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?

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Post by tshaddox » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 7:13 PM UTC

DonaldPShimoda wrote: post #193

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…

(Major spoilers for The Expanse below.) > 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. Or send a technologically engineered molecule that can hijack single-cellular life to help establish your needed technology in the target solar system.

It’s funny that that wouldn’t have been a spoiler if you hadn’t mentioned the name of the work.

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

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Post by babelfish » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 7:23 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.

Spoilers for The Dark Forest and The Remembrance of Earth's Past Trilogy below.

In the book that the OP article is based on, humanity is doing anything and everything to prevent/defend themselves against an alien invasion happening ~400 years in the future. The character who coins "Dark Forest" theory in the book proposes sending a 'spell' (just a signal containing coordinates) to a nearby star, which is then amplified throughout the universe via "Sci-Fi science". This reveals the location of the star, and shortly after the star is destroyed by some comet-sized object moving at the speed of light. It's later revealed that some other civilization listens for broadcasts on every spectrum, decodes them for coordinates, then destroys the ones that seem to have actually been sent by intelligent life.

I thought this made perfect sense - why wouldn't another intelligent species do this if they possess the technology? I personally agree with "Dark Forest" theory and think that we should /never/ make first contact (lest we are destroyed), but if we were to attempt first contact, we should at the very least have a weapon like you described available to us first.

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

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Post by Florin_Andrei » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 7:26 PM UTC

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…

> They are such great and imaginative books

Those books are pretty awful. They can't make up their mind whether they belong to sci-fi or fantasy. Sometimes they veer towards hard scifi but then make naive mistakes with current science. The characters are cardboard cutouts, very shallow, and make nonsensical decisions. The general atmosphere is depressing and ends in the complete failure of basically everything.

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

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Post by nradov » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 7:32 PM UTC

zabzonk wrote: post #199

edgyquant wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> his is true of a fairly large number of organisms on Earth Is it though? How many other large, multicellular, organisms live on every continent without humans having brought them there?

Seals. Birds.

But we don't see the same species of seals or birds everywhere. There are different species which evolved to survive on each continent. Whereas humans are a single worldwide species.

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

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Post by EthanHeilman » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 7:33 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,…

>It's entirely doubtful that humanity could be self-sustaining on Mars even in principle, it is certainly not possible with known technologies.

Citation needed.

What's the blocker here?

Energy production on Mars? Why not Solar or Simple Stirling Engines.

Food/Closed ecological systems? Hard, for sure yeah, but even not particularly well funded small ecosystems like Biosphere2 worked for several years.

The biggest issue seems psychological.

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

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Post by pdonis » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 7:35 PM UTC

caeril wrote: post #204

pdonis wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Your snark is misplaced. All of the issues you raise apply to any source of energy, including "renewables". The difference is, "renewables" (a) are not controllable, and (b) don't have nearly enough capacity to support a global civilization. And if you're worried about social unrest, by far the best way to ensure it is to refuse to make use of an obvious source of plentiful energy to help maintain and improve people's standard of living, and instead insist on keeping billions of people in poverty in order to satisfy your ideological preconceptions.

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

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Post by Coriolis3 » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 7:39 PM UTC

godshatter wrote: post #138

I wonder if we're making too many assumptions about how civilizations would live and spread. I've always wondered why our species puts so much focus on planetary colonization instead of building smaller habitats. We seem to assume we'll terraform Mars, maybe build habitats on some of the Jovian moons, then jump to the next star. It seems more logical to me to take the ISS and iterate on it, building larger habitats a…

I agree, for an advanced species space habitats seem far superior to planets. A constant supply of free energy (solar), easy access to endless metal (asteroids), no earthquakes/tsunamis/volcanos/wildfires. If we're talking far-future, to me the Culture and their Orbitals represent the ideal utopian endpoint for humanity.

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

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Post by edgyquant » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 7:44 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #154

edgyquant wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No it isn’t since the whole topic here is that any civilization capable of accelerating an object to relativistic speeds and hitting a target from light years away is capable of defending against one. We can send voyager to target an object on the other side of the solar system but we are also perfectly able to defend against a potential voyager.

Just because you now claim to not be addressing the actual goal at hand doesn’t mean I moved the goalpost; if anything you’re now implying you did.

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

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Post by syops » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 7:44 PM UTC

Causality1 wrote: post #135

syops wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see why that necessarily follows and I don’t see why one would want to send such a probe. It does nothing for me if I can send a probe to start humanity on another planet when I have no connection to said planet and won’t be able to see the result or have a connection to that colony. In the dark forest view one would never seed such a colony as they will quickly become competitors.

You don't think species chauvinism is a thing? If I had to lose an interstellar war and be wiped out I'd prefer it to be a human offshoot doing it. At least that way my species survives.

In the dark forest view it’s best to just kill off the opponent and not replace them with a potential new opponent.

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

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Post by edgyquant » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 7:47 PM UTC

crowbahr wrote: post #146

edgyquant wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would anyone come from light years away to inhabit a planet. It would be cheaper to just build habitats or colonize a planet in their solar system. There is almost nothing we can provide to a civilization capable of traversing between start systems.

All resources are scarce. But if nobody wants our world and they're scared of intelligent life then just send out Von Neumann probes to ensure intelligence isn't showing up elsewhere. First mover's advantage nullifies the entire dark forest.

relatively scarce, sure. There are millions of times more of all the resources Earth has between us and any civilization coming from light years away. By the time they needed Earths resources they’d have to have gobbled up large chunks of, if not the whole, Galaxy.