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DarkForestSim: A Netlogo Simulation of the Dark Forest Hypothesis

92 points by throw0101c 4y ago

throw0101c 4y ago
For those unaware of the Dark Forest Hypothesis (DFH): > “Dark forest theory” holds that civilizations fear one another so much that they don’t dare to reveal themselves lest they immediately be considered a potential threat and destroyed. * https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/20/technologys-dark-forest/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/20/technologys-dark-forest/ > In The Dark Forest, a 2008 novel which Discover Magazine calls "a dark answer to the Fermi paradox",[138] Chinese writer Liu Cixin envisions aliens as being paranoid and wanting to kill life because it might be future competition. Other aliens dare not reveal themselves because they might be considered a threat, and they stay quiet as if in a dark forest.[139] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Communication_is_dangerous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Communication_is...
- authpor 4y ago
  sounds like if they know about human governments, they will certainly hide themselves, or come looking for a fight cuz they're likely to get one... then again, given the technology necessary for traveling that far, it wouldn't be a fun fight for them, so no point in coming.
  - postalrat 4y ago
    In the books the weapons to destroy entire star systems can be used seemingly without to much cost.
    - Aeolun 4y ago
      I think that’s more because any cost is acceptable if you are talking about the continuance of your civilization. We could spend a million years building a single civilization destroying weapon, and it would still be worth it. Since we’re not likely to encounter another civilization much more often. Of course, humans couldn’t really stay interested in something that long, so the practical range is probably a few decades :P
- fartsucker69 4y ago
  This is not a particularly accurate representation. It's a game theoretical problem. Because of the huge delay in communication over interstellar distances, you can not adequately communicate with other in diplomatic terms. due to the speed of light limitation, if you contact another civilization to e.g. propose to establish diplomatic relations, you will only find out if they sent a big ass rocket as a reply in about the same time it would take to receive a message as an answer. Making certain assumptions about the technology available, like: No instant communication possible, solar system or at least planet destroying weapons possible, etc., then in purely game theoretical terms if a civilization seeks to minimize the chance of being destroyed, it then becomes a good strategy for a civilization to hide and not reveal themselves, and immediately attack and destroy any civilization that should make the mistake to reveal themselves by e.g. sending out a message. thus giving them no chance to harm you before they are destroyed themselves. it's only a hypothesis, and even at a superficial glance there are alternative strategies that might end up being better on average, much better if each civilization is willing to take some risk, etc.
heyitsguay 4y ago
I appreciated the write-up but i think it runs into one of the issues I've encountered myself messing around with netlogo, where for complex agent-based stuff, you sort of end up baking the result into your modeling choices. For the three civ variables, there are no constraints or trade-offs between them, and all comparisons are monotonic (more power + detection always better, less visibility always better). It's cool to see the visualizations and quantify the progression, but I don't think you need to run the sim to predict the result.
jabthedang 4y ago
zwilliamson 4y ago
Dark Forest theory best portrayed in the 2nd book of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past series by Liu Cixin (sci-fi at its best) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23168817 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23168817
- jondiggsit 4y ago
  As described in the book, the ease with which advanced civs can destroy other civs would likely cancel out any % of visibility in this model.
  - c048 4y ago
    Which is inline with the simulation (and real world military); the ability to detect is more important.
    - Aeolun 4y ago
      It’s not though? In the sim you can only kill civs with a lower power.
      - c048 4y ago
        "Powerful civs that are good at detecting others seem to always do well, even if they are themselves visible." Power is important, but not the most important factor. He states that he needs to collect more data, but within his current dataset there is a clear and visible preference in the surviving population.
- Rioghasarig 4y ago
  I mean that's where the term came from, after all.
  - glogla 4y ago
    The words might be, but the context and approach goes back to at the very least to The Killing Star by Charles R. Pellegrino and George Zebrowski published in 1995, who wrote: We ask that you try just one more thought experiment. Imagine yourself taking a stroll through Manhattan, somewhere north of 68th street, deep inside Central Park, late at night. It would be nice to meet someone friendly, but you know that the park is dangerous at night. That's when the monsters come out. There's always a strong undercurrent of drug dealings, muggings, and occasional homicides. It is not easy to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. They dress alike, and the weapons are concealed. The only difference is intent, and you can't read minds. Stay in the dark long enough and you may hear an occasional distance shriek or blunder across a body. How do you survive the night? The last thing you want to do is shout, "I'm here!" The next to last thing you want to do is reply to someone who shouts, "I'm a friend!" What you would like to do is find a policeman, or get out of the park. But you don't want to make noise or move towards a light where you might be spotted, and it is difficult to find either a policeman or your way out without making yourself known. Your safest option is to hunker down and wait for daylight, then safely walk out. There are, of course, a few obvious differences between Central Park and the universe. There is no policeman. There is no way out. And the night never ends. But of course, even Stephen Hawking was talking about this for decades. I find it bit of hilarious social commentary, that some Chinese author copied it and now people claim he invented it.
efferifick 4y ago
Shouldn't there be the possibility for civilizations to join forces?
- bee_rider 4y ago
  Yeah, it would be interesting I think to add an aggression variable. If two species meet and their combined aggression is high enough, they fight (with some large bonus going to species with some combination of aggression and ability to detect, as it is assumed they can get off a devastating first strike). If the species are not aggressive, they can presumably at least the weaker of the two should get some large bonus. Of course then we could play with the first strike bonus and the alliance bonus, and get whatever result we want from the simulation.
- imglorp 4y ago
  There's also a huge damping variable due to communication latency between star systems, and of course travel time if you want two armadas to gang up on a third system. In fact this is exactly the two generals problem: you really don't want to launch an armada without confirmation from your ally, and if you do launch it, you will have the two generals problem recalling it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Generals%27_Problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Generals%27_Problem
  - efferifick 4y ago
    I was suggesting a simpler solution: just merge the two civs into one. This would be equivalent to having only one general.
michaelmrose 4y ago
I question the meaning of saying if civs kill each other then it's a dangerous world out there which is inherently circular. I question power and visibility being independent variables. I question the idea of needing to be more powerful to destroy each other when a weaker society could still kill the other simply by attacking first. A kinetic care package could spend as little as 7 hours inside Pluto's orbit and it wouldn't have to be mountain sized. It might indeed only follow it's own light by a small increment leaving even a much more advanced tech with few options. Overall entirely pointless.
rl3 4y ago
The model is flawed and fails to account for the activation of the XCOM project: humanity's first, and last line of defense against the alien threat. In all seriousness though, if the universe is indeed populous then there's probably been innumerable alien XCOM projects. I also can't help but think that we usually fail to appreciate the technology gaps involved. Human beings in a span of a few hundred years managed to go from the advent of electricity and industrial society, to artificial intelligence—all in what amounts to not even a blink of a cosmic eye. Yet recursively improving intelligence is conceivable to us. 2001: A Space Odyssey did a wonderful job illustrating such gaps. I think there's a good chance most civilizations (ours included) would not be equipped to even comprehend how to detect or fight an advanced civilization, let alone understand their very nature.
- SkyMarshal 4y ago
  > Human beings in a span of a few hundred years managed to go from the advent of electricity and industrial society, to artificial intelligence—all in what amounts to not even a blink of a cosmic eye. Also keep in mind that Humanity is a latecomer to the universe. We weren't the first species to evolve on Earth. First came the dinosaurs, about 230m years ago, and lasted till about 66m years ago, then went extinct. Then came humanity. But there may be planets in our galaxy or other ones where intelligent life happened to be the first species to evolve on that planet. If so, they have a multi-hundred million year head start on us, evolutionarily, scientifically, technologically. Yeah, there's no possible XCOM project against that. We just have to hope they're benevolent. (And if they've solved scarcity with energy->matter conversion, as in Star Trek, they may very well be - there's nothing we have that they could need or want)
- EamonnMR 4y ago
  I won't spoil the three body series for you, but it definitely has a 2001 scale representation with the power differences between civilizations.
  - BiteCode_dev 4y ago
    It is probably the greatest moment of the second book. I was giddy reading it, because it feels so logical, so realistic, and our reaction so congruent. I love Xcom but it very much portraits the absolute opposite of the 3 body problem trilogy.
sinuhe69 4y ago
For me, it’s rather probable that advanced civilizations will collapse or/and kill themselves. It happened with civilizations on earth, it certainly can happen with other civilizations in the universe. Destroying other makes no sense because the risk is much higher than the reward. There is more than plenty of resources out there for any possible civilization.
- postalrat 4y ago
  And are you willing to risk the chance that some other civilization won't share that belief and will instead choose to destroy you?
  - GoblinSlayer 4y ago
    Pascal wager has no winning strategy.
- sholladay 4y ago
  > There is more than plenty of resources out there for any possible civilization. It looks that way to us because of the limited rate at which we consume resources relative to the scale of the cosmos. But our rate of consumption isn’t anywhere near an upper bound for a civilization. We’re not even a Type 1 on the Kardashev scale. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
- Thorrez 4y ago
  Sounds related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  I think that the speed of light limitation is insurmountable. Advanced civilizations become insular and stay close in space to themselves to minimize communication latency. They all become addicted to Internets and never go exploring very far, if at all.
  - 4y ago
majou 4y ago
Is it conceivable for a civilization to invent cheap space travel, but not nuclear weapons?
- dmichulke 4y ago
  Couldn't you just launch a sufficiently fast and heavy object into another civ's planets? I don't see how nuclear weapons are necessary for destruction if that is your point.
- EamonnMR 4y ago
  If there's some obvious-but-not-to-us way to break Newtonian physics without ever figuring out atoms... maybe.
- Archelaos 4y ago
  I civilization of intelligent funghi?
- NateEag 4y ago
  It may not be realistic, but it is conceivable. The Road Not Taken by Harry Turtledove is a fun take on something like this concept.
- bpodgursky 4y ago
  Maybe if a civilization evolved on a world extremely poor in heavy metals, they'd never get around to fission. Maybe fusion bombs will forever be impractical without a fission kickstart?
  - kyriakos 4y ago
    Would they be able to reach anywhere else in their system though? In that case availability of heavy metals on their home planet becomes a non issue.
anyonecancode 4y ago
Maybe this just reflect poorly on my numerical intuition, but it seems to me the forest may be dark because it's more of very sparse forest? As in, no matter how many trees there are, they are so far apart from each other that it's really more of a steppe. When "nearby" is tens or hundreds of light years, and most things are not nearby, it seems there's plenty of both time and space to make it very believable that there's just little to no overlap between when detectable civilizations and civilizations able to listen coincide.
- XorNot 4y ago
  The problem is exponential growth destroys all. You can't explore the universe very quickly on human timescales...but presuming the trend lines of technological civilization hold up, eventually immortal sufficiently-intelligent Von Neumann probes can rapidly and easily (hundreds of thousands of years, but a blink of the eye geologically) explore the entire galaxy. Even if it took a few million years to do, that's still far less time then the Earth has been habitable and had life. So the question of course is still where are they?
  - pencilguin 4y ago
    Civilizations will sort out neatly into expansionist and stable. Stable civilizations will be, generally, much, much older than expansionist neighbors, and so incomprehensibly more advanced. Thus, each expansionist civilization will spread out to encompass an exponentially increasing number of advanced, stable civilizations, and antagonize an increasing number of them. Soon, they will encounter one that chooses to put them in their place, and maybe just wipe them out. So we may think of the galaxy as an archipelago of stable civilizations that interact little, with splashes of expansionism in between that encounter and annoy them, and are swiftly contained. Such expansions are exceedingly unlikely to get to us before such an event curtails them.
    - nullc 4y ago
      I think that model only works if the stable civilizations are advanced enough to survive arbitrary threats, otherwise they'll just get wiped out by chance over time and replaced with expansionist ones which are more robust against anything other than being systematically destroyed by something they irritated. ... plus to destroy an expansionist civilization you'd have to have significantly superior expansionist technology. I.e. how do you destroy an expansionist fleet which has scaled up to the point that it's furthest point from you is increasing close to the speed of light?
jonathankoren 4y ago
The premise of the DFH is just so bizzare. Essentially godlike aliens go around killing other aliens for hell of it. It'S fOr SeLf ProTeCtIoN! Please. If you're a godlike alien, you don't actually have to care about anyone else. Hell, not only do you actually have to deal with intergalactic distances, we're talking about a plan that requires at this point quadrillions of individuals to be dedicated to multiple 100,000 year plans of preêmptive genocide against literally unknown civilizations. I'm sorry. But I'm not supposed to suspend disbelief for serious discussions. The older I get, the more I find these debates as tedious as medieval demonologists wondering about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and who is the fifth viscount of the third circle of Hell, and just what exactly is his bailiwick.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  > Essentially godlike aliens go around killing other aliens for hell of it. It'S fOr SeLf ProTeCtIoN! Please. Isn't the point the point that they aren't godlike? They're glass cannons, capable of creating weapons with incredible power, but incapable of defending themselves against that same class of weapon.
- nine_k 4y ago
  An easy illustration. Godlike aliens -> humans. Other civs -> wasps, mosquitos, cockroaches. Not a real existential threat, but enough of a nuisance. Wasps, even though they live in a complex culture from their point of view, have no chance to understand human culture. Not wanting to be accidentally stung sort of has a chance to be understood by both sides, very-very approximately.
  - dmichulke 4y ago
    0. Wasps are everywhere (on the planet) and they can't destroy you. 1. Wasp-Aliens are everywhere in the universe. 2. Therefore they know how to travel with some speed v. 3. Therefore they know how to accelerate objects to speed v. 4. They can launch said objects towards your planet. 5. Therefore they can destroy you, so assumption 0 doesn't hold.
- 4y ago

92 points by throw0101c 4y ago

For those unaware of the Dark Forest Hypothesis (DFH): > “Dark forest theory” holds that civilizations fear one another so much that they don’t dare to reveal themselves lest they immediately be considered a potential threat and destroyed. * https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/20/technologys-dark-forest/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/20/technologys-dark-forest/ > In The Dark Forest, a 2008 novel which Discover Magazine calls "a dark answer to the Fermi paradox",[138] Chinese writer Liu Cixin envisions aliens as being paranoid and wanting to kill life because it might be future competition. Other aliens dare not reveal themselves because they might be considered a threat, and they stay quiet as if in a dark forest.[139] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Communication_is_dangerous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Communication_is...

authpor 4y ago
sounds like if they know about human governments, they will certainly hide themselves, or come looking for a fight cuz they're likely to get one... then again, given the technology necessary for traveling that far, it wouldn't be a fun fight for them, so no point in coming.
- postalrat 4y ago
  In the books the weapons to destroy entire star systems can be used seemingly without to much cost.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    I think that’s more because any cost is acceptable if you are talking about the continuance of your civilization. We could spend a million years building a single civilization destroying weapon, and it would still be worth it. Since we’re not likely to encounter another civilization much more often. Of course, humans couldn’t really stay interested in something that long, so the practical range is probably a few decades :P
fartsucker69 4y ago
This is not a particularly accurate representation. It's a game theoretical problem. Because of the huge delay in communication over interstellar distances, you can not adequately communicate with other in diplomatic terms. due to the speed of light limitation, if you contact another civilization to e.g. propose to establish diplomatic relations, you will only find out if they sent a big ass rocket as a reply in about the same time it would take to receive a message as an answer. Making certain assumptions about the technology available, like: No instant communication possible, solar system or at least planet destroying weapons possible, etc., then in purely game theoretical terms if a civilization seeks to minimize the chance of being destroyed, it then becomes a good strategy for a civilization to hide and not reveal themselves, and immediately attack and destroy any civilization that should make the mistake to reveal themselves by e.g. sending out a message. thus giving them no chance to harm you before they are destroyed themselves. it's only a hypothesis, and even at a superficial glance there are alternative strategies that might end up being better on average, much better if each civilization is willing to take some risk, etc.

heyitsguay 4y ago

I appreciated the write-up but i think it runs into one of the issues I've encountered myself messing around with netlogo, where for complex agent-based stuff, you sort of end up baking the result into your modeling choices. For the three civ variables, there are no constraints or trade-offs between them, and all comparisons are monotonic (more power + detection always better, less visibility always better). It's cool to see the visualizations and quantify the progression, but I don't think you need to run the sim to predict the result.

jabthedang 4y ago

zwilliamson 4y ago

Dark Forest theory best portrayed in the 2nd book of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past series by Liu Cixin (sci-fi at its best) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23168817 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23168817

jondiggsit 4y ago
As described in the book, the ease with which advanced civs can destroy other civs would likely cancel out any % of visibility in this model.
- c048 4y ago
  Which is inline with the simulation (and real world military); the ability to detect is more important.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    It’s not though? In the sim you can only kill civs with a lower power.
    - c048 4y ago
      "Powerful civs that are good at detecting others seem to always do well, even if they are themselves visible." Power is important, but not the most important factor. He states that he needs to collect more data, but within his current dataset there is a clear and visible preference in the surviving population.
Rioghasarig 4y ago
I mean that's where the term came from, after all.
- glogla 4y ago
  The words might be, but the context and approach goes back to at the very least to The Killing Star by Charles R. Pellegrino and George Zebrowski published in 1995, who wrote: We ask that you try just one more thought experiment. Imagine yourself taking a stroll through Manhattan, somewhere north of 68th street, deep inside Central Park, late at night. It would be nice to meet someone friendly, but you know that the park is dangerous at night. That's when the monsters come out. There's always a strong undercurrent of drug dealings, muggings, and occasional homicides. It is not easy to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. They dress alike, and the weapons are concealed. The only difference is intent, and you can't read minds. Stay in the dark long enough and you may hear an occasional distance shriek or blunder across a body. How do you survive the night? The last thing you want to do is shout, "I'm here!" The next to last thing you want to do is reply to someone who shouts, "I'm a friend!" What you would like to do is find a policeman, or get out of the park. But you don't want to make noise or move towards a light where you might be spotted, and it is difficult to find either a policeman or your way out without making yourself known. Your safest option is to hunker down and wait for daylight, then safely walk out. There are, of course, a few obvious differences between Central Park and the universe. There is no policeman. There is no way out. And the night never ends. But of course, even Stephen Hawking was talking about this for decades. I find it bit of hilarious social commentary, that some Chinese author copied it and now people claim he invented it.

efferifick 4y ago

Shouldn't there be the possibility for civilizations to join forces?

bee_rider 4y ago
Yeah, it would be interesting I think to add an aggression variable. If two species meet and their combined aggression is high enough, they fight (with some large bonus going to species with some combination of aggression and ability to detect, as it is assumed they can get off a devastating first strike). If the species are not aggressive, they can presumably at least the weaker of the two should get some large bonus. Of course then we could play with the first strike bonus and the alliance bonus, and get whatever result we want from the simulation.
imglorp 4y ago
There's also a huge damping variable due to communication latency between star systems, and of course travel time if you want two armadas to gang up on a third system. In fact this is exactly the two generals problem: you really don't want to launch an armada without confirmation from your ally, and if you do launch it, you will have the two generals problem recalling it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Generals%27_Problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Generals%27_Problem
- efferifick 4y ago
  I was suggesting a simpler solution: just merge the two civs into one. This would be equivalent to having only one general.

michaelmrose 4y ago

I question the meaning of saying if civs kill each other then it's a dangerous world out there which is inherently circular. I question power and visibility being independent variables. I question the idea of needing to be more powerful to destroy each other when a weaker society could still kill the other simply by attacking first. A kinetic care package could spend as little as 7 hours inside Pluto's orbit and it wouldn't have to be mountain sized. It might indeed only follow it's own light by a small increment leaving even a much more advanced tech with few options. Overall entirely pointless.

rl3 4y ago

The model is flawed and fails to account for the activation of the XCOM project: humanity's first, and last line of defense against the alien threat. In all seriousness though, if the universe is indeed populous then there's probably been innumerable alien XCOM projects. I also can't help but think that we usually fail to appreciate the technology gaps involved. Human beings in a span of a few hundred years managed to go from the advent of electricity and industrial society, to artificial intelligence—all in what amounts to not even a blink of a cosmic eye. Yet recursively improving intelligence is conceivable to us. 2001: A Space Odyssey did a wonderful job illustrating such gaps. I think there's a good chance most civilizations (ours included) would not be equipped to even comprehend how to detect or fight an advanced civilization, let alone understand their very nature.

SkyMarshal 4y ago
> Human beings in a span of a few hundred years managed to go from the advent of electricity and industrial society, to artificial intelligence—all in what amounts to not even a blink of a cosmic eye. Also keep in mind that Humanity is a latecomer to the universe. We weren't the first species to evolve on Earth. First came the dinosaurs, about 230m years ago, and lasted till about 66m years ago, then went extinct. Then came humanity. But there may be planets in our galaxy or other ones where intelligent life happened to be the first species to evolve on that planet. If so, they have a multi-hundred million year head start on us, evolutionarily, scientifically, technologically. Yeah, there's no possible XCOM project against that. We just have to hope they're benevolent. (And if they've solved scarcity with energy->matter conversion, as in Star Trek, they may very well be - there's nothing we have that they could need or want)
EamonnMR 4y ago
I won't spoil the three body series for you, but it definitely has a 2001 scale representation with the power differences between civilizations.
- BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  It is probably the greatest moment of the second book. I was giddy reading it, because it feels so logical, so realistic, and our reaction so congruent. I love Xcom but it very much portraits the absolute opposite of the 3 body problem trilogy.

sinuhe69 4y ago

For me, it’s rather probable that advanced civilizations will collapse or/and kill themselves. It happened with civilizations on earth, it certainly can happen with other civilizations in the universe. Destroying other makes no sense because the risk is much higher than the reward. There is more than plenty of resources out there for any possible civilization.

postalrat 4y ago
And are you willing to risk the chance that some other civilization won't share that belief and will instead choose to destroy you?
- GoblinSlayer 4y ago
  Pascal wager has no winning strategy.
sholladay 4y ago
> There is more than plenty of resources out there for any possible civilization. It looks that way to us because of the limited rate at which we consume resources relative to the scale of the cosmos. But our rate of consumption isn’t anywhere near an upper bound for a civilization. We’re not even a Type 1 on the Kardashev scale. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
Thorrez 4y ago
Sounds related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
MichaelCollins 4y ago
I think that the speed of light limitation is insurmountable. Advanced civilizations become insular and stay close in space to themselves to minimize communication latency. They all become addicted to Internets and never go exploring very far, if at all.
- 4y ago

majou 4y ago

Is it conceivable for a civilization to invent cheap space travel, but not nuclear weapons?

dmichulke 4y ago
Couldn't you just launch a sufficiently fast and heavy object into another civ's planets? I don't see how nuclear weapons are necessary for destruction if that is your point.
EamonnMR 4y ago
If there's some obvious-but-not-to-us way to break Newtonian physics without ever figuring out atoms... maybe.
Archelaos 4y ago
I civilization of intelligent funghi?
NateEag 4y ago
It may not be realistic, but it is conceivable. The Road Not Taken by Harry Turtledove is a fun take on something like this concept.
bpodgursky 4y ago
Maybe if a civilization evolved on a world extremely poor in heavy metals, they'd never get around to fission. Maybe fusion bombs will forever be impractical without a fission kickstart?
- kyriakos 4y ago
  Would they be able to reach anywhere else in their system though? In that case availability of heavy metals on their home planet becomes a non issue.

anyonecancode 4y ago

Maybe this just reflect poorly on my numerical intuition, but it seems to me the forest may be dark because it's more of very sparse forest? As in, no matter how many trees there are, they are so far apart from each other that it's really more of a steppe. When "nearby" is tens or hundreds of light years, and most things are not nearby, it seems there's plenty of both time and space to make it very believable that there's just little to no overlap between when detectable civilizations and civilizations able to listen coincide.

XorNot 4y ago
The problem is exponential growth destroys all. You can't explore the universe very quickly on human timescales...but presuming the trend lines of technological civilization hold up, eventually immortal sufficiently-intelligent Von Neumann probes can rapidly and easily (hundreds of thousands of years, but a blink of the eye geologically) explore the entire galaxy. Even if it took a few million years to do, that's still far less time then the Earth has been habitable and had life. So the question of course is still where are they?
- pencilguin 4y ago
  Civilizations will sort out neatly into expansionist and stable. Stable civilizations will be, generally, much, much older than expansionist neighbors, and so incomprehensibly more advanced. Thus, each expansionist civilization will spread out to encompass an exponentially increasing number of advanced, stable civilizations, and antagonize an increasing number of them. Soon, they will encounter one that chooses to put them in their place, and maybe just wipe them out. So we may think of the galaxy as an archipelago of stable civilizations that interact little, with splashes of expansionism in between that encounter and annoy them, and are swiftly contained. Such expansions are exceedingly unlikely to get to us before such an event curtails them.
  - nullc 4y ago
    I think that model only works if the stable civilizations are advanced enough to survive arbitrary threats, otherwise they'll just get wiped out by chance over time and replaced with expansionist ones which are more robust against anything other than being systematically destroyed by something they irritated. ... plus to destroy an expansionist civilization you'd have to have significantly superior expansionist technology. I.e. how do you destroy an expansionist fleet which has scaled up to the point that it's furthest point from you is increasing close to the speed of light?

jonathankoren 4y ago

The premise of the DFH is just so bizzare. Essentially godlike aliens go around killing other aliens for hell of it. It'S fOr SeLf ProTeCtIoN! Please. If you're a godlike alien, you don't actually have to care about anyone else. Hell, not only do you actually have to deal with intergalactic distances, we're talking about a plan that requires at this point quadrillions of individuals to be dedicated to multiple 100,000 year plans of preêmptive genocide against literally unknown civilizations. I'm sorry. But I'm not supposed to suspend disbelief for serious discussions. The older I get, the more I find these debates as tedious as medieval demonologists wondering about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and who is the fifth viscount of the third circle of Hell, and just what exactly is his bailiwick.

MichaelCollins 4y ago
> Essentially godlike aliens go around killing other aliens for hell of it. It'S fOr SeLf ProTeCtIoN! Please. Isn't the point the point that they aren't godlike? They're glass cannons, capable of creating weapons with incredible power, but incapable of defending themselves against that same class of weapon.
nine_k 4y ago
An easy illustration. Godlike aliens -> humans. Other civs -> wasps, mosquitos, cockroaches. Not a real existential threat, but enough of a nuisance. Wasps, even though they live in a complex culture from their point of view, have no chance to understand human culture. Not wanting to be accidentally stung sort of has a chance to be understood by both sides, very-very approximately.
- dmichulke 4y ago
  0. Wasps are everywhere (on the planet) and they can't destroy you. 1. Wasp-Aliens are everywhere in the universe. 2. Therefore they know how to travel with some speed v. 3. Therefore they know how to accelerate objects to speed v. 4. They can launch said objects towards your planet. 5. Therefore they can destroy you, so assumption 0 doesn't hold.
4y ago