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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 t

by 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.

jeremyjh 5y ago
How far away from earth is it still possible to detect oxygen and/or methane levels in the atmosphere?
- jamiek88 5y ago
  Light years with the right telescope. It’s just spectroscopy.
  - jeremyjh 5y ago
    Yes but only a tiny fraction of our sun's light would pass through earth's atmosphere on its way out of the solar system, I didn't think spectroscopy would be possible very far away.
- david-gpu 5y ago
  If I was a technologically advanced civilization, I would send robotic Von Neumann probes around the galaxy to keep tabs on things at close proximity. If I was also murderous, I would have programmed the probes to destroy any signs of life. So, the fact that we are still alive after broadcasting the presence of life through out atmosphere for the last couple billion years is quite reassuring.
  - pharke 5y ago
    Wouldn't that be the most difficult and expensive way to simply monitor for life or technosignatures? Compare that to simply (relatively speaking) building massive space based optical and radio observatories that can observe every visible star. The light reaching you has already made the trip, you just have to collect it. If you were murderous, you could launch an attack from your home system rather than waiting for the probes to spread from system to system. Granted there could be some technical limitations that prevent you from observing certain systems but that pool will be much smaller than an entire galaxy of stars. Also, don't forget that a Von Neumann probe is at a disadvantage when it arrives in a system since you want to send the minimum number of probes to each star and then have them replicate on arrival. If your probe accidentally shows up in a system that contains an advanced civilization capable of detecting and capturing it then you've given away the fact of your existence and your intent along with all the information that can be gained by studying the probe.
    - 5y ago
pharmakom 5y ago
You don’t destroy the system because you want to inhabit it yourself. This assumes that life is looking for similar habitats and that it’s not simpler to create an artificial planet anyway.
- crowbahr 5y ago
  If there is oxygen breathing carbon based intelligent life that wants our planet they could've easily spotted and taken it anytime within the past 2 billion years. It seems safe to say that there isn't life that wants our planet.
  - belter 5y ago
    Or maybe that carbon based intelligent life that wanted our planet it's us. We were almost wiped out after the first large impact. The impact that happened a few millennia after we killed all those awful looking smarty octopus that lived in this planet. But we could not defend against the large Comet, it come from behind the Sun and way too fast. We had minutes notice. Some microbes survived...And here we are again typing on our keyboards. :-)
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    Why would anyone come from light years away to inhabit a planet. It would be cheaper to just build habitats or colonize a planet in their solar system. There is almost nothing we can provide to a civilization capable of traversing between start systems.
    - crowbahr 5y ago
      All resources are scarce. But if nobody wants our world and they're scared of intelligent life then just send out Von Neumann probes to ensure intelligence isn't showing up elsewhere. First mover's advantage nullifies the entire dark forest.
      - edgyquant 5y ago
        relatively scarce, sure. There are millions of times more of all the resources Earth has between us and any civilization coming from light years away. By the time they needed Earths resources they’d have to have gobbled up large chunks of, if not the whole, Galaxy.
im3w1l 5y ago
If I use humanity as a model, then we don't see other great apes as dangerous competitors. Rather we see them as interesting curiosities. We want them to stay alive. But it's hard to resist the desire to turn their habitats into something economically productive. Colonizing other planets and making them into homes for aliens long before a native civilization has a chance to arise seems more plausible than just destroying them.
- jerf 5y ago
  For the purposes of this conversation, colonizing other planets effectively is destroying them. After that, no natural intelligent competitor will arise and surprise you, because you're right there to keep an eye on everything. (Of course, you may still have any amount of conflict with your fellow settlers, or your someone in your original species' descendants two systems over, but that's a completely different conversation.)
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
"Too precise a level of incompetence to believe in." That's the most beautiful wording I have read in some time...
- jerf 5y ago
  Hat tip: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=615 https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=615 "That is a very specific level of tired."
DonaldPShimoda 5y ago
(Major spoilers for The Expanse below.) > 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. Or send a technologically engineered molecule that can hijack single-cellular life to help establish your needed technology in the target solar system.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  It’s funny that that wouldn’t have been a spoiler if you hadn’t mentioned the name of the work.
- jerf 5y ago
  That's a variant of what I discuss in another reply, but well underscores my point of just how easy this is if you happen to get there anywhere in the 2.0-2.4 billion window Earth has had prior to intelligence. If you colonize the system in any manner, be it biological, technological, whatever, for Dark Forest purposes that's equivalent to destruction; there is no longer a threat of natural competing life. You've got two major approaches: Fling a kinetic kill projectile, or if you have the tech to get "something" into the target system at roughly orbital velocities, send some machines to do the job with local resources. None of these things appear to have happened in Earth's past. Ironically, trying to spin yarns in which they did anyhow still end up countering the Dark Forest hypothesis, because all such attempts must either include significant probabilities of failure of the attempts or the possibility that the life out there is benevolent (to some degree, at least sufficient to avoid simply wiping us out, which on this scale is "benevolence" despite whatever else they may be doing) which itself would imply the forest isn't that dark.
yreg 5y ago
Why get a factory to the target system when you can launch kill projectiles to all the systems in the galaxy from home?

by jerf 5y ago

jeremyjh 5y ago

How far away from earth is it still possible to detect oxygen and/or methane levels in the atmosphere?

jamiek88 5y ago
Light years with the right telescope. It’s just spectroscopy.
- jeremyjh 5y ago
  Yes but only a tiny fraction of our sun's light would pass through earth's atmosphere on its way out of the solar system, I didn't think spectroscopy would be possible very far away.
david-gpu 5y ago
If I was a technologically advanced civilization, I would send robotic Von Neumann probes around the galaxy to keep tabs on things at close proximity. If I was also murderous, I would have programmed the probes to destroy any signs of life. So, the fact that we are still alive after broadcasting the presence of life through out atmosphere for the last couple billion years is quite reassuring.
- pharke 5y ago
  Wouldn't that be the most difficult and expensive way to simply monitor for life or technosignatures? Compare that to simply (relatively speaking) building massive space based optical and radio observatories that can observe every visible star. The light reaching you has already made the trip, you just have to collect it. If you were murderous, you could launch an attack from your home system rather than waiting for the probes to spread from system to system. Granted there could be some technical limitations that prevent you from observing certain systems but that pool will be much smaller than an entire galaxy of stars. Also, don't forget that a Von Neumann probe is at a disadvantage when it arrives in a system since you want to send the minimum number of probes to each star and then have them replicate on arrival. If your probe accidentally shows up in a system that contains an advanced civilization capable of detecting and capturing it then you've given away the fact of your existence and your intent along with all the information that can be gained by studying the probe.
  - 5y ago

pharmakom 5y ago

You don’t destroy the system because you want to inhabit it yourself. This assumes that life is looking for similar habitats and that it’s not simpler to create an artificial planet anyway.

crowbahr 5y ago
If there is oxygen breathing carbon based intelligent life that wants our planet they could've easily spotted and taken it anytime within the past 2 billion years. It seems safe to say that there isn't life that wants our planet.
- belter 5y ago
  Or maybe that carbon based intelligent life that wanted our planet it's us. We were almost wiped out after the first large impact. The impact that happened a few millennia after we killed all those awful looking smarty octopus that lived in this planet. But we could not defend against the large Comet, it come from behind the Sun and way too fast. We had minutes notice. Some microbes survived...And here we are again typing on our keyboards. :-)
- edgyquant 5y ago
  Why would anyone come from light years away to inhabit a planet. It would be cheaper to just build habitats or colonize a planet in their solar system. There is almost nothing we can provide to a civilization capable of traversing between start systems.
  - crowbahr 5y ago
    All resources are scarce. But if nobody wants our world and they're scared of intelligent life then just send out Von Neumann probes to ensure intelligence isn't showing up elsewhere. First mover's advantage nullifies the entire dark forest.
    - edgyquant 5y ago
      relatively scarce, sure. There are millions of times more of all the resources Earth has between us and any civilization coming from light years away. By the time they needed Earths resources they’d have to have gobbled up large chunks of, if not the whole, Galaxy.

im3w1l 5y ago

If I use humanity as a model, then we don't see other great apes as dangerous competitors. Rather we see them as interesting curiosities. We want them to stay alive. But it's hard to resist the desire to turn their habitats into something economically productive. Colonizing other planets and making them into homes for aliens long before a native civilization has a chance to arise seems more plausible than just destroying them.

jerf 5y ago
For the purposes of this conversation, colonizing other planets effectively is destroying them. After that, no natural intelligent competitor will arise and surprise you, because you're right there to keep an eye on everything. (Of course, you may still have any amount of conflict with your fellow settlers, or your someone in your original species' descendants two systems over, but that's a completely different conversation.)

AnimalMuppet 5y ago

"Too precise a level of incompetence to believe in." That's the most beautiful wording I have read in some time...

jerf 5y ago
Hat tip: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=615 https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=615 "That is a very specific level of tired."

DonaldPShimoda 5y ago

(Major spoilers for The Expanse below.) > 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. Or send a technologically engineered molecule that can hijack single-cellular life to help establish your needed technology in the target solar system.

tshaddox 5y ago
It’s funny that that wouldn’t have been a spoiler if you hadn’t mentioned the name of the work.
jerf 5y ago
That's a variant of what I discuss in another reply, but well underscores my point of just how easy this is if you happen to get there anywhere in the 2.0-2.4 billion window Earth has had prior to intelligence. If you colonize the system in any manner, be it biological, technological, whatever, for Dark Forest purposes that's equivalent to destruction; there is no longer a threat of natural competing life. You've got two major approaches: Fling a kinetic kill projectile, or if you have the tech to get "something" into the target system at roughly orbital velocities, send some machines to do the job with local resources. None of these things appear to have happened in Earth's past. Ironically, trying to spin yarns in which they did anyhow still end up countering the Dark Forest hypothesis, because all such attempts must either include significant probabilities of failure of the attempts or the possibility that the life out there is benevolent (to some degree, at least sufficient to avoid simply wiping us out, which on this scale is "benevolence" despite whatever else they may be doing) which itself would imply the forest isn't that dark.

yreg 5y ago

Why get a factory to the target system when you can launch kill projectiles to all the systems in the galaxy from home?