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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?

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.
  - syops 5y ago
    The energy requirement to send a life destroying device to a far away planet might be much less than the energy requirement to send colonizers. That may be the big leap so to speak.
    - Causality1 5y ago
      If you can send a weapon you can probably send some kind of Von Neumann probe with genetic and cultural data to create a seed colony
      - syops 5y ago
        I don’t see why that necessarily follows and I don’t see why one would want to send such a probe. It does nothing for me if I can send a probe to start humanity on another planet when I have no connection to said planet and won’t be able to see the result or have a connection to that colony. In the dark forest view one would never seed such a colony as they will quickly become competitors.
        Causality1 5y ago
        You don't think species chauvinism is a thing? If I had to lose an interstellar war and be wiped out I'd prefer it to be a human offshoot doing it. At least that way my species survives.
        syops 5y ago
        In the dark forest view it’s best to just kill off the opponent and not replace them with a potential new opponent.
      - wonderwonder 5y ago
        Not really, the weapon does not need to slow down. If its just a big enough chunk of rock that is aimed at a planet and it speeds up the whole way reaching some impressive fraction of the speed of light before impact, the only hard part is the math to aim it. We are reasonably close now to being able to strap some engines on an chunk of rock and send it on its way randomly in one direction. We are very far away from being able to start a seed colony in another solar system.
- Mordisquitos 5y ago
  I don't see that as a counterpoint, but more of a post hoc theory. How could the eradicators detect and destroy their victims before we detected any signal at all from the victims? And why haven't the eradicators come for us yet? Of course, this could always be explained by the distances involved and the limitations of light speed, but that would make the Dark Forest hypothesis redundant as an explanation as to why we haven't yet detected any alien civilisation(s).
  - saiya-jin 5y ago
    I think what would explain this is our very limited timespan when we started listening to universe. There might have been 10 strong signals in last 2000 years, but last one could have happened around the time US declared independence. And 2000 years is nothing timewise on scale of universe. Plus we talk about signal that can maybe travel few hundred / a thousand light years before they blend into galactic and intergalactic noise.
  - yreg 5y ago
    >How could the eradicators detect and destroy their victims before we detected any signal at all from the victims? Even if they destroy them within say a thousand years, then at any given time there would be only few civilizations at the right age to be broadcasting. And not very loud at that. We listen only to a miniscule portion of the Galaxy. IMO, Fermi's question shouldn't be "Why can't we hear the few civs that are close to our level". It should be "How come we don't detect Kardashev >2 civs collonizing most of the galaxy?" Why can't we detect a single Dyson Sphere? (I don't consider dark forest explanation to be probable though.)
    - marcosdumay 5y ago
      The Fermi question is a lot closer to "how come Earth wasn't colonized before we even appear?" than "how come we can't see anybody?".
      - yreg 5y ago
        Yes, that's a cleaner way to put it.
saberdancer 5y ago
We are early in our "Space age". It's possible that inexperienced civilizations emit their position only to start hiding after realizing the dangers. Other possibility is that we are in a short period until we are wiped out because we broadcast our position. All of this would drastically reduce number of visible civilizations at any time making the detection of civilizations much less likely.
ericmay 5y ago
I don’t think the Dark Forest principle asserts that all civilizations adhere to it. We might simply be the naive (or stupid) ones that get destroyed. That wouldn’t discredit the hypothesis. We are also the only civilization we know of so we again may just be the dumb ones with a sample size of 1.
LatteLazy 5y ago
1 exception doesn't disprove this rule. There could be any number of reasons for one or some civilisations to broadcast but not be destroyed: * it takes time, we've only been broadcasting for 70 years or so. 70 light years isn't that far. * we are far from dangerous listeners (we are right out on an arm in the milky way galaxy) * all planets broadcast for a while at least (we did so without any serious consideration) and not all broadcasts end in annihilation. Up until just 40 years ago we seemed pretty likely to wipe ourselves out with war, even if an alien were planning our destruction, why not wait and see if we did it ourselves? * Popular methods of destruction might not apply to our solar systems. If you rely on near by asteroids or free-floating planets to destroy civilisations and there happen to be none near sol, then we are safe to broadcast even if no one is safe to reply. * if more than 1 alien actively destroys planets we might be lucky and have the aliens who detected us assume other aliens will destroy us. As long as they are happy to wait, we can broadcast in blissful ignorance believing we disproved the dark forest when we're actually just in the middle of a Mexican standoff... * If a civilisation destroys other civilisations as soon as it detects them, you can use the abrupt destruction of civilisations to triangulate that civilisation. And destroy it. And that's a high priority since that way you find hidden civs AND ones which pose an immediate and serious threat to you. The best defence against this is to allow plenty of time between detecting and destroying a civilisation, especially a harmless unarmed (in the cosmic scale) one like ours. The lack of many close neighbours to us means a would be destroyer needs to wait even longer before striking us to maintain their annonimity. Ironically this last point is the best argument against the dark forest: why destroy soft targets like earth when doing so reveals your existence? Why not wait, let someone else hit us and then hit them since they were a much bigger threat. So you'd expect a certain amount of noisy "prey" to be left as bait by one predator for another... Also, I don't think we are broadcasting very much anymore. The move to digital broadcasts (lower power) and to Internet based comms/media (99% undetectable even from orbit) mean we're a lot less visible than we were previously.
- TaupeRanger 5y ago
  The book responds to most of the "not there yet" concerns. The idea is that if there are 1,000 species aware of even primitive life on a particular planet, chances are at least one of them will be close enough for it to be worth the effort to destroy it. This is because technological development is exponential and you can't predict if/when a planet will produce dangerous technology equal or greater than your own. If you wait, you only increase the risk of being destroyed.
V-2 5y ago
Becoming truly detectable - on a cosmic scale - might require a higher technological level than our current one. Attaining that technological level could be inherently linked with the ability to realize the dangers to begin with.
evrydayhustling 5y ago
As other commenters have said, we can't take our own viewpoint as an example of what kinds of civilizations survive because our technological age is so young. But IMO Dark Forest is bunk anyway, because it assumes that projecting power over interstellar distances is easier than defending yourself. That's not true within terrestrial history ... even though the arrival of colonists was massively disruptive to populations in (for example) the Americas, they couldn't have outright destroyed them. To survive, they had to trade and mingle with their neighbors, ultimately changing both cultures. The sequels to The Three Body Problem kind of discuss this, and extend the dark forest idea to consider that any population that splits off from you is now a dark forest alien. I find that crazy xenophobic and ultimately an impractical black and white view of self vs other. On Earth, successful civilizations have been capable of trade and cultural exchange in addition to force.
- bobcostas55 5y ago
  >because it assumes that projecting power over interstellar distances is easier than defending yourself This seems really obviously true to me. Accelerating a rock to relativistic speeds is pretty easy, defending against a rock potentially coming from anywhere in space traveling at relativistic speeds is extremely difficult.
  - evrydayhustling 5y ago
    IANAAstrophysicist but it seems like targeting that rock gets proportionally hard with the speed and distance. Throwing a dart and hitting an ant on the other side of the world, etc. And the other side of that equation is: does the species who can do that have anything to fear from us? Or does the same technology make them likely able to stay ahead on defense, making it uninteresting to destroy us? Three Body Problem introduces all this dimension folding tech that makes being the first to strike totally dominate. But the closest equivalent on Earth hasn't (yet) led to nuclear holocaust, because preventing others from getting the tech and establishing mutual detente with those who do has been better for each actor.
    - 5y ago
wydfre 5y ago
There is no way to underestimate the stupidity of people in groups, and our eusocial stupidity might be unique to our species. If someone knocked on your door, quite unexpectedly, in the middle of the night, can I err on the idea that you would be quite panic-struck? But if humanity got a signal from another civilization tomorrow, do you think it is safe to err on folks being quite happy?
- TheCoelacanth 5y ago
  > If someone knocked on your door, quite unexpectedly, in the middle of the night, can I err on the idea that you would be quite panic-struck? Quite likely, but only because the socially acceptable reasons to knock on someone's door in the middle of the night are usually something pretty bad. I wouldn't fear that they're attacking me. I would fear whatever they are waking me up to tell me about.
- riffraff 5y ago
  > If someone knocked on your door, quite unexpectedly, in the middle of the night, can I err on the idea that you would be quite panic-struck? But if a stranger knocks on your door in the middle of the day you might just open up and say "no thanks, I don't want your pamphlet/vacuum/encyclopedia". I mean, even if a stranger knocks, it seems weird to kill them assuming they're dangerous, even if we have "don't let a stranger in" etched in our collective consciousness.
nirui 5y ago
Ah... the "Dark Forest Theory". People really put way too much unnecessary time on it. If the theory was true, then the first thing those "tree-body man" would reasonably do is to just destroy the solar system straight away with that super illegal (to the law of physics) raindrop probe. A civilization with the intention of discover and kill will definitely make their probes efficient kill devices, right? Why pay the expense of identify and kill the "Key actors" one by one when you can delete a entire system for cheap? Just turn the probe into a blackhole to kill the sun, it should be easy if the probe was really that dense. A more direct attack is rooted in the theory itself: for the theory to be true, a state/condition called 猜疑连 (Chain Of Suspicion) must be created. The content of Chain Of Suspicion is simple: - A civilization cannot determine if another civilization is evil - A civilization cannot determine if other civilizations will view itself as evil - A civilization cannot determine if another civilization will launch an attack against it - A civilization cannot determine if itself is evil - A civilization cannot determine if another civilization view themself as evil - A civilization cannot determine if another civilization will treat itself in such way that been determined unevil - ... ... (The article that I quoted from has this at the last line: https://wiki.mbalib.com/wiki/%E9%BB%91%E6%9A%97%E6%A3%AE%E6%9E%97%E6%B3%95%E5%88%99#.E5.8F.B6.E6.96.87.E6.B4.81.E6.8F.90.E5.87.BA.E7.9A.84.E2.80.9C.E5.9F.BA.E6.9C.AC.E5.85.AC.E7.90.86.E2.80.9D.E5.92.8C.E4.B8.A4.E5.A4.A7.E9.87.8D.E8.A6.81.E6.A6.82.E5.BF.B5) Have you see the hole here? For a civilization that advanced, what are the chances that they're not equipped with also advanced social and science knowledge and skills? Heck, their advanced probe could probably even do all the observation and tests fully automatically and report the result back. The Chain Of Suspicion will never form to begin with because they CAN determine the facts if they really wants to. And then so the Dark Forest will never form too (at least not for the advanced side). Now, let's talk about some serious thing. Because I've noticed some people uses the Dark Forest Theory to explain the relation between nations (yes, Earth nations). So it is really important to realize that the entire theory is nothing more than a plot device that Liu Cixin employed for his novel, among many other plots. Most of them are there to make the story more convenient, instead of more logical (as I have said, based on the theory, the logical thing to do is to wipe everything out at contact, how convenient that the probe "JuST cAnT" huh?). So, if the theory inspired you do to something good, then nice, go ahead, have a good life, help people, communticate with others, try to understand others, have fun. However, if you believe the "Dark Forest Theory" is THE true governing rule of the universe, then you probably overthink it too much, stop it, it's not healthy. And guess what, the planet we're living on hosts multiple civilizations, you stick with us now no matter what.
microtherion 5y ago
> we have made many active attempts to communicate our existence to other hypothetical civilisations Spamming aliens with nude selfies, among other measures, which in retrospect may not have been a wise choice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque

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.
- syops 5y ago
  The energy requirement to send a life destroying device to a far away planet might be much less than the energy requirement to send colonizers. That may be the big leap so to speak.
  - Causality1 5y ago
    If you can send a weapon you can probably send some kind of Von Neumann probe with genetic and cultural data to create a seed colony
    - syops 5y ago
      I don’t see why that necessarily follows and I don’t see why one would want to send such a probe. It does nothing for me if I can send a probe to start humanity on another planet when I have no connection to said planet and won’t be able to see the result or have a connection to that colony. In the dark forest view one would never seed such a colony as they will quickly become competitors.
      - Causality1 5y ago
        You don't think species chauvinism is a thing? If I had to lose an interstellar war and be wiped out I'd prefer it to be a human offshoot doing it. At least that way my species survives.
        syops 5y ago
        In the dark forest view it’s best to just kill off the opponent and not replace them with a potential new opponent.
    - wonderwonder 5y ago
      Not really, the weapon does not need to slow down. If its just a big enough chunk of rock that is aimed at a planet and it speeds up the whole way reaching some impressive fraction of the speed of light before impact, the only hard part is the math to aim it. We are reasonably close now to being able to strap some engines on an chunk of rock and send it on its way randomly in one direction. We are very far away from being able to start a seed colony in another solar system.
Mordisquitos 5y ago
I don't see that as a counterpoint, but more of a post hoc theory. How could the eradicators detect and destroy their victims before we detected any signal at all from the victims? And why haven't the eradicators come for us yet? Of course, this could always be explained by the distances involved and the limitations of light speed, but that would make the Dark Forest hypothesis redundant as an explanation as to why we haven't yet detected any alien civilisation(s).
- saiya-jin 5y ago
  I think what would explain this is our very limited timespan when we started listening to universe. There might have been 10 strong signals in last 2000 years, but last one could have happened around the time US declared independence. And 2000 years is nothing timewise on scale of universe. Plus we talk about signal that can maybe travel few hundred / a thousand light years before they blend into galactic and intergalactic noise.
- yreg 5y ago
  >How could the eradicators detect and destroy their victims before we detected any signal at all from the victims? Even if they destroy them within say a thousand years, then at any given time there would be only few civilizations at the right age to be broadcasting. And not very loud at that. We listen only to a miniscule portion of the Galaxy. IMO, Fermi's question shouldn't be "Why can't we hear the few civs that are close to our level". It should be "How come we don't detect Kardashev >2 civs collonizing most of the galaxy?" Why can't we detect a single Dyson Sphere? (I don't consider dark forest explanation to be probable though.)
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    The Fermi question is a lot closer to "how come Earth wasn't colonized before we even appear?" than "how come we can't see anybody?".
    - yreg 5y ago
      Yes, that's a cleaner way to put it.

saberdancer 5y ago

We are early in our "Space age". It's possible that inexperienced civilizations emit their position only to start hiding after realizing the dangers. Other possibility is that we are in a short period until we are wiped out because we broadcast our position. All of this would drastically reduce number of visible civilizations at any time making the detection of civilizations much less likely.

ericmay 5y ago

I don’t think the Dark Forest principle asserts that all civilizations adhere to it. We might simply be the naive (or stupid) ones that get destroyed. That wouldn’t discredit the hypothesis. We are also the only civilization we know of so we again may just be the dumb ones with a sample size of 1.

LatteLazy 5y ago

1 exception doesn't disprove this rule. There could be any number of reasons for one or some civilisations to broadcast but not be destroyed: * it takes time, we've only been broadcasting for 70 years or so. 70 light years isn't that far. * we are far from dangerous listeners (we are right out on an arm in the milky way galaxy) * all planets broadcast for a while at least (we did so without any serious consideration) and not all broadcasts end in annihilation. Up until just 40 years ago we seemed pretty likely to wipe ourselves out with war, even if an alien were planning our destruction, why not wait and see if we did it ourselves? * Popular methods of destruction might not apply to our solar systems. If you rely on near by asteroids or free-floating planets to destroy civilisations and there happen to be none near sol, then we are safe to broadcast even if no one is safe to reply. * if more than 1 alien actively destroys planets we might be lucky and have the aliens who detected us assume other aliens will destroy us. As long as they are happy to wait, we can broadcast in blissful ignorance believing we disproved the dark forest when we're actually just in the middle of a Mexican standoff... * If a civilisation destroys other civilisations as soon as it detects them, you can use the abrupt destruction of civilisations to triangulate that civilisation. And destroy it. And that's a high priority since that way you find hidden civs AND ones which pose an immediate and serious threat to you. The best defence against this is to allow plenty of time between detecting and destroying a civilisation, especially a harmless unarmed (in the cosmic scale) one like ours. The lack of many close neighbours to us means a would be destroyer needs to wait even longer before striking us to maintain their annonimity. Ironically this last point is the best argument against the dark forest: why destroy soft targets like earth when doing so reveals your existence? Why not wait, let someone else hit us and then hit them since they were a much bigger threat. So you'd expect a certain amount of noisy "prey" to be left as bait by one predator for another... Also, I don't think we are broadcasting very much anymore. The move to digital broadcasts (lower power) and to Internet based comms/media (99% undetectable even from orbit) mean we're a lot less visible than we were previously.

TaupeRanger 5y ago
The book responds to most of the "not there yet" concerns. The idea is that if there are 1,000 species aware of even primitive life on a particular planet, chances are at least one of them will be close enough for it to be worth the effort to destroy it. This is because technological development is exponential and you can't predict if/when a planet will produce dangerous technology equal or greater than your own. If you wait, you only increase the risk of being destroyed.

V-2 5y ago

Becoming truly detectable - on a cosmic scale - might require a higher technological level than our current one. Attaining that technological level could be inherently linked with the ability to realize the dangers to begin with.

evrydayhustling 5y ago

As other commenters have said, we can't take our own viewpoint as an example of what kinds of civilizations survive because our technological age is so young. But IMO Dark Forest is bunk anyway, because it assumes that projecting power over interstellar distances is easier than defending yourself. That's not true within terrestrial history ... even though the arrival of colonists was massively disruptive to populations in (for example) the Americas, they couldn't have outright destroyed them. To survive, they had to trade and mingle with their neighbors, ultimately changing both cultures. The sequels to The Three Body Problem kind of discuss this, and extend the dark forest idea to consider that any population that splits off from you is now a dark forest alien. I find that crazy xenophobic and ultimately an impractical black and white view of self vs other. On Earth, successful civilizations have been capable of trade and cultural exchange in addition to force.

bobcostas55 5y ago
>because it assumes that projecting power over interstellar distances is easier than defending yourself This seems really obviously true to me. Accelerating a rock to relativistic speeds is pretty easy, defending against a rock potentially coming from anywhere in space traveling at relativistic speeds is extremely difficult.
- evrydayhustling 5y ago
  IANAAstrophysicist but it seems like targeting that rock gets proportionally hard with the speed and distance. Throwing a dart and hitting an ant on the other side of the world, etc. And the other side of that equation is: does the species who can do that have anything to fear from us? Or does the same technology make them likely able to stay ahead on defense, making it uninteresting to destroy us? Three Body Problem introduces all this dimension folding tech that makes being the first to strike totally dominate. But the closest equivalent on Earth hasn't (yet) led to nuclear holocaust, because preventing others from getting the tech and establishing mutual detente with those who do has been better for each actor.
  - 5y ago

wydfre 5y ago

There is no way to underestimate the stupidity of people in groups, and our eusocial stupidity might be unique to our species. If someone knocked on your door, quite unexpectedly, in the middle of the night, can I err on the idea that you would be quite panic-struck? But if humanity got a signal from another civilization tomorrow, do you think it is safe to err on folks being quite happy?

TheCoelacanth 5y ago
> If someone knocked on your door, quite unexpectedly, in the middle of the night, can I err on the idea that you would be quite panic-struck? Quite likely, but only because the socially acceptable reasons to knock on someone's door in the middle of the night are usually something pretty bad. I wouldn't fear that they're attacking me. I would fear whatever they are waking me up to tell me about.
riffraff 5y ago
> If someone knocked on your door, quite unexpectedly, in the middle of the night, can I err on the idea that you would be quite panic-struck? But if a stranger knocks on your door in the middle of the day you might just open up and say "no thanks, I don't want your pamphlet/vacuum/encyclopedia". I mean, even if a stranger knocks, it seems weird to kill them assuming they're dangerous, even if we have "don't let a stranger in" etched in our collective consciousness.

nirui 5y ago

Ah... the "Dark Forest Theory". People really put way too much unnecessary time on it. If the theory was true, then the first thing those "tree-body man" would reasonably do is to just destroy the solar system straight away with that super illegal (to the law of physics) raindrop probe. A civilization with the intention of discover and kill will definitely make their probes efficient kill devices, right? Why pay the expense of identify and kill the "Key actors" one by one when you can delete a entire system for cheap? Just turn the probe into a blackhole to kill the sun, it should be easy if the probe was really that dense. A more direct attack is rooted in the theory itself: for the theory to be true, a state/condition called 猜疑连 (Chain Of Suspicion) must be created. The content of Chain Of Suspicion is simple: - A civilization cannot determine if another civilization is evil - A civilization cannot determine if other civilizations will view itself as evil - A civilization cannot determine if another civilization will launch an attack against it - A civilization cannot determine if itself is evil - A civilization cannot determine if another civilization view themself as evil - A civilization cannot determine if another civilization will treat itself in such way that been determined unevil - ... ... (The article that I quoted from has this at the last line: https://wiki.mbalib.com/wiki/%E9%BB%91%E6%9A%97%E6%A3%AE%E6%9E%97%E6%B3%95%E5%88%99#.E5.8F.B6.E6.96.87.E6.B4.81.E6.8F.90.E5.87.BA.E7.9A.84.E2.80.9C.E5.9F.BA.E6.9C.AC.E5.85.AC.E7.90.86.E2.80.9D.E5.92.8C.E4.B8.A4.E5.A4.A7.E9.87.8D.E8.A6.81.E6.A6.82.E5.BF.B5) Have you see the hole here? For a civilization that advanced, what are the chances that they're not equipped with also advanced social and science knowledge and skills? Heck, their advanced probe could probably even do all the observation and tests fully automatically and report the result back. The Chain Of Suspicion will never form to begin with because they CAN determine the facts if they really wants to. And then so the Dark Forest will never form too (at least not for the advanced side). Now, let's talk about some serious thing. Because I've noticed some people uses the Dark Forest Theory to explain the relation between nations (yes, Earth nations). So it is really important to realize that the entire theory is nothing more than a plot device that Liu Cixin employed for his novel, among many other plots. Most of them are there to make the story more convenient, instead of more logical (as I have said, based on the theory, the logical thing to do is to wipe everything out at contact, how convenient that the probe "JuST cAnT" huh?). So, if the theory inspired you do to something good, then nice, go ahead, have a good life, help people, communticate with others, try to understand others, have fun. However, if you believe the "Dark Forest Theory" is THE true governing rule of the universe, then you probably overthink it too much, stop it, it's not healthy. And guess what, the planet we're living on hosts multiple civilizations, you stick with us now no matter what.

microtherion 5y ago

> we have made many active attempts to communicate our existence to other hypothetical civilisations Spamming aliens with nude selfies, among other measures, which in retrospect may not have been a wise choice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque