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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 o

by 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.
- aeternum 5y ago
  Historically it's extremely rare that the conquerors killed everyone in the cities they conquered. Instead they enslaved some, or let them mostly live and just taxed them. Even with other species that regularly attack humans (tigers or even mosquitos), we have not exterminated them.
  - Mary-Jane 5y ago
    Not many neanderthals around these days. Just an observation.
    - pharke 5y ago
      We carry them with us in our genes, that seems to indicate more than just war was going on.
      - obedm 5y ago
        We don't know that happened to them, or to any other human species for that matter. But we're pretty sure we obliterated a entire species in our way up the food chain ( giant marsupials for example)
        aeternum 5y ago
        We very likely obliterated a few along the way but that seems to be the exception rather than the rule. Humans had the power to exterminate many more but chose not to, and continue to choose not to.
        obedm 5y ago
        Is that really true though? Saying "we didn't kill them all" doesn't exempt the fact that we did it for many of them. There's no easy answer to this. We are what we are. But it points to the disregard powerful beings have over weaker ones when they get in their way.
luckyandroid 5y ago
> "Chains of Suspicion" assumes civilizations cannot communicate, yet the dark forest hypothesis assume civilizations can destroy each other > If you can physically interact, you can communicate I think you misunderstood what they meant by "communicate". They don't mean "reach with a message", they mean "engage in back and forth communication with both sides understanding the conversation". We're still struggling to talk to dolphins, but technically we could nuke them all to death if we ever got scared they were rising up.
- xwolfi 5y ago
  But we're not struggling to talk to dolphins, they're struggling to materialize Shakespeare. We understand their structures and concerns more than they understand ours, and we observe them when they're still in the original soup. ALl this to say: if they were rising up, we'd probably be able to create a bidirectional connection. We can only make sense "nuking them all to death", like you say in america to mean "defend our freedom and way of life", if we are able to communicate and are faced with a refusal to submit. The dolphin, so far, accept american hegemony - there's no purpose to nuking them. So it is correct what you say, but here we're talking of civilizations. Civilizations worth nuking will always have a way to understand each others, otherwise there'd be no threat worth suppressing.
  - luckyandroid 5y ago
    > Civilizations worth nuking will always have a way to understand each other Again, we cannot talk to dolphins. Closest we’ve got is teaching monkeys sign language - and to be fair, that’s pretty good, but we’re also very similar to them. My reason for the dolphin analogy is that they’re an intelligent species here on earth that have incredibly different physiology and behavioural patterns to us. We can’t assume that any other ‘intelligent’ species in the universe we find will be similar enough to us where we can figure out rudimentary sign language with them, we have to assume the worst, in this case trying to communicate with an entirely foreign species. Also the phrase ‘’the dolphin, so far, accept American hegemony - there’s no purpose to nuking them’’ is the funniest thing I’ve read in a while, lol.
deleted 5y ago
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artimaeis 5y ago
I also adore the series. It's become my favorite sci-fi I've read in years. You're leaving out the time required to communicate. Yes, communication would require less energy, but time is a constant that even type 3 civilizations could be in short supply of. The chain of suspicion calls this out explicitly, it's not that the civs cannot communicate, it's that due to the extreme lengths of time required for back-and-forth communications their societies are likely to significantly change during communications, leading to higher probability of the technological explosion. What medium was primed for the technological explosion on Earth since the industrial revolution? I mean, I reckon we could point to an array of things that have seemed as though they would be a limit, but thus-far we've always found ways past that (see: peak oil). I'm not trying to indicate I think our trends _will_ go on forever, just that it seems possible they could.
Florin_Andrei 5y ago
> They are such great and imaginative books Those books are pretty awful. They can't make up their mind whether they belong to sci-fi or fantasy. Sometimes they veer towards hard scifi but then make naive mistakes with current science. The characters are cardboard cutouts, very shallow, and make nonsensical decisions. The general atmosphere is depressing and ends in the complete failure of basically everything.
dvirsky 5y ago
> 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. IIRC The Dark Forest addresses this directly - saying that wiping out a civilization must be cheap and casual. There's a chapter where an alien scout detects Earth, puts a dimensionality attack cartridge in a gun or something, launches it and goes on with their business.

by jmull 5y ago

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.

aeternum 5y ago
Historically it's extremely rare that the conquerors killed everyone in the cities they conquered. Instead they enslaved some, or let them mostly live and just taxed them. Even with other species that regularly attack humans (tigers or even mosquitos), we have not exterminated them.
- Mary-Jane 5y ago
  Not many neanderthals around these days. Just an observation.
  - pharke 5y ago
    We carry them with us in our genes, that seems to indicate more than just war was going on.
    - obedm 5y ago
      We don't know that happened to them, or to any other human species for that matter. But we're pretty sure we obliterated a entire species in our way up the food chain ( giant marsupials for example)
      - aeternum 5y ago
        We very likely obliterated a few along the way but that seems to be the exception rather than the rule. Humans had the power to exterminate many more but chose not to, and continue to choose not to.
        obedm 5y ago
        Is that really true though? Saying "we didn't kill them all" doesn't exempt the fact that we did it for many of them. There's no easy answer to this. We are what we are. But it points to the disregard powerful beings have over weaker ones when they get in their way.

luckyandroid 5y ago

> "Chains of Suspicion" assumes civilizations cannot communicate, yet the dark forest hypothesis assume civilizations can destroy each other > If you can physically interact, you can communicate I think you misunderstood what they meant by "communicate". They don't mean "reach with a message", they mean "engage in back and forth communication with both sides understanding the conversation". We're still struggling to talk to dolphins, but technically we could nuke them all to death if we ever got scared they were rising up.

xwolfi 5y ago
But we're not struggling to talk to dolphins, they're struggling to materialize Shakespeare. We understand their structures and concerns more than they understand ours, and we observe them when they're still in the original soup. ALl this to say: if they were rising up, we'd probably be able to create a bidirectional connection. We can only make sense "nuking them all to death", like you say in america to mean "defend our freedom and way of life", if we are able to communicate and are faced with a refusal to submit. The dolphin, so far, accept american hegemony - there's no purpose to nuking them. So it is correct what you say, but here we're talking of civilizations. Civilizations worth nuking will always have a way to understand each others, otherwise there'd be no threat worth suppressing.
- luckyandroid 5y ago
  > Civilizations worth nuking will always have a way to understand each other Again, we cannot talk to dolphins. Closest we’ve got is teaching monkeys sign language - and to be fair, that’s pretty good, but we’re also very similar to them. My reason for the dolphin analogy is that they’re an intelligent species here on earth that have incredibly different physiology and behavioural patterns to us. We can’t assume that any other ‘intelligent’ species in the universe we find will be similar enough to us where we can figure out rudimentary sign language with them, we have to assume the worst, in this case trying to communicate with an entirely foreign species. Also the phrase ‘’the dolphin, so far, accept American hegemony - there’s no purpose to nuking them’’ is the funniest thing I’ve read in a while, lol.

deleted 5y ago

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artimaeis 5y ago

I also adore the series. It's become my favorite sci-fi I've read in years. You're leaving out the time required to communicate. Yes, communication would require less energy, but time is a constant that even type 3 civilizations could be in short supply of. The chain of suspicion calls this out explicitly, it's not that the civs cannot communicate, it's that due to the extreme lengths of time required for back-and-forth communications their societies are likely to significantly change during communications, leading to higher probability of the technological explosion. What medium was primed for the technological explosion on Earth since the industrial revolution? I mean, I reckon we could point to an array of things that have seemed as though they would be a limit, but thus-far we've always found ways past that (see: peak oil). I'm not trying to indicate I think our trends _will_ go on forever, just that it seems possible they could.

Florin_Andrei 5y ago

> They are such great and imaginative books Those books are pretty awful. They can't make up their mind whether they belong to sci-fi or fantasy. Sometimes they veer towards hard scifi but then make naive mistakes with current science. The characters are cardboard cutouts, very shallow, and make nonsensical decisions. The general atmosphere is depressing and ends in the complete failure of basically everything.

dvirsky 5y ago

> 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. IIRC The Dark Forest addresses this directly - saying that wiping out a civilization must be cheap and casual. There's a chapter where an alien scout detects Earth, puts a dimensionality attack cartridge in a gun or something, launches it and goes on with their business.