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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?

#71

Post by yreg »

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…

I agree with your other critisising points but I think presumptions (2) and (3) make sense somewhat.

It's safe to assume that for any self-replicating life evolution takes place, universally. The genes (no matter on their biological implementation) are always evaluated by one fitness function only – whether they succeed in spreading around.

Life isn't optimised for surviving per se, but it is optimised for replicating.

The same in a way applies for civilisations. The ones that are bad at expanding are massively outexpanded/outnumbered by the ones that are good at expanding. Unless expanding fundamentally always leads to civilisation's downfall (but I don't see how it would?)

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

#72

Post by chadwittman »

zhynn wrote: post #27

A group collaborating will have better chance of survival than an individual. The upside of working with your neighbors outweighs the benefit of destroying them.

Tell that to the species we've eradicated while pursuing our goals.

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

#73

Post by myrmidon »

NiceWayToDoIT wrote: post #17

In the near future it is more likely we will wipe out ourselves either due to Nuclear War, Global Warming, rogue AI or similar, than some hostile alien civilization will get us. It seems that we are those hostile aliens for ourselves.

Do you think there is a "real" (>1% over the next century) risk for humanity to wipe itself out, or just that the hostile-alien risk is way beyond negligible in comparison?

Because all current climate doom-erism notwithstanding-- humanity extinction seems impossible to achieve to me via climate change or nuclear war; rogue autonomous self-replicating systems might be a danger, but are too far beyound current tech to estimate risk IMO...

Very curious if/how/why you disagree on this!

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

#74

Post by yreg »

marcosdumay wrote: post #64
yreg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How could the eradicators detect and destroy their victims before we detected any signal at all from the victims? Even if they destroy them within say a thousand years, then at any given time there would be only few civilizations at the right age to be broadcasting. And not very loud at that. We listen only to a miniscule portion of the Galaxy. IMO, Fermi's question shouldn't be "Why can't we hear the few civs that…

The Fermi question is a lot closer to "how come Earth wasn't colonized before we even appear?" than "how come we can't see anybody?".

Yes, that's a cleaner way to put it.

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

#75

Post by Moodles »

kadoban wrote: post #63
snowwrestler wrote: post #48

To me the most likely back of the napkin answer to the Fermi paradox is that aliens are elsewhere in time. The Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 light years across but about 13.5 billion years old. So it’s like 135,000x deeper in the time direction than the distance direction. We’re in the light cones of all the stars we can see, and as far as we know, we can’t get out of them. If a civilization ended even 100 years…

If true, that ends up meaning that alien civilizations are short-lived, right? That doesn't bode well for us.

Carl Sagan thought this, though he lived during the cold war so it's not surprising he did.

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

#76

Post by mikro2nd »

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.

Precisely. IMHO any civilisation capable of interstellar travel (at any speed) has solved all necessary questions/problems of resource/energy acquisition and control and has no need to plunder the resources of others.

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

#78

Post by bob33212 »

kadoban wrote: post #63
snowwrestler wrote: post #48

To me the most likely back of the napkin answer to the Fermi paradox is that aliens are elsewhere in time. The Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 light years across but about 13.5 billion years old. So it’s like 135,000x deeper in the time direction than the distance direction. We’re in the light cones of all the stars we can see, and as far as we know, we can’t get out of them. If a civilization ended even 100 years…

If true, that ends up meaning that alien civilizations are short-lived, right? That doesn't bode well for us.

Civilizations are only detectable for a short period of time. Once they understand physics, they no longer need radio waves or Dyson spheres or to travel through what we call spacetime.

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

#79

Post by mokus »

marcosdumay wrote: post #64
yreg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How could the eradicators detect and destroy their victims before we detected any signal at all from the victims? Even if they destroy them within say a thousand years, then at any given time there would be only few civilizations at the right age to be broadcasting. And not very loud at that. We listen only to a miniscule portion of the Galaxy. IMO, Fermi's question shouldn't be "Why can't we hear the few civs that…

The Fermi question is a lot closer to "how come Earth wasn't colonized before we even appear?" than "how come we can't see anybody?".

How do we know we aren’t the colonists?

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

#80

Post by im3w1l »

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…

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.

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