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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?

#151

Post by hnbad »

scarmig wrote: post #108
hnbad wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering where climate change is heading, it's surprising anyone doesn't think this.

Climate change is very real and worth addressing, but it's extremely unlikely to wipe out human civilization. It's just going to be costly and kill millions, not billions.

Can you clarify what you mean by "millions"? The Syrian civil war is estimated to have killed just short of half a million people. The pandemic easily has a global death toll of roughly 4 million people so far. The Chalisa famine of 1783/1784 is estimated to have killed 11 million people. The Spanish flu killed at least 17 million people, though some of the more dramatizing estimates place it closer to 100 million. According to some researchers, climate change is already killing 100,000 a year[1]. So I assume you're not thinking of just seven or eight digits unless you're exceedingly optimistic.

Climate change will make parts of the world inhabitable that are currently populated by humans. It will also result in crop failures, which will cause famines. In some cases formerly native crops will no longer be supported by the changing local climate or farmland may become completely unusable. Potable water will become harder to source. Water contamination is a source of many deadly diseases.

Even if we assume most of the deaths will be concentrated in places like Africa or the Indian subcontinent, the global economy relies on these places for resources and cheap labor. People in ongoing climate catastrophes also don't tend to stay put and die in an orderly fashion, they become refugees or riot against their governments. Things can get politically messy even in the nations next door as humans tend to be uncomfortable with political chaos and mass deaths.

But unlike the Spanish flu, or the potato famine, or COVID, climate change is not a temporary blip that happens and then goes away. If all the carriers of the plague have died, nobody dies from the plague unless they get infected handling the dead. Famines can starve millions to death but once there's another harvest the survivors have food again. Climate change isn't like that. If climate change creates a drought, that's not just a drought, that's now dry season and it will be dry season every year from now.

There are currently 7.8 billion humans. There's absolutely no reason to believe climate change can't kill billions, especially once it's managed to kill the first hundreds of millions.

Keep in mind that it's not about "addressing" climate change. It's not a moldy bathroom tile that you need to clean up or replace before the mold spreads everywhere. It's a fire our entire way of life is fueling every single day. We know what needs to be done to slow it down to survivable levels (or at least levels that are lethal for less than 1% of us) but we can't just pass legislation or appeal to personal responsibility to do that because it involves changes that would be economical suicide for anyone doing it alone. The world economy is playing a game of chicken with each other and nobody is bluffing.

[1]: https://grist.org/climate/how-many-people-has-climate-change...

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

#152

Post by aeternum »

obedm wrote: post #145
jmull wrote: post #139

I love that series -- just an incredible, imaginative, unique perspective -- but the dark forest hypothesis just doesn't make sense. It's orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude less energy to communicate with (including obscuring your origin, if you want) than destroy a civilization. And communication has potential benefits (cooperation) that destruction does not. Civilizations that communicated would very quickl…

I think dark forest is the best explanation so far. If what you say is true, it should've been true for earlier human civilizations too. Why didn't the Chinese and Japanese civilizations unite to conquer others? Why didn't the Mongols unite with whoever else to conquer, instead of Genghis Khan doing it all with a bunch of Mongols in horses? Human civilization is a dark forest that only changed with global trade. The…

Historically it's extremely rare that the conquerors killed everyone in the cities they conquered. Instead they enslaved some, or let them mostly live and just taxed them. Even with other species that regularly attack humans (tigers or even mosquitos), we have not exterminated them.

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

#153

Post by luckyandroid »

jmull wrote: post #139

I love that series -- just an incredible, imaginative, unique perspective -- but the dark forest hypothesis just doesn't make sense. It's orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude less energy to communicate with (including obscuring your origin, if you want) than destroy a civilization. And communication has potential benefits (cooperation) that destruction does not. Civilizations that communicated would very quickl…

> "Chains of Suspicion" assumes civilizations cannot communicate, yet the dark forest hypothesis assume civilizations can destroy each other > If you can physically interact, you can communicate

I think you misunderstood what they meant by "communicate". They don't mean "reach with a message", they mean "engage in back and forth communication with both sides understanding the conversation".

We're still struggling to talk to dolphins, but technically we could nuke them all to death if we ever got scared they were rising up.

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

#154

Post by Retric »

edgyquant wrote: post #140
Retric wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t say we have, just that we can. The closest Star is ~268,770 AU where voyager 1 is only 152.6 AU. However, being able to target a probe within 50 feet at 150AU, means hitting a planet sized target at 4.25 light years. Building a probe large enough and fast enough to do significant damage at the other side is the hard part, not targeting. Calculating where a planet sized object would be by the time our probe g…

Voyager is not traveling a relativistic speeds. We could definitely defend against someone sending voyager at us.

That’s moving the goalposts. I said we could hit a planet at those distances not that we can create a relativistic impactor.

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

#155

Post by fiftyfifty »

miltondts wrote: post #126
aetherson wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short lived on those timescales, yes. But not necessarily short lived in terms of our perspective. If we imagine that in the last 5 billion years, there have been a good solid 10,000 post-industrial civilizations, and each of those civilizations has lasted 10,000 years (in the post-industrial stage where they're detectable), then that implies that of the last 5,000,000,000 years, 100,000,000 of them have been host to…

> if you've colonized say 20 stars, what disaster could possibly end your civilization? Unfortunately, war with another civilization.

If the stars are reasonably close together a supernova would do it. Even a relatively distant supernova (like 30-40 light years) would likely render most planets inhabitable for a long time.

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

#156

Post by Pokepokalypse »

scarmig wrote: post #108
hnbad wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering where climate change is heading, it's surprising anyone doesn't think this.

Climate change is very real and worth addressing, but it's extremely unlikely to wipe out human civilization. It's just going to be costly and kill millions, not billions.

I wouldn't say it's extremely unlikely. Maybe not the primary effects won't kill us. But when nations start to struggle with the primary effects, the resource shortages are going to cause conflict - which will almost certainly lead to wars, with these weapons, which will kill billions.

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

#157

Post by NiceWayToDoIT »

hnbad wrote: post #117
NiceWayToDoIT wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think, or rather I hope there are civilization that as a part of their evolution had cooperation, sharing, exploration and innovation embedded as main and prevalent strategies of survival and thriving. I would like to think that there is as in magic fairy tails of old, civilization where good prevails. Where leaders (or what ever mechanism of decision they have) and those in power - are not easily corrupted a…

You're describing humans. Up to the point where you hope their leaders aren't corruptible. The problem with humans mostly comes down to centralization. We're an extremely cooperative species until we're put in an environment that promotes competition and punishes cooperation. Centralization of power is one such environment. And it's very hard to undo at this point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs Corruption is not just leaders it is a network of beneficiaries, like a snake with thousand heads, and regardless how many you cut new will grow. And we do not know how to get out of that mold. And democracy in uneducated society simply does not work. And we do not have it. All governments are aristocracies. News media displays of "busting" corruption is just "bread in circuses" of this age, media manipulations of wide populous while business as usual continues, hypnosis of population by spin offs and demagogues narrative.

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

#158

Post by cogman10 »

ryandvm wrote: post #98
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…

That and the fact that civilizations probably only broadcast EM radiation out into the void for a short period of time before they start getting into energy efficiency and switch over to more efficient communication technologies.

This is my theory.

You look at human civilization and that's exactly what's happened. We started off by broadcasting everything as loud as we could (which isn't very loud) and we've slowly transitioned to signals that are both quieter and don't really survive escaping the atmosphere.

I can't imagine an advanced species wouldn't follow a similar communications path. The only way we detect them is if they specifically target our spot in the sky with focused EM for a very long time, generations! After all, they have no clue when we would be in our evolutionary path.

And for that to happen, the species would have to first find us. Not just find us, find us while we are still listening.

And this is all with the assumption that FTL communication/observation is even a possibility (It likely isn't).

IMO, the simplest answer is that FTL communication and travel is impossible. Advanced civilizations across the galaxy have all come to the same conclusion.

We might be able to explore our own neighboring stars throughout generations but it's unlikely we'll be able to ever send a message to another civilization that will get there while they are listening (without spending huge amounts of power).

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

#159

Post by cogman10 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #148
bob33212 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I question your use of "implies" there. It implies no such thing. What you suggest is one possible answer, nothing more.

Yup, to me it implies a darker problem, that FLT is something that can't be surpassed. All civs might advance to that understanding and decide to maybe just occupy nearby solar systems and nothing more.

We may not talk to them simply because it's both incredibly expensive and will yield nothing more than "Yup, we're stuck here, so are you".

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

#160

Post by xwolfi »

luckyandroid wrote: post #153
jmull wrote: post #139

I love that series -- just an incredible, imaginative, unique perspective -- but the dark forest hypothesis just doesn't make sense. It's orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude less energy to communicate with (including obscuring your origin, if you want) than destroy a civilization. And communication has potential benefits (cooperation) that destruction does not. Civilizations that communicated would very quickl…

> "Chains of Suspicion" assumes civilizations cannot communicate, yet the dark forest hypothesis assume civilizations can destroy each other > If you can physically interact, you can communicate I think you misunderstood what they meant by "communicate". They don't mean "reach with a message", they mean "engage in back and forth communication with both sides understanding the conversation". We're still struggling to…

But we're not struggling to talk to dolphins, they're struggling to materialize Shakespeare. We understand their structures and concerns more than they understand ours, and we observe them when they're still in the original soup.

ALl this to say: if they were rising up, we'd probably be able to create a bidirectional connection. We can only make sense "nuking them all to death", like you say in america to mean "defend our freedom and way of life", if we are able to communicate and are faced with a refusal to submit. The dolphin, so far, accept american hegemony - there's no purpose to nuking them.

So it is correct what you say, but here we're talking of civilizations. Civilizations worth nuking will always have a way to understand each others, otherwise there'd be no threat worth suppressing.

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