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Beyond “Fermi’s Paradox” XVI: What Is the “Dark Forest” Hypothesis?

• zabzonk 5y ago
  Note that this is just one in a series of articles - check out the links at the end.
• detritus 5y ago
  Huh. I could've sworn the name and concept of the Dark Forest hypothesis predated Liu Cixin's book. Obviously I have it completely arse-about-face - I thought he developed the series based upon the concept, not the other way around.
  • burntsushi 5y ago
    This blurb has some citation links that suggest it predated Liu Cixin's book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Communication_is_dangerous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Communication_is... My understanding was that Cixin's book gave it the name "Dark Forest," along with the eerie analogy.
    • detritus 5y ago
      Aye, the basic concept was covered in this a couple of decades ago - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killing_Star https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killing_Star (which has just about as dark a conclusion as Cixin's trilogy does), but it was the actual Dark Forest name specifcially I thought existed prior. Clearly I'd been unwittingly absorbing output from people who'd already read his books ahead of me! - ed oh! I see The Killing Star's mentioned in the original linked article. It's worth a read, if you haven't already.
    • andyjohnson0 5y ago
      Greg Bear's novels Forge of God (1987) and Anvil of Stars (1993) explore the same idea. They feel a little dated now but the first one in particular is still well worth a read imo.
      • detritus 5y ago
        Huh, I can't remember that [apparently fundamental] aspect of those two books. I'm going to see if I still have a copy of Forge of God on the bookshelf when I get home later, thanks. Last time I re-read one of his books (Eon, probably), I was quite bemused by the comically-simplistic 80s-esque Cold War perspective though!
        • andyjohnson0 5y ago
          [spoilers] In the first book the earth is attacked by Von Neumann probes launched preemptively by a civilization that wants to destroy potential agressors before they develop the technology to become a risk. The "benefactor" civilization group organises rescue and counter-assaults as a means of pan-civilisation trust building. The second book looks at the ethics of destroying a civ based on decisions it may have taken in its distant past. Anvil has something of a young adult style, but the game theory and strategy elements are quite satisfying I think.
• Mordisquitos 5y ago
  Am I missing something, or is this article very narrowly missing the most damning criticism of the Dark Forest hypothesis according to the article's own logic? The first paragraph of the “Criticism” section says: > Overall, the Dark Forest Hypothesis has an internal logic and consistency that makes it an appealing (if somewhat somber) potential resolution to Fermi’s age-old question. Unfortunately, it also suffers from an inherent flaw that is capable of unraveling the whole thing. Like many other Fermi-related hypotheses, it only takes one exception to this rule to prove it wrong. Given this, I thought it was going to follow on to point out that we are the exception to the rule, but instead it goes on to talk about malevolent exceptions. But, as the article mentioned earlier, we have made many active attempts to communicate our existence to other hypothetical civilisations, and we make no effort in obscuring our radio signals. Is it possible that other civilisations follow the “Dark Forest” principle? Of course it is! But why would we happen to be the only civilisation that doesn't really worry about getting seen? The possibility that we are not alone and we are the only ones trying to communicate sounds even more fanciful and anthropocentric than any of the alternatives.
  • zabzonk 5y ago
    > The possibility that we are not alone and we are the only ones trying to communicate sounds even more fanciful and anthropocentric than any of the alternatives. Well, yes. But it could also make the (possibly) few blithe spirits who do want communicate be in general much further away, and thus much harder to communicate with.
  • HotHotLava 5y ago
    Wouldn't the counterpoint be that those civilizations like us that do not obscure their location are quickly eradicated by others in the forest? So the forest also acts like a filter for those that are not careful enough.
    • Causality1 5y ago
      I don't see there being that big a technological leap between annihilating another civilization and starting a colony in another star system. If you're the type of civilization that would be interested in killing a competitor off you're probably the type that's going to colonize and fill the entire galaxy in a few million years. We evolved, so that hasn't happened, in a galaxy thirteen billion years old. I suspect we're alone.
• overthemoon 5y ago
  Call me naive, but the fact that we're still sending messages makes me happy in spite of the grim calculations.
• NiceWayToDoIT 5y ago
  In the near future it is more likely we will wipe out ourselves either due to Nuclear War, Global Warming, rogue AI or similar, than some hostile alien civilization will get us. It seems that we are those hostile aliens for ourselves.
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • EamonnMR 5y ago
    The universe could still be a dark forest of AIs ready to smash each other as soon as they spot each other.
  • yreg 5y ago
    Do you think that most/all civilisations end this way before becoming spacefarers?
    • NiceWayToDoIT 5y ago
      I don't think, or rather I hope there are civilization that as a part of their evolution had cooperation, sharing, exploration and innovation embedded as main and prevalent strategies of survival and thriving. I would like to think that there is as in magic fairy tails of old, civilization where good prevails. Where leaders (or what ever mechanism of decision they have) and those in power - are not easily corrupted as here.
      • hnbad 5y ago
        You're describing humans. Up to the point where you hope their leaders aren't corruptible. The problem with humans mostly comes down to centralization. We're an extremely cooperative species until we're put in an environment that promotes competition and punishes cooperation. Centralization of power is one such environment. And it's very hard to undo at this point.
        • NiceWayToDoIT 5y ago
• Archelaos 5y ago
  What makes the dark forest hypothesis not so conving to me is that it has the presupposition that it is indeed possible to hide. An advanced civilization close to us that is surveying the sky for signs of life would have very likely identified earth as a very promissing candidate due to the presence of methane and oxygen in its atmosphere at the same time. So our star system would have long been under surveillance, before we had the chance to develop a technology that would reliable disguise our presence. If such a technology is possible at all, only the very first advanced civilization had the ability to hide from all others. And only if they were able to develop it before any other civilization had been able to track them. To some extent it might nevertheless be a reasonable strategy to keep as quiet as possible. But this strategy is less and less useful for the latecomers. If they were already tracked by a multitude of other advanced civilization they would hardly benefit from keeping quiet. Unless they (wrongly) think that they are an early advanced civilization. However, if a couple of these civilizations start to openly seek contact to others, what can the hidden ones do? If a hidden civilization starts to fight one of these latecomers, it would need to leave its cover and make itself known to all other civilizations in its vicinity. If it follows the dark forst hypothesis, it could only do so, when it is sure that it is the only dangerous civilization in its forest. This leaves me with the following alternatives: - The forest is dark, because there is only one civilization out there that is very capable in hiding and has the ability to exterminate any latecomer efficiently and without traces. - The forest appears dark, because it is thinly populated and we just have not looked enough for the others. - We are the only ones in our cosmic vicinity.
  • jerf 5y ago
    I agree with your logic but would add one more thing to it: There is no compelling reason to wait until a planet conclusively proves it has intelligence on it to nuke it into oblivion with a kinetic kill projectile. You don't really know how long it will take for an intelligent species that could compete with you to arise. Humans have moved pretty quickly on cosmological scales, there's no particular reason to believe we're moving at the max speed and a lot of reason to think otherwise. Compared to the amount of energy you can obtain over cosmological time periods, the expenditure of a kinetic kill projectile is nothing. In fact, if you don't mind waiting a bit, it can be almost trivial. All you have to do is basically get a factory to the target system; it can use local resources to build a kinetic kill projectile efficiently out of a big, local hunks of rock and local hydrogen. Launching near-light-speed projectiles from lightyears away is the emergency "oh crap! They're smart already!" option. Killing a planet that only has dinosaurs on it is dead easy for these hypothetical intelligences and there's little reason to believe they wouldn't. So I think the dark forest hypothesis falls down on the fact that not only has Earth been broadcasting loud and clear to the stars that it has life on it ever since the Great Oxygenation Catastrophe, which was somewhere around 2 to 2.5 billion years ago, the Dark Forest theory implies that any surrounding intelligence that arose and was capable of seeing Earth on that time frame should have hit it. That has not happened. And 2.5 billion years is actually significant even on cosmological time scales. (Also, no, the dinosaur asteroid or other events were not kill projectiles. If an alien intelligence is going to kill-projectile Earth there's no compelling reason to just sort of inconvenience life... it's going to eliminate it. Hypothesizing a race capable of launching projectiles but being too stupid to realize it wouldn't do the job is too precise a level of incompetence to believe in. As they say, there's no kill like overkill.) Fun science fiction premise... not a solution to the Fermi paradox.
• InsomniacL 5y ago
  I have a theory that intelligence isn't particularly rare however the rate of development may be. It has long been alluded to in Sci-Fi that humanity's rate of development is fast (Humans vs Vulcans, Halo universe, etc). I imagine that one of the great barriers is that a civilisation with a lower rate of development may stuck in an industrial type era unable to progress before doing irreparable damage to their environment/eco-structure. Does anyone know if this theory has a name?
  • yarg 5y ago
    I think that the biggest issue's gonna be a time gap. Life shows up and spends a long time doing not much, then exponential growth kicks in, life gets smart and suicides out in 100000 years or so. The rate of intelligent and communicating planets is going to be low enough; the chance of two such planets within a distance that allowed for bidirectional communication existing simultaneously is dwindling - and even then they'll be at different points in their growth curves. If ever we meet aliens they'll be cavemen or gods.
    • chadwittman 5y ago
      Love that quote: "If ever we meet aliens they'll be cavemen or gods."
  • qayxc 5y ago
    It's one of the Great Filters [0] - I don't know if it has a catchy name. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
  • yreg 5y ago
    To be fair, even with our (fast paced?) rate of development we have a hard time to tech fast enough to outrun the industrial damage. On the other hand, only total extinction might be truly "irreparable".
    • hnbad 5y ago
      It's also not correct to claim we are no longer "stuck in an industrial type era" just because most of the Western world is post-industrial. We largely offloaded the industrial era into the third world. You don't see kids in coal mines in England but you do see people dipping circuit boards in vats of acid without protective equipment in India. We may be investing in renewables in the US and Europe but we still flood parts of Africa and the Sea with crude oil and all that lithium doesn't mine itself. The "Industrial Age" may be over but the damage is still being done and all the shiny new tech is largely window dressing. It's also not yet clear that the shiny post-Industrialism can easily exist without the rest of the world perpetually playing "catch-up" (i.e. whether it really is catching up) as our quality of living heavily hinges on underpaying other countries for resources and labor.
• deleted 5y ago
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• zhynn 5y ago
  A group collaborating will have better chance of survival than an individual. The upside of working with your neighbors outweighs the benefit of destroying them.
  • qayxc 5y ago
    That might be true for individuals of the same (social) species, but I don't think that's a given in the context of technological civilisations competing for resources.
  • chadwittman 5y ago
    Tell that to the species we've eradicated while pursuing our goals.
    • unchocked 5y ago
      Exactly. Consider the prevalence of wolves vs. dogs.
  • dfilppi 5y ago
    Perhaps. But we're not talking about individuals.
• raldi 5y ago
  Note that the Arecibo message diagram in this article is wrong; the image is flipped left-right from how it’s typically displayed, so when the opening is described as “the numbers 1-10 from left to right”, it’s actually from right to left.
• rnhmjoj 5y ago
  > In other words, the finite nature of resources will ultimately pit one civilization against another as they all struggle to sustain their growth. I'm not sure this constraint is so strict to force a strong competition for survival, given how vast the universe is. It seems to me this projecting our earth-bound mentality of limited resources to a whole different scale, where it may not really apply.
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • dragonelite 5y ago
    Once we are earth loose we will be solar bound and human factions will fight for solar resources/domination.
    • pharke 5y ago
      During star formation up to half of the matter can be rejected. During planetary formation a lot of fairly large bodies will be ejected, think moon size, along with a lot of smaller stuff too. Interstellar space probably has a lot more to offer than we generally think.
  • mikro2nd 5y ago
    Precisely. IMHO any civilisation capable of interstellar travel (at any speed) has solved all necessary questions/problems of resource/energy acquisition and control and has no need to plunder the resources of others.
  • riffraff 5y ago
    that is what I thought when I read the three-body problem. If you can manipulate space-time at the levels exposed in the book you can trivially build orbitals that will host trillions of beings and live in a post-scarcity society for millennia, after which your society is likely to disappear waaay before you run out of space and resources.
    • 5y ago
• formerly_proven 5y ago
  This paper discusses the "dark forest" idea and concludes that it is very unlikely to be true: https://arxiv.org/abs/1302.0606 https://arxiv.org/abs/1302.0606 MAD with Aliens? Interstellar deterrence and its implications
  • AmericanChopper 5y ago
    The “MAD with Aliens” portion of the book isn’t particularly relevant to the dark forest theory it postulates. The MAD in the book only applies to a conflict between earth and another nearby non-technologically-sophisticated alien spices, who are competing for earths resources in order to survive. The conflict is resolved by both us and them advancing beyond the need for earth, and becoming full dark forest participants.
• tener 5y ago
  The Dark Forest makes so many (explicit and implicit) assumptions it starts to feel extremely dodgy. There are also falacious arguments embedded within it which fail to imagine numerous possible scenarios simply by following "tried and true" paths copy-pasted from sci-fi novels. TLDR: The forest analogy fails because civilizations are not singular entities (like animals are) but rather complex structures which can merge and evolve. The supposed technological and societal barriers can very well not materialize in which case the theory falls apart. Details below... > Suppose a vast number of civilizations distributed throughout the universe, on the order of the number of observable stars. Lots and lots of them. "On the order of observable stars" is extremely wide. Perhaps there is one life-bearing planet per galaxy. Perhaps there is one per 100 stars. Those are vastly different outcomes. > Survival is the primary need of civilizations. On individual level humans have no hope to "survive" (i.e. live immortal lives). Yet despite that fact we don't commit mass suicide. The "primary need" of human civilization to survive is merely emergent behaviour due to other factors. Perhaps advanced civilizations would be happy to achieve some grand undertaking and then perish. Now for the second "axiom": > Civilizations continuously grow and expand ... Expansionist civilizations with unlimited space certainly can do that. But does it really bring any benefits? The more complex the societal structure, the harder it is to change. Perhaps there is a critical mass above which it becomes detrimental to multiply beyond and all "sane" civilizations will stay below it. > ... , but the total matter in the universe remains constant. It may be finite, but perhaps most of it will be "stranded" anyway - so far away that access to it becomes non-feasible anyway. > ... In other words, the finite nature of resources will ultimately pit one civilization against another as they all struggle to sustain their growth. This part I believe is the biggest logical fallacy of all. What is civilization if not a set of societal structures? And we can easily imagine merging of two such structures - they are already composed of other structures; what is just another level of complexity? If we merge two "competing" civilizations suddenly we have a single larger civilization... supposedly without conflict? The amount of resources is the same as before but not we only have a single contender: the merged civilization. This paradox stems from the failure to account for the internal race for resources inherent to all civilizations. The civilizations are not unitary entities. Treating them as such and assuming blind dedication to it from its members is short sighted and lacking imagination. > If open communication exists, then conflict could be averted and tensions diffused. But given the time-lag involved with any attempt at interstellar communications, civilizations that are light-years apart are unlikely to resolve their fears quickly. Sufficiently advanced civs can simply send AI envoys or do mind upload of their representatives with the speed of light. This makes the learning of language, communication etc. very quick. Perhaps FTL communication can exist too. Etc. etc. Endless ways to break another assumption. > By the time they arrived, the attacker’s technology would not have matured one bit, while the defender would have decades or centuries to progress. It may be possible that advanced technology does not progress as fast as it does now. See our experiments with fusion and particle accelerators. What used to be easy now takes years and billions in funding. Perhaps going at some point getting any kind of advancement will be nearly impossible and all technology will become "old". In this scenario the centuries of technological advancement are moot. OTOH potential gains from trade from foreign civs is very real possibility.
• snowwrestler 5y ago
  To me the most likely back of the napkin answer to the Fermi paradox is that aliens are elsewhere in time. The Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 light years across but about 13.5 billion years old. So it’s like 135,000x deeper in the time direction than the distance direction. We’re in the light cones of all the stars we can see, and as far as we know, we can’t get out of them. If a civilization ended even 100 years earlier than our equivalent “now” in their light cone, we wouldn’t have seen them. And if they became visible even 1 year later than our equivalent “now,” we would not have seen them yet. We’re proceeding through time at 1 sec per sec and basically if we’re going to see an alien civilization at this point, I think the only way would be if one happens to achieve the necessary technology to be detected while we’re looking at it. If there were existing civilizations that were easy to see, we would have seen them already. I think it’s far more likely we will confirm alien life first by indirect means, for example spectroscopically detecting free atmospheric oxygen on an exoplanet, or finding tiny fossils on Mars.
  • kadoban 5y ago
    If true, that ends up meaning that alien civilizations are short-lived, right? That doesn't bode well for us.
    • hashkb 5y ago
      We're on a steady path to extinction, no doubt.
      • throw1234651234 5y ago
        Generalization. Would be interesting discussion with details. Pop is growing. What's your concern - global warming, fertility rates, pollution, nuclear arsenal, running out of resources? Doesn't seem like we are doing that badly and that pop can't drop if get below renewable resource level or adjust to new ways of making energy/food, etc. Does seem likely that on an extremely long time scale, we need to get multi-planetary, which is "realistic" if we give a reasonable time frame of, say, 10,000 years. As far as the sun dying, that's beyond even parent point's timeline. This is very things start to get questionable if we never get to even .1 of c (e.g. Project Orion "realistic" estimates). Alpha Centauri is relative close at 4.something ly, but other "potentially habitable/useful" star systems are way out there.
• baron_harkonnen 5y ago
  Given that most complex life is probably carbon based, and given the one planet with complex life we can observe, my guess is that most complex life runs into one of two paths: 1. You don't have enough easily accessible hydrocarbons in ground to build a civilization advanced enough to even get you into space. 2. You do have enough hydrocarbons which leads to inevitable overshoot, and accompanying collapse before you ever get close to figuring out interstellar travel. Exponential growth patterns lead you to either exhaust the carrying capacity of your planet, or you end up warming your planet too much and die off (or a little bit of both). We're a pretty good case study between 1 and 2. Right now we're in a race to see if we can exhaust our hydrocarbons or overheat our planet first, there seems to be no realistic alternative (plenty of nice fantasy ones though). If we had reached peak oil in the early 80s (or sooner) we would have likely avoided catastrophic climate change, but would have started a major population shift downwards towards 1 billion, where we would have likely stabilized but with no major technical progress (technological progress is largely a function of energy). We didn't though, so now it seems like we are going to continue to increase the rate we combust hydrocarbons until we create an unlivable planet (at least for us). A few billionaires are making some cool toys, but we don't seem to be able to survive until we're anywhere near interstellar travel.
• jlpom 5y ago
  Maybe I lack imagination, but I can only see as a constant selective pressure leading to a specie with interstellar space plans (we still haven't) the biped-on land evolution that took place on earth, and I can only see earth-like planet hosting avanced life.
• PicassoCTs 5y ago
  Even with a dark forest, one would have territorial threats announced to the rest of the world. Examples: Blow a star up and make it project a unique territorial mark. Make a diamond lighttower, beaming threatening messages to probable green zones, to lure unsuspecting enemies in.
• Symmetry 5y ago
  One paper on the Fermi Paradox I want to plug is this one by Sandberg, Drexler, and Ord. https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404 https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404 Most people when doing the Fermi estimate for the number of civilizations in the Galaxy use numbers that tend to result in a lot of them. But different people use very different numbers in different steps. If you look at the ranges of values that different people assign to the different terms then suddenly it doesn't seem very unlikely that intelligent civilizations could be rare.
• abecedarius 5y ago
  > This particular proposed resolution to Fermi’s Paradox question is a very recent addition. It takes its name from the novel The Dark Forest The same idea was in Gregory Benford's novel In the Ocean of Night in the 1970s.
• shadowlight 5y ago
  Fermis paradox is garbage. He can't make such a statement about probability when the circumstances aren't even known. We don't even know how life forms so how can we even know what the probability of it forming is? How do we know that probability is high enough that it is very likely to occur? The chances of it occurring could be incredibly low.
• cletus 5y ago
  Anyone interested in this topic should spend some time on Isaac Arthur's series about the Fermi Paradox. There's an episode on this called Hidden Aliens [1]. It's a flawed idea. If you assume that we live in an FTL universe subject to the laws of thermodynamics (as I do), mass and energy (being basically the same thing as we know) are the ultimate limiting factor. This basically means bigger is better. Remember such a civilization is likely thinking on time lines where a trillion years is a blink of an eye. So how will a spacefaring civilization evolve? Likely into a Dyson swarm for three primary reasons: 1. It requires no new physics. It's essentially an engineering problem that only requires materials as complex as stainless steel and energy tech no more complex than solar power. If you get better tech (eg fusion, graphene for construction) this outcome becomes more likely not less; 2. Orbitals are a highly efficient way of creating living area. A full Dyson swarm around our Sun would likely consume <1% of the mass of Mercury, for example; and 3. The energy output of the Sun is essentially "free". A full Dyson swarm makes you a Kardashev-2 (K2) civilization. On the Carl Sagan scale, that means you're consuming ~10^26 Watts of power. And that's just for one Sun. Now consider: 1. Such a civilization is capable of sterilizing the galaxy in 100,000 years if they choose to; 2. There's really no hiding from such a civilization; 3. There's really no hiding a Dyson swarm from a Dyson swarm from an advanced civilization due to the IR signature it would produce. This has nothing to do with say radio communications. Remember with the Fermi Paradox you don't have to establish what the average civilization does. Say there are 5 spacefaring civilizations in the Milky Way. What are the odds that all of them hide? Now imagine there are 100. The odds of them all hiding are much lower. And it only really takes one who decides to build Dyson Swarms and expand beyond their star to be detectable. So I can imagine a splinter of a civilization decides to "hide". A good example of this would be if fusion becomes viable. One could sink habitats into Neptune, which is not particularly dense, and probably live there undisturbed and unfound for eons is quite high. That's probably more hidden than, say, trying to hide between stars. It's just not likely that as the number of civilizations increases that all of them go that route. My view is that spacefaring life is just quite rare. We may well be the only one within out light cone within the Milky Way. Why that is is an interesting topic. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEBn8bc0k-I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEBn8bc0k-I
• markus_zhang 5y ago
  Although I very much enjoy the novel, I think Vlad's theory is more likely to be true: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9kbcGfX35M&ab_channel=PeterMulvey https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9kbcGfX35M&ab_channel=Peter... As of myself, I also have a theory why it's difficult for civilizations to see each other: 1 - You need very advanced technology to break through the barrier of speed of light (worm hole, someone?) 2 - Such advanced technology will need a long, continuous period of peace and prosperity for researchers to figure it out. Wars are "useful" in certain way but not always. 3 - Intelligent beings are in general greedy (regardless of their biological construction) and they want to take as much resources as possible. 4 - The resources in the universe is unlimited, but the resources that one civilization can obtain is very limited. 5 - Combine 3 & 4, you can probably figure out that the "long, continuous period of peace and prosperity" is very much unlikely and very likely to be broken by wars within the civilizations. 6 - The more advanced the civilizations they are, more likely those wars will wipe them out completely. 7 - Even if they managed to avoid those destructive wars (unlikely already). Another factor we need to consider is the number of smart scientists and technicians that can figure out and implement those fancy technologies. 8 - Yeah for sure, one man, such as Newton or Einstein can leap forward our understanding of the universe. 9 - But you need a very large of population to "grow" one Newton or Einstein. 10 - Go back to 3 & 4, now tell me, even if they manage to avoid wars, can they also avoid creating a caste and shut everyone else out of a prosperous life? I mean look at ourselves. 11 - If such thing happens (eventually), there is not going to be enough population to create a Newton or Einstein. And science/tech eventually just don't go forward. 12 - Combine 6 & 11, it is really very, very unlikely for any civilization to develop advanced technology to travel beyond the speed of light, which also means we don't get to see them (very often).
• godshatter 5y ago
  I wonder if we're making too many assumptions about how civilizations would live and spread. I've always wondered why our species puts so much focus on planetary colonization instead of building smaller habitats. We seem to assume we'll terraform Mars, maybe build habitats on some of the Jovian moons, then jump to the next star. It seems more logical to me to take the ISS and iterate on it, building larger habitats and learning how to live in them. There could be trillions of habitats out there and we'd never know it. From small low-orbit stations orbiting home planets to larger complexes orbiting their stars instead up to generation ships moving to the next star to mine for more resources or to build more ships due to population limits being hit. Once you've perfected the building of habitats that are large enough and are tailored to your species specific needs, why mess around with planets that can kill you in so many different ways? Maybe the reason we don't see anyone is because we can't resolve even very large habitats at light-year distances and the reason we don't run into them is because we don't have anything they can't get somewhere that isn't already inhabited. Perhaps they avoid inhabited systems because of the dangers involved.
  • Coriolis3 5y ago
    I agree, for an advanced species space habitats seem far superior to planets. A constant supply of free energy (solar), easy access to endless metal (asteroids), no earthquakes/tsunamis/volcanos/wildfires. If we're talking far-future, to me the Culture and their Orbitals represent the ideal utopian endpoint for humanity.
  • unchocked 5y ago
    The O’Neillian movement is predicated on the answer to “is a planetary surface the best place for an expanding technological civilization” being no. Long run, this view will be most influential.
• jmull 5y ago
  I love that series -- just an incredible, imaginative, unique perspective -- but the dark forest hypothesis just doesn't make sense. It's orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude less energy to communicate with (including obscuring your origin, if you want) than destroy a civilization. And communication has potential benefits (cooperation) that destruction does not. Civilizations that communicated would very quickly and easily out-compete/out-advance civilizations that did not. "Malevolent" civilizations would inevitably run into more advanced cooperating civs sooner or later and be checked, either learning to cooperate themselves or lose. Put another way, the assumptions used to build out the hypothesis, "Chains of Suspicion" and "Technological Explosion", don't make sense either. "Chains of Suspicion" assumes civilizations cannot communicate, yet the dark forest hypothesis assume civilizations can destroy each other. That's a contradiction. If you can physically interact, you can communicate (and as I pointed out before, with much, much less energy/resources than it takes to destroy). And "Technological Explosion", as written in the book, assume exponential technological growth could occur at any point, which seems to be nonsense to me. Any kind of exponential growth necessarily depends on a medium primed with the resources for that growth and stops when the resources are expended (which is never all that long, given the nature of exponential growth). I cringed every time this idea was forced into the forefront of the books. They are such great and imaginative books, I don't mind at all that not all the ideas really pan out, but it was a little hard to stomach every time the plot turned on this weak idea.
  • obedm 5y ago
    I think dark forest is the best explanation so far. If what you say is true, it should've been true for earlier human civilizations too. Why didn't the Chinese and Japanese civilizations unite to conquer others? Why didn't the Mongols unite with whoever else to conquer, instead of Genghis Khan doing it all with a bunch of Mongols in horses? Human civilization is a dark forest that only changed with global trade. The communication challenge is language and culture. And civilizations have always been technologically distinct, with the more powerful one almost always conquering. With interstellar communication and technological advance it would be orders of magnitude higher stakes.
    • 5y ago
• taneq 5y ago
  Just started book 3, I'm clearly being Baader-Meinhoff'd. I think the basic logic of preemptive first strikes being the universally safest response is sound, assuming the current trend continues that a species' offensive capabilities will grow faster than its defensive capabilities as it improves its mastery of physics. Even if in the short term, some civilizations are inherently friendly and some are inherently hostile, in the long term the chances of any randomly selected civilization being hostile approaches unity due to survivor bias. It's pretty similar to one of my favourite quotes, from Peter Watts: > Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didn't have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials— but if there are any, they said, they're not just going to be smart. They're going to be mean. (I'm admittedly finding a lot of the other plot points of the series, especially around how people respond to adversity, less convincing though.)
• nestorD 5y ago
  My favorite answer to Fermi's Paradox is a paper (which I do not have on hand) showing that it can be explained by the approximation error in doing a raw product of probabilities. If, instead of doing a product of the probability of each event, you actually take the various distributions into account (nowadays you can easily test a wide variety of distributions with monte carlo methods) then, the probability of getting into contact with another life in the universe becomes vanishingly small.
  • pdimitar 5y ago
    What would that be a "favorite" answer? It's just one of the hypotheses. Drake's equation and how exactly must it be applied has been fiercely discussed for decades. Unless, of course, saying it's your "favorite" is your way of saying "I like to believe in this one hypothesis".
    • nestorD 5y ago
      It removes the paradox without requiring additional hypotheses, just refining the math. That makes it the most convincing solution to the paradox for me.
      • pdimitar 5y ago
        I disagree. It looks like you simply choose to believe one of the hypotheses. Or need I mention other areas of life where choosing one hypothesis eliminates all others? Hint: it's the "R" word. ;)
  • taejo 5y ago
    I guess this is the paper you're talking about: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404 https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • jeremysalwen 5y ago
    My interpretation of that paper is that it is saying "We don't have hard enough bounds on the parameters of the Drake Equation, so one (or more) of the parameters could be much lower than expected". But without specifying which parameters are much lower than expected, the paper is just saying "our current understanding/uncertainty about the universe is consistent with someone solving the drake equation in some unknown way at a later point in the future". Which I don't think is actually a solution. The real question we are interested in is which parameters are lower than expected and why.
• lowbloodsugar 5y ago
  Peter F. Hamilton's Salvation series [1] has a similar take, but also provides a possible out: don't live on planets or near stars. In Liu Cixin's books (which I loved btw, also SPOILERS), the level of technology involves weapons that can destroy solar systems. It seems reasonable that such civilizations could live between the stars. I don't agree that Civilizations need to expand without limit. Even humans, having reached a certain level of comfort, have difficulty reproducing enough to maintain population levels. Conceivably then, civilizations will reach a comfortable size and then stop. Certainly they might be willing to stop when they reach a "boundary". The problems with enemies is that, unless we are of sufficient size, we might bump into an enemy that is, say, twice our size, and therefore can thump us in a war. However, novels by Iain M. Banks [2] and Neal Asher [3] provide insight here (Culture vs Iridans, Polity vs Prador). The issue is not how many weapons you have (W), or even how many weapons you can make (dW/dt), but how fast you can make weapons factories (d2w/dt2) (etc). And ultimately, organics simply have absolutely no chance against AI: in both Culture and Polity, the AI runs the war for humans. On the matter of technological breakout, the entire Lensman series has an underlying theme of the back-and-forth of new weapon vs it's mitigation [5]. Liu makes a good case that such back-and-forth is unrealistic: in the time it takes light to travel from the enemy's star to yours, they might go from poking each other with pointy sticks to fusion bombs, or from fusion bombs to star-killers. But there is a simple mitigation there too: don't hang around stars. Or rather, think of stars as Navies think of islands: nice place to refuel and R&R, but don't put all your ships in one harbor. Ultimately, if survival is the goal, then Salvation or We are Bob [4] are the way to go: expand as much as possible. Just be willing to defer to existing civilizations. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34068552-salvation https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34068552-salvation [2] https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5807106.Iain_M_Banks https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5807106.Iain_M_Banks [3] https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/56353.Neal_Asher https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/56353.Neal_Asher [4] https://www.amazon.com/Are-Legion-Bob-Bobiverse-Book-ebook/dp/B01LWAESYQ https://www.amazon.com/Are-Legion-Bob-Bobiverse-Book-ebook/d... [5] https://www.goodreads.com/series/49225-lensman https://www.goodreads.com/series/49225-lensman
• pdimitar 5y ago
  > In other words, the finite nature of resources will ultimately pit one civilization against another as they all struggle to sustain their growth. I absolutely can't see how that follows exactly. The Universe, hell, just our own galaxy, is pretty damn big. The time and fuel it could cost you to get to the adjacent civilization and steal its resources might be way too much compared to, you know, invest in some cosmic mining operations where you can get a Bonanza of resources just by poking into your local asteroid cluster. To address the rest of this argument, a civilization might be as malicious as they come and they could still be very powerless and can't just go terrorize somebody.
• pklausler 5y ago
  Over enough time and space, probabilities other than 0 and 1 become rare; i.e., things that are not impossible become inevitable. Bracewell-von Neumann self-replicating interstellar probes are not impossible. I think we're not too far away from being able to create and launch them ourselves, if we survive. Has any technical civilization in galactic history launched a BvN probe? It only takes one launch of a BvN probe to saturate the galaxy for all time afterwards, esp. if they can mutate and compete. But we don't see any such probe activity, and I think that we would, if they were busily mining asteroids and frantically manufacturing copies of themselves. So I think we can tentatively assume that nobody has launched one yet in our galaxy; and explaining that possibility leads to some unsettling consequences.
  • captainmuon 5y ago
    I'm not convinced von Neuman probes are actually feasible. For one, you'd need general artificial intelligence because the task of setting up a production line on a different planet is incredibly complicated. Then you'd need to move a lot of mass across star systems. Tiny replicators are not going to survive the harsh conditions on other planets, and then find and extract all the resources you need to build bigger machines. I'm not sure what the minimum feasible probe would be, but I guess a lot bigger than everything we can send into space now. Finally, I'm not sure interstellar flight is realistically possible. Especially if you are not sending solar sails or rice corn sized probes, but a payload the size of an oil rig or bigger.
    • pklausler 5y ago
      I don't think that planets are good targets; you'd want to use asteroids for raw materials and stay in microgravity, no? But yes, if BvN probes are impossible at any level of technology, that would explain their apparent absence.
• MarkLowenstein 5y ago
  My theory, and I don't know why this is never mentioned: all societies eventually retreat into inhabiting a purely simulated universe (Matrix/Holodeck), where EM emissions and space exploration become a thing of the past, and the society just "goes dark". The dynamic that guarantees it is that great stuff is almost always cheaper/easier to experience via simulation than in reality. We already know that TV plots and video game situations are endlessly more entertaining than our real-world lives. Arranging computing power that can fool our eyes and ears is way easier than mustering the materials to get ourselves into space.
  • yoz-y 5y ago
    Isaac Arthur mentions this several times. But the counter argument is that with advanced civilisations having gigantic populations, it is hard to imagine that a “small” group counting in quadrillions wouldn’t prefer to live in the real world.
• hindsightbias 5y ago
  For those that believe that intelligent life should be more common within the Milky Way, some author had a good response to that: It only takes one xenophobic von-Nuemann capable civilization to ruin the party for everyone.
• elihu 5y ago
  Something to consider about "Dark Forest" scenarios is that there's no particular reason to think that a given species would be more benevolent towards its own kind than some other alien species. If you think about how humans behave, I think if we ever get to the point where we're a multi-planetary species, those two planets aren't going to trust each other very much. If we expand to other star systems with years of communication lag, it'll be even worse -- both societies are going to be constantly expecting a hail of nukes to fall out of the sky one of these days, unless there's either a plausible defense against such an attack, or a reasonable expectation of mutually-assured destruction.
• overgard 5y ago
  I'm not an expert by any means, but I guess I've always felt skeptical that if alien civilizations existed we would have the means to detect them. I mean, we can barely detect planets, if we look carefully. Unless one of these civilizations really wanted to make itself seen by desperately spending a ton of energy, it seems like they would mostly be invisible just because we don't have sensitive enough means to detect them. I personally find it impossibly unlikely that we are the only intelligent life. It's just, there's nothing in the universe that doesn't repeat. And there is a lot of space for us to repeat. Our solar system likely isn't all that special, so I just don't get that we could be the only thing that appeared in all the conceivable universe. It also might be the case that we're not alone, but that life is just so hard to get going that maybe the nearest civilization is galaxies apart from us. In that sense I suppose we really are "alone" for any practical purpose.
• rvba 5y ago
  I dont understand why politicians allow those active messages sent - most people probably dont want them.
• finwhat 5y ago
  Meanwhile, reading this on planet earth every few paragraphs is interrupted by an ad for a groin / body hair trimmer. Honestly, it puts things into perspective when considering the terror of the 'dark forest' hypothesis. If intelligent life is anything like us, they are just as stuck on the prosaic (arguing amongst themselves about invasive ads) as they are on the profound (ending other civs).
• stevenalowe 5y ago
  well written, but the "creepy neighbors" hypothesis explains all without paradox: we are just not that interesting or threatening yet. If we make enough noise or try to leave, they'll eventually call the cops on us.