81–90 of 106 posts
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Did you intend to say dark forest hypothesis ?
According to physicist Sean Carroll, "hypothesis" and "theory" are interchangeable as the words are used by practicing scientists.
Even more because the confidence changes all the time, but people do go around renaming well known ideas
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At 5 AU, gravitational force would be 1/25 or 4% the strength of the sun at 1 AU. If the black hole was four solar masses, it would exert a pull about 16% as strong as the sun. Probably not enough to rip us out of orbit, but enough to seriously perturb it. I think it's at least an end-of-civilization event. 5 AU is the perfect distance to really wreck Jupiter, though.
Not an astrophysicist, but I'm thinking 5 AU could quickly fry the Earth - because it takes very little in the way of solar comets, asteroids, and dust to build a temporary accretion disk around such a black hole. That disk might have a temperature of >1M degrees. Plus the dynamo effects of the disk's interactions with the solar magnetic field? Yeah. 5 ly sounds much safer.
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Many physicists have pointed out several flaws in the dark forest theory, which makes for a great read but doesn’t really carry over to the real universe 1:1.
What flaws? Do they apply to variants such as Greg Bear's and related ideas such as berserkers?
The optimal strategy in this case is to expand as quickly as possible, before others can grab or destroy resources.
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What flaws? Do they apply to variants such as Greg Bear's and related ideas such as berserkers?
"Dark forest" doesn't work from a game-theoretical standpoint. It assumes that it's cheap to destroy entire planets and solar systems. Yet no-one seems to be colonizing other systems. The optimal strategy in this case is to expand as quickly as possible, before others can grab or destroy resources.
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"Dark forest" doesn't work from a game-theoretical standpoint. It assumes that it's cheap to destroy entire planets and solar systems. Yet no-one seems to be colonizing other systems. The optimal strategy in this case is to expand as quickly as possible, before others can grab or destroy resources.
I think one idea is that there aren't very many habitable planets. The Trisolarians are coming to Earth because it's their only option, not because they want to destroy humanity.
Still makes no sense.
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> > the fact that the universe is consistent > We don't know this either. See this is what I'm talking about as far as being too open-minded. Consider what it would mean for the universe to be inconsistent, particularly in relation to the astronomical observations that are the basis of this conversation.
All we can say is that the universe has been consistent so far, during the brief time we observed a small part of it given the instruments we have. We update our model(s) so that it keeps being consistent and predictable to us (that’s human nature), but no model can be probably correct and complete.
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Can you point me to more info on that or just tell me? I am curious about reasons to be more optimistic than that book lays out. I would much prefer the Carl Sagan view of the Cosmos as one where it simply makes no physical nor cultural sense at all to be aggressive toward other stellar civilizations.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-dark-forest-hypothesis-is-...
This might be a better one.
https://medium.com/predict/why-the-dark-forest-theory-is-pro...
This video is pretty good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0SvgT9Lc2M
This post attempts a formal refutation.
This is one of those headlines where I simultaneously think "cool" and now have a new source of low-grade background anxiety about. It can have a seat next to false vacuum collapse.
Concern for celestial events is a bit like one of your gut bacterium being concerned with your work schedule
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Many physicists have pointed out several flaws in the dark forest theory, which makes for a great read but doesn’t really carry over to the real universe 1:1.
Why would physicists have anything useful to say about this theory?