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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?

#271

Post by Corazoor »

not_jd_salinger wrote: post #120
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus humans are extremely adaptable. Even before we invented agriculture, people had colonized the whole planet, except for Antarctica. It would be hard to kill us all off.

> humans are extremely adaptable This is a strange claim I see repeated over and over, but it has very little evidence to justify it. The only piece of evidence people present is: > people had colonized the whole planet, except for Antarctica This is true of a fairly large number of organisms on Earth. On top of this humans have only been around for ~200,000 years, that's not long at all. Humans have not survived a s…

In comparison to most other mammals (including the neanderthals), we are pretty awesome at adaption. Probably even better than bacteria, all things considered.

That is because we possess multiple different ways of adapting to our enviroment:

genetic

during childhood

acclimatization

culture and technology

This link provides a nice summary: https://www2.palomar.edu/anthro/adapt/adapt_1.htm

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

#272

Post by joshuahedlund »

sangnoir wrote: post #213
Archelaos wrote: post #22

What makes the dark forest hypothesis not so conving to me is that it has the presupposition that it is indeed possible to hide. An advanced civilization close to us that is surveying the sky for signs of life would have very likely identified earth as a very promissing candidate due to the presence of methane and oxygen in its atmosphere at the same time. So our star system would have long been under surveillance, b…

> An advanced civilization close to us that is surveying the sky for signs of life would have very likely identified earth as a very promissing candidate due to the presence of methane and oxygen in its atmosphere at the same time. Signs of carbon-based life - who is to say all forms of life are carbon-based? The universe is vast, what are the odds of aliens being in our vicinity and time (light cone) stumbling upon…

> Signs of carbon-based life - who is to say all forms of life are carbon-based?

There's a limited number of elements, and their abundance in the universe decreases rapidly beyond the first few. Carbon is by far the most advantageous for life due to its vast ability to form complex molecules. Silicon might be a distant second. If there is other life in the universe, and if there's nothing special about us, it might not all be carbon-based, but it's extremely likely that a large amount of it will be.

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

#273

Post by joshuahedlund »

hnbad wrote: post #112
myrmidon wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think there is a "real" (>1% over the next century) risk for humanity to wipe itself out, or just that the hostile-alien risk is way beyond negligible in comparison? Because all current climate doom-erism notwithstanding-- humanity extinction seems impossible to achieve to me via climate change or nuclear war; rogue autonomous self-replicating systems might be a danger, but are too far beyound current tech to…

We don't need to go extinct. Our global economy is very fragile, relatively speaking and it's not at all clear we could sustain the economy necessary to perform space exploration if bad things happen. To avoid an extended argument about all the ways in which climate change will screw things up, let's focus on nuclear war: a nuclear war between, say, India and China would not only wipe out huge swaths of the human pop…

> The economy relies on layers and layers of extremely convoluted supply chains and can't sustain a loss of even 1% of the human population

I think you are underestimating the ability of humanity to adjust and innovate, especially over time. I mean we literally essentially lose 1% of the human population to old age every year.

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

#274

Post by tjalfi »

mokus wrote: post #79
marcosdumay wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Fermi question is a lot closer to "how come Earth wasn't colonized before we even appear?" than "how come we can't see anybody?".

How do we know we aren’t the colonists?

There have been a couple science fiction novels with this premise:

Protector[0] by Larry Niven

David Weber's Dahak trilogy, available as the Empire from the Ashes[1] omnibus

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protector_(novel)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_from_the_Ashes

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

#275

Post by lmohseni »

hutrdvnj wrote: post #202
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,…

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

I don’t think Elon could build a pyramid. He might be capable of tweeting about one though.

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

#276

Post by mLuby »

ithkuil wrote: post #184
xwolfi wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But maybe war is a territorial animal's instinct and once we have shaken up a bit more of our animality, we'd understand this makes no sense ? If we can control resource, exchange knowledge and techniques, and reproduce automatically (for instance if we become small electronic machines rather than the current inefficient chemical process we are), "war" might probably sounds both ridiculous and totally ineffective, bo…

OTOH animals evolved those instincts because they worked in the game-theoretical circumstances that competition with other animals. Perhaps we can shake off many emotional components of war (which would make war an irrational option in many of the cases that our monkey brain would have been dragged into) but that doesn't necessarily mean that war itself would be eradicated

Animals are stuck in local maxima (betrayal in the Prisoner's Dilemma). A more evolved group might discover and be able to reach the global maximum (solidarity in the Prisoner's Dilemma). Imagine if tigers or sharks developed pack hunting, or the octopus became more pro-social.

Also, multi-species symbiotic relationships are quite common in the animal kingdom. It would be surprising if that weren't true at other scales (and if it were limited to the sci-fi trope of "worker species, soldier species, leader species").

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

#277

Post by ManBlanket »

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…

There's the other end of a technology curve, when a civilization ceases use of an outdated piece of technology. In our case humanity is looking for radar because we're currently broadcasting it. Why would anyone continue using radar to communicate within a few years of quantum entangled data processing, capable instantly transmitting data instantaneously across vast distances? There might be a few living that rock star lifestyle of HAM radio operation and messenger pidgeons, but at that moment our civ would go narly completely dark to our sister civ's SETI program. All humanity's existence so far has been nothing but spark swallowed up by the darkness of time. Our use of radio a fart in the wind.

This theory is incredibly type-zero-civ-pocentric. A species capable of interstellar travel will have mastered technologies we can't even comprehend. By the time humanity is able to meaningfully reach across the stars, we'll have spread life across our entire solar system and everything we'd ever need. Unlimited energy from our sun, a lush and verdant Venus and Mars, mining colonies across the solar system producing vast quantities of any desirable element, not to mention an Earth whose biosphere is a shining jewel - perpetually locked-in at peak biodiversity.

Begs the question of what we would ever need from another civ, and furthermore what a similar civilization would ever want from a bunch of squatting troglodytes such as ourselves.

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

#278

Post by mLuby »

pharke wrote: post #104
david-gpu wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I was a technologically advanced civilization, I would send robotic Von Neumann probes around the galaxy to keep tabs on things at close proximity. If I was also murderous, I would have programmed the probes to destroy any signs of life. So, the fact that we are still alive after broadcasting the presence of life through out atmosphere for the last couple billion years is quite reassuring.

Wouldn't that be the most difficult and expensive way to simply monitor for life or technosignatures? Compare that to simply (relatively speaking) building massive space based optical and radio observatories that can observe every visible star. The light reaching you has already made the trip, you just have to collect it. If you were murderous, you could launch an attack from your home system rather than waiting for…

So have your replicators approach a system from an unexpected vector; one course correction in interstellar space should be enough.

Also I'd expect the probes would communicate with the homeworld via relays (where they were replicated) rather than directly, so it'd take a fair amount of effort to unravel a replicator network unless you caught one of the very first probes.

And also it'd be conspicuous if there was a volume of space in your network where your probes always failed.

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

#279

Post by riffraff »

yoz-y wrote: post #241
riffraff wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why or how would a post scarcity multi planetary or even multi stellar civilisation disappear? I agree that there is no need for plunder, but I don’t think highly advanced civilisations are in risk of extinction.

Well, I don't know.

It is just a common topic in fiction that great civilizations just fade out, and it seems reasonable to me. I do not believe the average individual would want to live forever, and at some point I feel the same would apply to civilizations. But for the sake of fun, I can recall some ideas from literature :)

Maybe they evolve into higher states of being and leave our plane of existence.

Maybe they stop reproducing and slowly die out.

Maybe they reach a level of self-introspection where they believe continuing existing is pointless.

Maybe they migrate to a more reliable virtual world in a sub-space computer.

Maybe each individual gets its own universe.

Maybe the society splinters over some trivial concepts and the old knowledge is lost when the machines start to fail.

There's a lot of interesting things that can happen, let's hope we'll find out late enough :)

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

#280

Post by tyfighter »

ManBlanket wrote: post #277
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…

There's the other end of a technology curve, when a civilization ceases use of an outdated piece of technology. In our case humanity is looking for radar because we're currently broadcasting it. Why would anyone continue using radar to communicate within a few years of quantum entangled data processing, capable instantly transmitting data instantaneously across vast distances? There might be a few living that rock st…

That's not possible. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem)
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