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Beyond “Fermi’s Paradox” XVI: What Is the “Dark Forest” Hypothesis?

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Re: Beyond “Fermi’s Paradox” XVI: What Is the “Dark Forest” Hypothesis?

#51

Post by evrydayhustling »

Retric wrote: post #46
evrydayhustling wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We can already hit tiny (Ed: planet sized) targets at interstellar distances. Planets are relatively speaking quite large targets especially if you’re tossing several rocks. This stuff doesn’t need sci-fi style new physics, just the kind of infrastructure we could actually build.

What tech are you thinking of? Remember it's not just the distance but the speed. How would we course correct a relativistic object once the target was close enough to estimate the desired change?

Re: Beyond “Fermi’s Paradox” XVI: What Is the “Dark Forest” Hypothesis?

#52

Post by roenxi »

bobcostas55 wrote: post #24
evrydayhustling wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 populatio…

>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.

Fortunately, it is possible to imagine other scenarios. For example; it would take relatively little energy to deflect such a missile and there is likely to be a lot of time to detect it's incoming presence assuming that some sort of planet-like mass is required to host all the technology to create a relativistic speed accelerating engine.

Re: Beyond “Fermi’s Paradox” XVI: What Is the “Dark Forest” Hypothesis?

#53

Post by dragonelite »

rnhmjoj wrote: post #29

> In other words, the finite nature of resources will ultimately pit one civilization against another as they all struggle to sustain their growth. I'm not sure this constraint is so strict to force a strong competition for survival, given how vast the universe is. It seems to me this projecting our earth-bound mentality of limited resources to a whole different scale, where it may not really apply.

Once we are earth loose we will be solar bound and human factions will fight for solar resources/domination.

Re: Beyond “Fermi’s Paradox” XVI: What Is the “Dark Forest” Hypothesis?

#54

Post by jerf »

Archelaos wrote: post #22

What makes the dark forest hypothesis not so conving to me is that it has the presupposition that it is indeed possible to hide. An advanced civilization close to us that is surveying the sky for signs of life would have very likely identified earth as a very promissing candidate due to the presence of methane and oxygen in its atmosphere at the same time. So our star system would have long been under surveillance, b…

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.

Re: Beyond “Fermi’s Paradox” XVI: What Is the “Dark Forest” Hypothesis?

#55

Post by jeremyjh »

jerf wrote: post #54
Archelaos wrote: post #22

What makes the dark forest hypothesis not so conving to me is that it has the presupposition that it is indeed possible to hide. An advanced civilization close to us that is surveying the sky for signs of life would have very likely identified earth as a very promissing candidate due to the presence of methane and oxygen in its atmosphere at the same time. So our star system would have long been under surveillance, b…

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 believ…

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

Re: Beyond “Fermi’s Paradox” XVI: What Is the “Dark Forest” Hypothesis?

#56

Post by rybosworld »

InsomniacL wrote: post #23

I have a theory that intelligence isn't particularly rare however the rate of development may be. It has long been alluded to in Sci-Fi that humanity's rate of development is fast (Humans vs Vulcans, Halo universe, etc). I imagine that one of the great barriers is that a civilisation with a lower rate of development may stuck in an industrial type era unable to progress before doing irreparable damage to their enviro…

That seems like an idealization of humanity imo, and is common in sci-fi. The most likely scenario is that we are average in every way.

Re: Beyond “Fermi’s Paradox” XVI: What Is the “Dark Forest” Hypothesis?

#57

Post by AlgorithmicTime »

tener wrote: post #42

The Dark Forest makes so many (explicit and implicit) assumptions it starts to feel extremely dodgy. There are also falacious arguments embedded within it which fail to imagine numerous possible scenarios simply by following "tried and true" paths copy-pasted from sci-fi novels. TLDR: The forest analogy fails because civilizations are not singular entities (like animals are) but rather complex structures which can me…

>Expansionist civilizations with unlimited space certainly can do that. But does it really bring any benefits? The more complex the societal structure, the harder it is to change. Perhaps there is a critical mass above which it becomes detrimental to multiply beyond and all "sane" civilizations will stay below it.

If even one civilization were expansionist in the history of our galaxy, we would expect the whole place to be full of their descendants. Evolution works that way.

Re: Beyond “Fermi’s Paradox” XVI: What Is the “Dark Forest” Hypothesis?

#58

Post by jamiek88 »

jeremyjh wrote: post #55
jerf wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 believ…

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

Light years with the right telescope. It’s just spectroscopy.

Re: Beyond “Fermi’s Paradox” XVI: What Is the “Dark Forest” Hypothesis?

#59

Post by david-gpu »

jeremyjh wrote: post #55
jerf wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 believ…

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

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.

Re: Beyond “Fermi’s Paradox” XVI: What Is the “Dark Forest” Hypothesis?

#60

Post by marcosdumay »

evrydayhustling wrote: post #51
Retric wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can already hit tiny (Ed: planet sized) targets at interstellar distances. Planets are relatively speaking quite large targets especially if you’re tossing several rocks. This stuff doesn’t need sci-fi style new physics, just the kind of infrastructure we could actually build.

What tech are you thinking of? Remember it's not just the distance but the speed. How would we course correct a relativistic object once the target was close enough to estimate the desired change?

Well, you do that with the same kind of engines that propels them at relativistic speed.

Anyway, it's not a target and forget situation, because relativistic ships get a (relatively) lot of drag in space.

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