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

Anyone interested in this topic should spend some time on Isaac Arthur's series about the Fermi Paradox. There's an episode on this called Hidden Aliens [1]. It's a flawed idea.

If you assume that we live in an FTL universe subject to the laws of thermodynamics (as I do), mass and energy (being basically the same thing as we know) are the ultimate limiting factor. This basically means bigger is better. Remember such a civilization is likely thinking on time lines where a trillion years is a blink of an eye.

So how will a spacefaring civilization evolve? Likely into a Dyson swarm for three primary reasons:

1. It requires no new physics. It's essentially an engineering problem that only requires materials as complex as stainless steel and energy tech no more complex than solar power. If you get better tech (eg fusion, graphene for construction) this outcome becomes more likely not less;

2. Orbitals are a highly efficient way of creating living area. A full Dyson swarm around our Sun would likely consume 3. The energy output of the Sun is essentially "free".

A full Dyson swarm makes you a Kardashev-2 (K2) civilization. On the Carl Sagan scale, that means you're consuming ~10^26 Watts of power. And that's just for one Sun. Now consider:

1. Such a civilization is capable of sterilizing the galaxy in 100,000 years if they choose to;

2. There's really no hiding from such a civilization;

3. There's really no hiding a Dyson swarm from a Dyson swarm from an advanced civilization due to the IR signature it would produce. This has nothing to do with say radio communications.

Remember with the Fermi Paradox you don't have to establish what the average civilization does. Say there are 5 spacefaring civilizations in the Milky Way. What are the odds that all of them hide? Now imagine there are 100. The odds of them all hiding are much lower. And it only really takes one who decides to build Dyson Swarms and expand beyond their star to be detectable.

So I can imagine a splinter of a civilization decides to "hide". A good example of this would be if fusion becomes viable. One could sink habitats into Neptune, which is not particularly dense, and probably live there undisturbed and unfound for eons is quite high. That's probably more hidden than, say, trying to hide between stars.

It's just not likely that as the number of civilizations increases that all of them go that route.

My view is that spacefaring life is just quite rare. We may well be the only one within out light cone within the Milky Way. Why that is is an interesting topic.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEBn8bc0k-I

Or maybe that carbon based intelligent life that wanted our planet it's us.

We were almost wiped out after the first large impact. The impact that happened a few millennia after we killed all those awful looking smarty octopus that lived in this planet. But we could not defend against the large Comet, it come from behind the Sun and way too fast. We had minutes notice.

Some microbes survived...And here we are again typing on our keyboards. :-)

Yes, it seems that the Fermi paradox implies that other civs progress beyond what we consider signs of intelligent life. The great filter seems less likely as we get close to colonizing other planets, and then other solar systems.

that is what I thought when I read the three-body problem.

If you can manipulate space-time at the levels exposed in the book you can trivially build orbitals that will host trillions of beings and live in a post-scarcity society for millennia, after which your society is likely to disappear waaay before you run out of space and resources.

I mean, maybe. Honestly hard for me to imagine war actually going on between two interstellar civilizations. But even if it did, it seems like in 99% of all cases, that would leave at least one of the two civilizations still around. We're looking for explanations, in this hypothesis, that leave 98% of all time with no civilizations.