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

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

#201

Post by tjalfi » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 6:13 PM UTC

kadoban wrote: post #162

aetherson wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe war between two spacefaring civilizations is too "easy". eg something like: throwing asteroids at ~the speed of light is necessarily a cheap thing to do once you're at that level, and everyone just dies. Like if on Earth nukes were something everyone could cook up in their backyard in an afternoon, we'd all be gone pretty quick. Not sure that really makes any sense though.

> Maybe war between two spacefaring civilizations is too "easy". eg something like: throwing asteroids at ~the speed of light is necessarily a cheap thing to do once you're at that level, and everyone just dies.

The Killing Star[0] and Flying to Valhalla by Charles Pellegrino are based around the idea that it's natural for a species to annihilate all other sentient species. The characters define three rules that an alien species may be operating by.

Rule 1. Aliens will believe their survival is more important than our survival.

Rule 2. Wimps don't become top dogs.

Rule 3. Aliens will assume that the first two rules apply to us as well.

[0] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TheKilling...

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

#202

Post by hutrdvnj » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 6:22 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #164

TrainedMonkey wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you know what really alarms me? these things are only chances on a very, very short-time scale. they are inevitable, yet no one seems alarmed when meteors come between us and the moon and we dont see it coming until hours beforehand. That is why Elon is so hell bent on making humanity multi planetary.

Elon Musk has the same chance of making humanity multi-planetary as the Pharaohs did. We are still far away from any semblance of a chance to do so. Besides, anything at all that we can imagine hitting the earth (except a gamma ray burst or collision with another planet) would still leave the earth in a better shape than Mars is. It's entirely doubtful that humanity could be self-sustaining on Mars even in principle,…

Well, but Pharaohs couldn't shoot a car into space.

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

#203

Post by nikhilgk » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 6:22 PM UTC

giantrobot wrote: post #191

ryandvm wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even broadcast emissions aren't detectable at long distances. If you parked an Arecibo-class telescope in orbit around Alpha Centauri the only signals you'd detect coming from Earth would be intentional directional transmissions from an Arecibo-class (or Goldstone class) radar. Our television and radio broadcasts aren't detectable by an Arecibo-class telescope out much past Jupiter let alone outside the solar system.…

> Even then out past a thousand light years even a multi-terawatt (EIRP) signal would be difficult to detect.

Not necessarily. Gravitational lensing may enable directed communication at much lower power levels : https://storkpaulo.wordpress.com/2010/04/26/gravitational-le...

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

#204

Post by caeril » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 6:22 PM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #197

caeril wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern civilization is extremely dependent on fossil fuels. We've already passed peak conventional oil production, and we're now surviving on EXTRAORDINARY technical means of enhanced oil recovery. If we can't make the complete transition to renewables in the next thirty years, it's game over for a VERY long time. Future civilizations won't enjoy the benefit of Spindletop. Cheap energy sources won't be available near…

> Cheap energy sources won't be available near the surface of the crust for another > 50 million years. Wrong. We already have one: nuclear energy.

That's a good point. It's pretty easy to construct and maintain fission reactors without fossil fuels. I bet enriching uranium was a snap in the 18th century, too. It will be even easier even getting to the enrichment phase in the future, with accessible ores about 30% as rich as they were when the nuclear age began.

Looking forward to the fleet of electric concrete trucks carrying electrically-manufactured concrete loaded with batteries that were produced with lithium carbonate dug out of the ground by electric excavation rigs.

All of this construction work will also not be disrupted by any social unrest resulting from 3 billion people starving to death because the Haber process no longer has enough cheap feedstock to sustain modern agricultural processes.

Thanks for educating me.

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

#205

Post by aeturnum » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 6:23 PM UTC

kryogen1c wrote: post #110

pharke wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the L constant of the Drake equation. Probably the hardest to find a value for until we've actually discovered other intelligent life or remains of such. The confounding part of it is that we can only guess at things that may end a civilization so completely that it will never recover. Things like the so called Great Filters, natural extinctions like impact events or gamma ray bursts, or other more speculativ…

> Great Filters, natural extinctions like impact events or gamma ray bursts you know what really alarms me? these things are only chances on a very, very short-time scale. they are inevitable, yet no one seems alarmed when meteors come between us and the moon and we dont see it coming until hours beforehand. sun bursts blowing out the electric grid, nuclear war, antiobotic resistance, crop and animal monoculture, cli…

I think people are alarmed, but solutions to these problems are enormously costly and largely fictional. The techniques we have for living in space (or transiting through it) would not sustain us if we lost earth. They are enormously costly[1], which is fine for what we are doing, but we need multiple orders-of-magnitude improvement to be practically interstellar.

On balance, I think we could spend more, but I also think diminishing returns is very real. Giving the wright brothers 100,000 workers to build copies of their planes would not have gotten us to the space shuttle much faster. Ironically, it could have slowed us down because of sunk cost fallacies.

[1] https://twitter.com/sim_kern/status/1411304471934685184

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

#206

Post by wonderwonder » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 6:26 PM UTC

Causality1 wrote: post #36

syops wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The energy requirement to send a life destroying device to a far away planet might be much less than the energy requirement to send colonizers. That may be the big leap so to speak.

If you can send a weapon you can probably send some kind of Von Neumann probe with genetic and cultural data to create a seed colony

Not really, the weapon does not need to slow down. If its just a big enough chunk of rock that is aimed at a planet and it speeds up the whole way reaching some impressive fraction of the speed of light before impact, the only hard part is the math to aim it. We are reasonably close now to being able to strap some engines on an chunk of rock and send it on its way randomly in one direction. We are very far away from being able to start a seed colony in another solar system.

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

#207

Post by Supermancho » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 6:34 PM UTC

tjalfi wrote: post #201

kadoban wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe war between two spacefaring civilizations is too "easy". eg something like: throwing asteroids at ~the speed of light is necessarily a cheap thing to do once you're at that level, and everyone just dies. Like if on Earth nukes were something everyone could cook up in their backyard in an afternoon, we'd all be gone pretty quick. Not sure that really makes any sense though.

> Maybe war between two spacefaring civilizations is too "easy". eg something like: throwing asteroids at ~the speed of light is necessarily a cheap thing to do once you're at that level, and everyone just dies. The Killing Star [0] and Flying to Valhalla by Charles Pellegrino are based around the idea that it's natural for a species to annihilate all other sentient species. The characters define three rules that an…

Given the relative emptiness of observed space, im not convinced that a civilization A would try to annihilate all life but would maybe war with others in their light cone who threaten civA goals/expansion. If you can traverse interstellar space you can probably make home most anywhere further reducing the amount of potential conflict.

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

#208

Post by hindsightbias » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 6:34 PM UTC

For those that believe that intelligent life should be more common within the Milky Way, some author had a good response to that:

It only takes one xenophobic von-Nuemann capable civilization to ruin the party for everyone.

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

#209

Post by ping_pong » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 6:37 PM UTC

evrydayhustling wrote: post #19

Mordisquitos wrote: post #4

Am I missing something, or is this article very narrowly missing the most damning criticism of the Dark Forest hypothesis according to the article's own logic? The first paragraph of the “ Criticism ” section says: > Overall, the Dark Forest Hypothesis has an internal logic and consistency that makes it an appealing (if somewhat somber) potential resolution to Fermi’s age-old question. Unfortunately, it also suffers…

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…

> On Earth, successful civilizations have been capable of trade and cultural exchange in addition to force.

Forget about what monstrosities we have done to other human civilizations throughout history. Instead, think about what we have done to animals. We have hunted many animals out of existence, or we have farmed them and made them basically the equivalent of the Matrix, sources of energy and food.

We are trying to eradicate mosquitoes for crying out loud, and entire species, without giving it a second thought. I will use insecticide to kill today entire colonies of ants without blinking.

All it takes is for one advanced alien civilisation to come across us and deem us the equivalent of their mosquitoes to eradicate us and take all the resources from the Earth. That's the whole point of the Dark Forest theory. If there's an infinite number of civilisations out there, and one of them is so advanced that we are insects to them, why wouldn't they just exterminate us, or use us as food?

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

#210

Post by Mary-Jane » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 6:41 PM UTC

aeternum wrote: post #152

obedm wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not many neanderthals around these days. Just an observation.