilizing an entire galaxy to make sure that there is never a challenge to your rule can be accomplished in a few thousand years. Without needing any interstellar transit.
- 013a 7y ago
  > Any species that develops a civilization capable of space travel must necessarily have evolved a strong cooperative spirit, and so is more unlikely to exercise homicide as a first resort. It's more accurate to say that HUMANITY would need a cooperative spirit in order to reach interstellar travel. I don't think it's accurate to assume that every species would need this. And, beyond that, TDF addresses this through the assertion that humanity, at multiple turns, didn't want to partake in this Dark Forest ideology; we wanted to make peace and friends, but the other more advanced civilizations weren't having it. So even if they had a cooperative spirit in the past, that doesn't preclude that the spirit sticks around when the destruction of your species is at stake. > If Dark Forest were true, and there was a murderous civilization that wanted to kill every other, we would all be dead already. You can make an entire galaxy's worth of relativistic kill missiles with the mass of a medium size asteroid. That's being awfully presumptive. Constructing even a galaxy's worth of kill missiles and launching them wildly like a shotgun isn't a strategy that any logical civilization would do. They'd end up destroying tons of empty planets that could have rich resource deposits or be habitable for future colonies, and they'd know that. Maybe there are illogical interstellar civilizations, but it stands to reason that they'd be More Rare than Logical ones, given it takes some form of logic to even accomplish space travel. Targeted strikes make more sense. So you have to have a Target. Humanity has been broadcasting RF for about 100 years. The milky way is 105,000 light years across; at best we're detectable by 0.095% of just our own galaxy. Maybe we haven't gotten one of these kill missiles because they haven't heard us yet. Or it's on its way. But all this requires life to common; the dark forest theory asserts that the reason life seems rare is because its common and everyone is just being quiet, but the other possibility is that life is, well, rare, and that's probably more likely. If life is rare, then the dark forest theory kinda goes out the window because the novelty of finding new life would invariably overwhelm a hypothetical risk that your species has never encountered before. IMO space contact & travel will have one of three outcomes. (1) The light speed limit can be worked around and none of this matters. (2) Life is Common, and the Dark Forest Theory is valid between species. (3) Life is Rare, humanity will colonize the stars, but a version of the Dark Forest Theory will begin to apply between human colonies separated by hundreds of lightyears. If its been 150 years since anyone in your colony has ever talked to Earth, then you're not really a colony anymore, but it's obvious to you that Earth won't see it that way. Your colony creates other colonies, and it takes earth hundreds of years to find out about them, if you decide to even tell them (because what do you owe earth?). So a thousand years pass and we've got dozens/hundreds of Tribes of humans who can't really talk to each other, most of whom don't even know of each other's existence, all developing culture, science, and weapons at independent rates. Really starts to look Dark Forest-esque, doesn't it?
jasaloo 7y ago
I hear you. Liu's outlook is deeply pessimistic. His obvious scientific background knowledge seems to be infused with a dash of western, neoliberal ideology-- that it's just dog-eat-dog out there, and we're all in it for our own self-interest. It's a bit ironic considering Liu is Chinese- wasn't China's Ming Dynasty the first to land on America in the early 1400s and historically demonstrate that exploration and discovery weren't necessarily accompanied by colonization/enslavement/destruction? That example gets held up a lot when mainstream historians spin the narrative that Colombus et al enslaved/raped/pillaged because that's just what societies do (while ignoring that it was the debt that the explorers owed to their financiers that drove most of that bad behavior).
- westmeal 7y ago
  >that Colombus et al enslaved/raped/pillaged because that's just what societies do (while ignoring that it was the debt that the explorers owed to their financiers that drove most of that bad behavior). Would you mind extrapolating on that a bit? In my totally 'unbiased' and 'truthful' American public school they never mentioned a word of this. I've always wanted to learn more about the real origins of this broken country.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Wait until you discover that the story behind Thanksgiving is pretty much a proper alien invasion sci-fi, featuring technologically superior invaders landing in ships, and promptly unleashing biological weapons on the local population.
    - westmeal 7y ago
      Well I knew that part. <sarcasm> They did it to promote freedom of course. </sarcasm>
  - davejohnclark 7y ago
    I found the oatmeal's comic about Columbus enlightening (and disturbing) https://theoatmeal.com/comics/columbus_day https://theoatmeal.com/comics/columbus_day
underwater 7y ago
I figure that the age of global discovery and colonialism that happened here on Earth is a case study. Fixed resources, different cultures, huge differences in technology. It wasn't great, but also, many distinct cultures and peoples survived.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Age of colonization meets zero of the two axioms underpinning "dark forest" - there was a possibility of establishing trust, and there was no possibility of sudden and unexpected technological leaps of the weaker side.

empath75 7y ago

People don’t always or even normally act at the level of civilizations. Why would this apply at the civilization and not the town or the state or country or corporate level.

AgentME 7y ago
Different groups of people get along because we're all still human and very similarly culturally and understand each other's desires and goals. Things start going badly when there's major social and technological differences. Think of how things went for the natives when America was discovered. Now amplify it. Imagine if different countries were isolated from each other for millions of years, evolving into different species, and advancing technology the whole time, lost track of any commonalities between each other, and were then exposed to each other.

simion314 7y ago

I also had a similar feeling after finishing the book, this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmCTmgavkrQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmCTmgavkrQ made some good points, mainly finding problems with the axioms so it convinced me that the conclusion in the book is probably wrong since the axioms are probably not true.

YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago

>> Even though it's science fiction, it actually seems hard to argue with the theory in the book -- that civilizations must act to eliminate each other or they are overwhelmingly likely to be eliminated themselves. This is a great conceit for a sci-fi novel (two, actually) but I wouldn't take it too seriously as a real-life argument. To begin with, it's a theory about essentially evolutionary imperatives. It says that every civilisation, regardless of species, location, or any other condition, will eventually reach the same conclusion about the nature of the universe and the rules defining the co-existence of civilisations inside it. To put it lightly, that is a very long stretch. We have no way to know anything about how a non-human civilisation will think, or even if it will "think" in the same sense that we do (they may be space-faring social insects without a real capacity for conscious thought, say- a classic sci-fi trope). We have no way to know what are the goals and rules that such a civilisation might choose for itself. Some may see it as their duty to protect and help life in the universe, as something unique and irreplaceable. Some might indeed see it as a survival imperative to go out and destroy or conquer other civilisations. Some might choose to develop along a sustainable path that will not end up in them exhausting their local systems' resources (eliminating the second axiom of cosmic sociology). It's a huge universe. There's space for any number of different outlooks on life, the universe and everything. I don't doubt that the Dark Forest theory is one thing that may well have arisen somewhere, somewhen, but to assume that everything that is conscious in the universe will have "developed the hiding gene and the cleansing gene", that's just assuming way, way too much (and first of all- about the way genetic information is transferred). We don't know anything about other technological civilisations. Cautiousness is well advised, but part of that is not assuming that we understand how they will necessarily think.

beat 7y ago
Not everyone reaches the conclusions of the Dark Forest. But those who don't reach it are exterminated.
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
  In the books, or in the real world? In the real world there are many competing theories about why the universe is silent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

ColanR 7y ago

Sadly, game theory bears out that observation. [1] Trust is difficult to cultivate. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

notduncansmith 7y ago
True, but I think there’s more hope when you take superrationality[1] into account. Multiple actors can independently arrive at compatible cooperative solutions to the survival-and-utility game (which is not zero-sum). Wikipedia says it assumes all other players are also superrational, but I think in practice a successful variant of this strategy is to identify whether other players are superrational and avoid them if not. There is sometimes the option of converting existing self-interested rational players into superrational ones, but that is another subject entirely. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superrationality https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superrationality
- ColanR 7y ago
  It would be nice if we were all superrational, but that concept just explains away the entire problem of the prisoner's dillemma: the dilemma serves to highlight our mutual lack of trust, and superrationality simply says, 'what if we did trust each other'? Since the assumptions of superrationality would be naive and foolish for any of those prisoners to assume, it solves nothing.
  - notduncansmith 7y ago
    The idea is not to assume that everyone will be superrational or trustworthy at the beginning of the game. I believe it’s possible for the superrational players in a game to become the majority by expressing the superrational strategy in terms that will appeal to rationally self-interested players and demonstrating a superrational strategy working at some non-trivial scale.
    - ColanR 7y ago

YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago

Regarding how long it takes to travel between habitable systems- Cixin Liu, like most other hard sci-fi authors, and everybody else who thinks about those things, seems to assume that lightspeed is just as problematic for everyone else as it is for us humans. And yet we have no way to know that for sure. We have no idea what the average lifespan of an intelligent species is. It may just be that humans are particularly short-lived, among all the species in the galaxy, or the entire universe. If a species has a lifetime of a couple thousand years then interstellar travel, even at sub-light speeds, would be a lot more manageable than it is for us. Which to me, means we can relax a little about the risk of being destroyed by hostile aliens. We don't know what we don't know. Chances are, if they were going to destroy us, they would have already done so in the last million years or so. We're probably a lot less appealing, as a world, than we think we are. Perhaps the universe really hates salt water or oxygen atmospheres? Who's to say?

dmitrygr 7y ago
Not really, since DFT covers how fast information travels, not biological bodies. Lifespans aren't really part of the equation.
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
  That's not to do with Dark Forest Theory, but why do you say it's about how fast information travels? I take it as a theory about the outlook of technological civilisations with respect to each other. And yes, lifespans are important. Perhaps not in the books, but in the real world our science and technology advances at least some in every generation, as new scientists and technologists continue the work of their forebears. If human generations lasted a thousand years, it would perhaps take us a lot longer to make the same technological progress that it now only takes us a few years- if nothing else because the urgency of making progress would be reduced accordingly. Lifespans may also influence the actualy speed by which species form thoughts and communicate. Remember the Ents in The Lord of the Rings? A species that lived ten thousand years may take an Earth day to form a meaningful utterance. Technological advancement would take considerably longer for them than for us.
7y ago

jbattle 7y ago

If you are in the market for a good story touching similar topics, I thought Pandora's Star (first of a two-book series) was a great read (I bounced hard off the dark forest)

AgentME 7y ago

Personally, I think it's possible that abiogenesis is so rare that we are the only life within the observable universe. I don't know if that's more or less depressing.

mlcrypto 7y ago

I think with the rate of technological growth an intelligent species can improve to match another quicker than they can travel across space. Or perhaps even surpass an isolated travelling group.

013a 7y ago

Its an interesting theory. IMO: the difficulty of destroying a civilization is probably harder than communicating with them, and the advantages of keeping one around probably outweigh the advantages of killing them if you're already more technically advanced. A big point in TDF is that the speed of light limits our ability to communicate and understand other civilizations. But, by extension, weapons are also limited by that limit. Of course, maybe its possible to break the speed of light, but then communication could also break this limit. So, if you're a technologically advanced alien civilization and you become aware of humanity, you can send an Envoy or you can send some Nukes (or, of course, you can do nothing and watch). Just within the context of The Dark Forest Theory, there's practically no reason to send Nukes; at worst, you discover that humanity sucks and then you go ahead and nuke us. But life is probably special; maybe humanity would make great trading partners, maybe our brains function differently and can solve problems differently, maybe our natural proclivity for war would make us great allies, or maybe we'd make great slaves for the mines on the Vartoth 12 colony. All of these are options for a civilization a thousand years ahead of us; they can pick what they'd like, but none of them would classify as a result of The Dark Forest theory. There's also a possibility that maybe this hypothetical alien civilization tried that course of action in the past with another civilization, and they were friends for a while, helped each other, then fought in a bloody war, and now that civilization is distrustful so they destroy any young civilizations while they still easily can instead of even trying to come to terms. But that's not a Dark Forest theory situation; the Dark Forest Theory suggests that its natural for civilizations to want to kill each other off.

shmed 7y ago
Cixin book covers those aspect pretty well. One of the main element behind his version of the Dark Forest theory is something he calls the "Chain of suspicion". He argues that in a world were communication is limited by the speed of light, there's no way to establish a coherent dialog during first contact between two civilizations that would allow you to completely trust the other party. If you cannot trust that the other party will not destroy you given the chance, then the only way for you to be guaranteed not to be destroyed is to destroy them first. Even if both parties want peace, there's no way for you to convince the other party that you want peace without also giving them the time to destroy you. It's basically a game theory situation where trying to go for peaceful communication is way too risky, and the stake in play are the survival of your civilization. It's also implied that civilization that played the "peace" card will simply get eliminated the moment they encounter someone playing the "destroy" card, making you much less likely to actually encounter a peaceful civilization.

asark 7y ago

Oh boy, read Blindsight by Peter Watts. Kinda similar idea but more deeply dreadful. Messed me up for days. Now added to the pile labeled "Existentially Horrifying Crap I have to Not Think About to Make It Through Another Day".

davesque 7y ago
I've read Blindsight. It's a good one. Actually, the premise didn't bother me as much as the Three Body trilogy.
Freaky 7y ago
Link, along with much of his other work: https://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm https://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm

TeMPOraL 7y ago

Keep in mind that the dark forest theory hinges on two axioms that will likely be true for interstellar relations, while remain false for terrestrial ones. The two axioms are clearly stated in the books: 1) large communication delay, and 2) unpredictable technological jumps. The idea of the dark forest is that communication delay makes it difficult to build trust, and even if you start in superior position, it's possible for the other side to leap ahead of you technologically in the middle of those very long talks. A hypothetical Earth scenario would be an early industrial empire contacting an age-of-sail empire across the ocean via letters sent on whales, only to have the latter suddenly respond with an ICBM.

hannasanarion 7y ago

There are several reasons not to fear Dark Forest, chief among them, 1. Any species that develops a civilization capable of space travel must necessarily have evolved a strong cooperative spirit, and so is more unlikely to exercise homicide as a first resort. 2. If Dark Forest were true, and there was a murderous civilization that wanted to kill every other, we would all be dead already. You can make an entire galaxy's worth of relativistic kill missiles with the mass of a medium size asteroid. Sterilizing an entire galaxy to make sure that there is never a challenge to your rule can be accomplished in a few thousand years. Without needing any interstellar transit.

013a 7y ago
> Any species that develops a civilization capable of space travel must necessarily have evolved a strong cooperative spirit, and so is more unlikely to exercise homicide as a first resort. It's more accurate to say that HUMANITY would need a cooperative spirit in order to reach interstellar travel. I don't think it's accurate to assume that every species would need this. And, beyond that, TDF addresses this through the assertion that humanity, at multiple turns, didn't want to partake in this Dark Forest ideology; we wanted to make peace and friends, but the other more advanced civilizations weren't having it. So even if they had a cooperative spirit in the past, that doesn't preclude that the spirit sticks around when the destruction of your species is at stake. > If Dark Forest were true, and there was a murderous civilization that wanted to kill every other, we would all be dead already. You can make an entire galaxy's worth of relativistic kill missiles with the mass of a medium size asteroid. That's being awfully presumptive. Constructing even a galaxy's worth of kill missiles and launching them wildly like a shotgun isn't a strategy that any logical civilization would do. They'd end up destroying tons of empty planets that could have rich resource deposits or be habitable for future colonies, and they'd know that. Maybe there are illogical interstellar civilizations, but it stands to reason that they'd be More Rare than Logical ones, given it takes some form of logic to even accomplish space travel. Targeted strikes make more sense. So you have to have a Target. Humanity has been broadcasting RF for about 100 years. The milky way is 105,000 light years across; at best we're detectable by 0.095% of just our own galaxy. Maybe we haven't gotten one of these kill missiles because they haven't heard us yet. Or it's on its way. But all this requires life to common; the dark forest theory asserts that the reason life seems rare is because its common and everyone is just being quiet, but the other possibility is that life is, well, rare, and that's probably more likely. If life is rare, then the dark forest theory kinda goes out the window because the novelty of finding new life would invariably overwhelm a hypothetical risk that your species has never encountered before. IMO space contact & travel will have one of three outcomes. (1) The light speed limit can be worked around and none of this matters. (2) Life is Common, and the Dark Forest Theory is valid between species. (3) Life is Rare, humanity will colonize the stars, but a version of the Dark Forest Theory will begin to apply between human colonies separated by hundreds of lightyears. If its been 150 years since anyone in your colony has ever talked to Earth, then you're not really a colony anymore, but it's obvious to you that Earth won't see it that way. Your colony creates other colonies, and it takes earth hundreds of years to find out about them, if you decide to even tell them (because what do you owe earth?). So a thousand years pass and we've got dozens/hundreds of Tribes of humans who can't really talk to each other, most of whom don't even know of each other's existence, all developing culture, science, and weapons at independent rates. Really starts to look Dark Forest-esque, doesn't it?

jasaloo 7y ago

I hear you. Liu's outlook is deeply pessimistic. His obvious scientific background knowledge seems to be infused with a dash of western, neoliberal ideology-- that it's just dog-eat-dog out there, and we're all in it for our own self-interest. It's a bit ironic considering Liu is Chinese- wasn't China's Ming Dynasty the first to land on America in the early 1400s and historically demonstrate that exploration and discovery weren't necessarily accompanied by colonization/enslavement/destruction? That example gets held up a lot when mainstream historians spin the narrative that Colombus et al enslaved/raped/pillaged because that's just what societies do (while ignoring that it was the debt that the explorers owed to their financiers that drove most of that bad behavior).

westmeal 7y ago
>that Colombus et al enslaved/raped/pillaged because that's just what societies do (while ignoring that it was the debt that the explorers owed to their financiers that drove most of that bad behavior). Would you mind extrapolating on that a bit? In my totally 'unbiased' and 'truthful' American public school they never mentioned a word of this. I've always wanted to learn more about the real origins of this broken country.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Wait until you discover that the story behind Thanksgiving is pretty much a proper alien invasion sci-fi, featuring technologically superior invaders landing in ships, and promptly unleashing biological weapons on the local population.
  - westmeal 7y ago
    Well I knew that part. <sarcasm> They did it to promote freedom of course. </sarcasm>
- davejohnclark 7y ago
  I found the oatmeal's comic about Columbus enlightening (and disturbing) https://theoatmeal.com/comics/columbus_day https://theoatmeal.com/comics/columbus_day

underwater 7y ago

I figure that the age of global discovery and colonialism that happened here on Earth is a case study. Fixed resources, different cultures, huge differences in technology. It wasn't great, but also, many distinct cultures and peoples survived.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
Age of colonization meets zero of the two axioms underpinning "dark forest" - there was a possibility of establishing trust, and there was no possibility of sudden and unexpected technological leaps of the weaker side.