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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?

#231

Post by edgyquant »

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.

Birds migrate from one place to the other they don’t live on every continent all year round. Even if we take these though (and as the other commenter said they aren’t the same species in every continent) that still leaves a total of 3 out of how many thousands, millions, of multicellular organisms on the planet.

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

#232

Post by myrmidon »

NiceWayToDoIT wrote: post #200
myrmidon wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "doom-erisam" and similar shaming terms is nothing better than those person First: I use the term because I see NO factual basis for assuming that humankind is going extinct. Your post did not change my view on that: 1) I fully agree that global warming is a massive problem. But assuming that it's going to lead to human extinction is IMO straight up delusional . The only plausible mechanism is full-runaway "hot-ven…

> I use the term because I see NO factual basis for assuming that humankind is going extinct. Your post did not change my view on that: There is a huge difference between I do NOT want to see, and there is NO factual basis. From https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities only 1170 cities have population of 2,179,929,822, RS-28 Sarmat yield is 10 heavy warheads, each yield of 1.5Mt. Currently there is 3,700 nukes…

> I somehow find more frighting and delusional that way of thinking, as it leaves possibility to use mentioned as solution for fixing problem as people optimistically believe they are the one that will survive.

I'll give you the other perspective on the doom-erism:

People preaching about the inevitable extinction of humankind just provide ammunition/"strawmans" against progressive climate policies because these doom-prophecies are obvious bullshit and everyone not in an echo bubble knows it.

Just consider how easy it was to dismiss your "humankind is going extinct because of climate change" points-- because it IS BULLSHIT. Climate change is NOT going to lead to human extinction, and preaching this just steals credibility and hinders much more than it helps by polarizing society/preventing consensus.

As for the nuclear threat:

> only 1170 cities have population of 2,179,929,822

First: These are metropolitan areas, not cities. One warhead per area is not even going to kill a fraction of the people.

Consider: Tokyo metro region is 14000 km^2. Fireball size for a 10Mt warhead is Taking all the aftereffects into account, you'll maybe get past the 50% population mark, but that is still not human extinction.

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

#233

Post by lisper »

EthanHeilman wrote: post #225
tsimionescu wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 iss…

> What's the blocker here?

Human nature, apparently. Just about all large-scale human activities at the moment are predicated on exponential growth. We're nowhere near achieving a long-term stable steady-state here on earth. The odds of achieving that in a vastly more hostile environment are even lower.

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

#234

Post by e40 »

aeturnum wrote: post #205
kryogen1c wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

> I think people are alarmed

I think your view is skewed. Every single person I've talked to about this as looked at me like they are bored. Of course, here on HN, I've found many like-minded people. That's great, but I think very few humans, especially humans in the power structures that run this planet, care about this issue.

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

#235

Post by pharke »

babelfish wrote: post #222
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.

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 amplifi…

> why wouldn't another intelligent species do this if they possess the technology?

I think the only question we can ask here is "Would we do this if we possessed the technology?". We only have ourselves as an example of intelligent life.

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

#236

Post by nestorD »

pdimitar wrote: post #173
nestorD wrote: post #166

My favorite answer to Fermi's Paradox is a paper (which I do not have on hand) showing that it can be explained by the approximation error in doing a raw product of probabilities. If, instead of doing a product of the probability of each event, you actually take the various distributions into account (nowadays you can easily test a wide variety of distributions with monte carlo methods) then, the probability of getti…

What would that be a "favorite" answer? It's just one of the hypotheses. Drake's equation and how exactly must it be applied has been fiercely discussed for decades. Unless, of course, saying it's your "favorite" is your way of saying "I like to believe in this one hypothesis".

It removes the paradox without requiring additional hypotheses, just refining the math. That makes it the most convincing solution to the paradox for me.

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

#237

Post by elihu »

Something to consider about "Dark Forest" scenarios is that there's no particular reason to think that a given species would be more benevolent towards its own kind than some other alien species.

If you think about how humans behave, I think if we ever get to the point where we're a multi-planetary species, those two planets aren't going to trust each other very much. If we expand to other star systems with years of communication lag, it'll be even worse -- both societies are going to be constantly expecting a hail of nukes to fall out of the sky one of these days, unless there's either a plausible defense against such an attack, or a reasonable expectation of mutually-assured destruction.

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

#238

Post by tjalfi »

crowbahr wrote: post #89
pharmakom wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t destroy the system because you want to inhabit it yourself. This assumes that life is looking for similar habitats and that it’s not simpler to create an artificial planet anyway.

If there is oxygen breathing carbon based intelligent life that wants our planet they could've easily spotted and taken it anytime within the past 2 billion years. It seems safe to say that there isn't life that wants our planet.

The aliens in Scott Westerfeld's Fine Prey invade Earth for a novel reason. It's ROT-13 (https://rot13.com/) encoded to avoid any spoilers.

Gur nyvraf ner ynathntr areqf. Gurl bpphcvrq Rnegu fb gung uhznaf jbhyq perngr n arj qvnyrpg bs gurve ynathntr.

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

#239

Post by crowbahr »

edgyquant wrote: post #230
crowbahr wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right but the whole premise of the Fermi Paradox is that it doesn't take long (on a galactic scale) to gobble up the entire galaxy using STL transit if you're dealing with a constantly growing civilization.

So either they'd - already have gotten here & already have destroyed the earth when we showed intelligence OR - already have gotten here & don't care about destroying intelligence.

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

#240

Post by yoz-y »

MarkLowenstein wrote: post #195

My theory, and I don't know why this is never mentioned: all societies eventually retreat into inhabiting a purely simulated universe (Matrix/Holodeck), where EM emissions and space exploration become a thing of the past, and the society just "goes dark". The dynamic that guarantees it is that great stuff is almost always cheaper/easier to experience via simulation than in reality. We already know that TV plots and v…

Isaac Arthur mentions this several times. But the counter argument is that with advanced civilisations having gigantic populations, it is hard to imagine that a “small” group counting in quadrillions wouldn’t prefer to live in the real world.
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