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IMO the dark forest hypothesis leads to fun books but makes little sense. If a civilization is capable of the unimaginable feat of interstellar travel, surely t

IMO the dark forest hypothesis leads to fun books but makes little sense. If a civilization is capable of the unimaginable feat of interstellar travel, surely their basic needs are well met and they aren't driven by base animal instincts anymore. They can probably engineer their own psyche. We humans will soon hit a population peak too, no exponental growth on the horizon. Also, I don't think the timescales make sense at all. It took 200 years for industrial civilization to develop, maybe 200 more for us to travel the stars, but it takes billions of years for intelligent life to develop. I don't think there could ever be two comparable civilizations emerging at the same time, close enough to one another to compete for resources. Either the aliens found Earth millions of years ago and prevent us from ever existing, or there aren't any aliens closeby. If you want an optimistic outlook on the far future which I think more plausible, read "Diaspora" by Greg Egan.

roenxi 2y ago
> If a civilization is capable of the unimaginable feat of interstellar travel, surely their basic needs are well met and they aren't driven by base animal instincts anymore. That is a bit like saying a human isn't driven by base instincts because we are so large and advanced compared to amoeba. We have concerns and options that are so far beyond the amoeba's comprehension that it makes no sense to even talk about an amoeba comprehending. And yet we are still driven by the same basic resource-acquisition logic as any microbe. Being more advanced again is unlikely to change that. Although I do agree that the Dark Forest hypothesis seems unlikely. It seems more reasonable to suggest that gravity wells and interstellar distances are a barrier that cannot be economically overcome, so intelligent life is bound to its own rock and eventually dies there. Then the odds just favour us not detecting life out there in whatever time period we've been looking.
PaulHoule 2y ago
There's the question of motivation. It seems possible that an advanced civilization could gravitationally disrupt a small planet like mercury, turn it into solar collectors and particle accelerators and create multiple-ton quantities of antimatter and use that for interstellar travel, but they would likely choose to do something else with those resources. People have a hard time thinking on a timescale of half a lifetime, never mind a lifetime or several lifetimes. The realistic version of the Bussard ramjet is not that you aim for c=0.1 or more, but rather with D-D fusion you can make hops of 1,000-10,000 au to Oort cloud bodies, you could possible gravitationally disrupt an object like Pluto and turn it into little ringworlds or other colonies. It might take people like that 10,000 years to make it to the next star but if they can make a comfortable lifestyle along the way why would they bother? And why would we even care enough to send them out on such a quest? Even colonizing Mars is problematic in the sense that it's inconceivable that you could bring anything back from Mars that would give us flatlanders any economic incentive to do it. It might be a gift to a population of a billion or so people that will live there, but profitable to us? No way. So even if you could colonize the galaxy with Von Neuman probes, it won't happen in your lifetime, your children's lifetime, etc. Our civilization might not be there to get the data from the first probes to reach other stars and the more steps removed the more the probability drops. Still there's just that tiny probability of a 'dark forest' scenario where somebody finds one of those things and decides to do something about it.
asdff 2y ago
That is if you assume the aliens will board a ship with conventional forces and enact a human style invasion. Now what if the alien was not even sentient. A giant configuration of some structure of chemistry just floating through interstellar space, catalyzing reactions when inputs are met, lying in wait otherwise. It might not “die” in the sense that any other mass of atoms doesn’t “die.” When faced with some input it might swell up in size, divide and diffuse elsewhere. Akin more to a random chemical interaction among a few molecules in pure solvent than life as we know it. Chemical structures like this could potentially be the wildfire patrolling the universe for fuel vs some spacefaring roman empire.
- thrance 2y ago
  One might argue encountering something like this would be more akin to a natural catastrophe (like a killer meteor) rather than an alien invasion. Stephen Baxter wrote a novel in which galaxies would be regularly wiped out by a natural phenomena, and that explains why there are no aliens in his universe. It's "Manifold: Space" if you're interested.
  - asdff 2y ago
    Life as we know it is just chemical reactions occuring within some membrane or walled environment. I don’t see why that definition couldn’t be extended to self sustaining chemical reactions that aren’t bound by a membrane or wall structure. The purpose of that membrane or wall is to just establish favorable conditions for the chemistry within the cell. If conditions could be established without such a membrane there wouldn’t be a reason for it. If reactions were energetically favorable across a wide spectrum of conditions there wouldn’t be a need for it either. There are some that consider fire to be a form of life. I don’t think that is such a wrong idea if we are to consider how wide the scope of possibilities are in the universe.

roenxi 2y ago

> If a civilization is capable of the unimaginable feat of interstellar travel, surely their basic needs are well met and they aren't driven by base animal instincts anymore. That is a bit like saying a human isn't driven by base instincts because we are so large and advanced compared to amoeba. We have concerns and options that are so far beyond the amoeba's comprehension that it makes no sense to even talk about an amoeba comprehending. And yet we are still driven by the same basic resource-acquisition logic as any microbe. Being more advanced again is unlikely to change that. Although I do agree that the Dark Forest hypothesis seems unlikely. It seems more reasonable to suggest that gravity wells and interstellar distances are a barrier that cannot be economically overcome, so intelligent life is bound to its own rock and eventually dies there. Then the odds just favour us not detecting life out there in whatever time period we've been looking.

PaulHoule 2y ago

There's the question of motivation. It seems possible that an advanced civilization could gravitationally disrupt a small planet like mercury, turn it into solar collectors and particle accelerators and create multiple-ton quantities of antimatter and use that for interstellar travel, but they would likely choose to do something else with those resources. People have a hard time thinking on a timescale of half a lifetime, never mind a lifetime or several lifetimes. The realistic version of the Bussard ramjet is not that you aim for c=0.1 or more, but rather with D-D fusion you can make hops of 1,000-10,000 au to Oort cloud bodies, you could possible gravitationally disrupt an object like Pluto and turn it into little ringworlds or other colonies. It might take people like that 10,000 years to make it to the next star but if they can make a comfortable lifestyle along the way why would they bother? And why would we even care enough to send them out on such a quest? Even colonizing Mars is problematic in the sense that it's inconceivable that you could bring anything back from Mars that would give us flatlanders any economic incentive to do it. It might be a gift to a population of a billion or so people that will live there, but profitable to us? No way. So even if you could colonize the galaxy with Von Neuman probes, it won't happen in your lifetime, your children's lifetime, etc. Our civilization might not be there to get the data from the first probes to reach other stars and the more steps removed the more the probability drops. Still there's just that tiny probability of a 'dark forest' scenario where somebody finds one of those things and decides to do something about it.

asdff 2y ago

That is if you assume the aliens will board a ship with conventional forces and enact a human style invasion. Now what if the alien was not even sentient. A giant configuration of some structure of chemistry just floating through interstellar space, catalyzing reactions when inputs are met, lying in wait otherwise. It might not “die” in the sense that any other mass of atoms doesn’t “die.” When faced with some input it might swell up in size, divide and diffuse elsewhere. Akin more to a random chemical interaction among a few molecules in pure solvent than life as we know it. Chemical structures like this could potentially be the wildfire patrolling the universe for fuel vs some spacefaring roman empire.

thrance 2y ago
One might argue encountering something like this would be more akin to a natural catastrophe (like a killer meteor) rather than an alien invasion. Stephen Baxter wrote a novel in which galaxies would be regularly wiped out by a natural phenomena, and that explains why there are no aliens in his universe. It's "Manifold: Space" if you're interested.
- asdff 2y ago
  Life as we know it is just chemical reactions occuring within some membrane or walled environment. I don’t see why that definition couldn’t be extended to self sustaining chemical reactions that aren’t bound by a membrane or wall structure. The purpose of that membrane or wall is to just establish favorable conditions for the chemistry within the cell. If conditions could be established without such a membrane there wouldn’t be a reason for it. If reactions were energetically favorable across a wide spectrum of conditions there wouldn’t be a need for it either. There are some that consider fire to be a form of life. I don’t think that is such a wrong idea if we are to consider how wide the scope of possibilities are in the universe.