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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?

#101

Post by yreg »

bob33212 wrote: post #95
yreg wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't they need megastructures and travel once they understood enough physics?

Space and time may be emergent, we don't know, all we do know is that our current model of physics is missing something. Quantum Gravity for example and We don't know what happens inside a black hole either.

That’s a non-answer though.

Do you mean they are guaranteed to discover another “realm” and move to it?

Why? It might not be possible, no matter how much physics one knows. Or do you take the Fermi paradox itself as a proof of the solution?

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

#102

Post by amanaplanacanal »

sha256kira wrote: post #82
throw1234651234 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generalization. Would be interesting discussion with details. Pop is growing. What's your concern - global warming, fertility rates, pollution, nuclear arsenal, running out of resources? Doesn't seem like we are doing that badly and that pop can't drop if get below renewable resource level or adjust to new ways of making energy/food, etc. Does seem likely that on an extremely long time scale, we need to get multi-pla…

Agreed. The great filter and collapse theory in general are fascinating in theory and can motivate some great positive action but they can't undermine the fact that humans beings are doing better than they've ever done in our history by almost every imaginable metric.

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.

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

#103

Post by magneticnorth »

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…

And to add the evidence we do have; in the billions of years of life on earth, there has only been <200 years where any species had the will and the way to send deliberate communications into space. Observational evidence suggests that the time span of civilizations existing is vanishingly tiny compared to the vastness of time overall

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

#104

Post by pharke »

david-gpu wrote: post #59
jeremyjh wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How far away from earth is it still possible to detect oxygen and/or methane levels in the atmosphere?

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 the probes to spread from system to system.

Granted there could be some technical limitations that prevent you from observing certain systems but that pool will be much smaller than an entire galaxy of stars.

Also, don't forget that a Von Neumann probe is at a disadvantage when it arrives in a system since you want to send the minimum number of probes to each star and then have them replicate on arrival. If your probe accidentally shows up in a system that contains an advanced civilization capable of detecting and capturing it then you've given away the fact of your existence and your intent along with all the information that can be gained by studying the probe.

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

#105

Post by delecti »

hashkb wrote: post #66
kadoban wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If true, that ends up meaning that alien civilizations are short-lived, right? That doesn't bode well for us.

We're on a steady path to extinction, no doubt.

Sure eventually, but there's no clear indication if that's 10 years away, 10 billion years away, or a mere technicality as our descendants evolve into something that counts as a separate species.

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

#106

Post by AlwaysRock »

hnbad wrote: post #97
Moodles wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carl Sagan thought this, though he lived during the cold war so it's not surprising he did.

Considering where climate change is heading, it's surprising anyone doesn't think this.

I agree in our case but this wouldnt be universal. Life may thrive in very hot planets if their evolutionary track was different.

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

#107

Post by riffraff »

chadwittman wrote: post #69
kadoban wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If true, that ends up meaning that alien civilizations are short-lived, right? That doesn't bode well for us.

Read more about the Great Filter, it's probable it's ahead of us.

is it _probable_?

AFA we know we've been insanely lucky up to this point (as earthling life we went past multiple mass extinctions, we got multi-cellular life, multiple brains iterations, a society which still didn't wipe itself out etc)

What makes it more likely for the filter to be ahead of us rather than behind us?

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

#108

Post by scarmig »

hnbad wrote: post #97
Moodles wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carl Sagan thought this, though he lived during the cold war so it's not surprising he did.

Considering where climate change is heading, it's surprising anyone doesn't think this.

Climate change is very real and worth addressing, but it's extremely unlikely to wipe out human civilization. It's just going to be costly and kill millions, not billions.

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

#109

Post by Symmetry »

One paper on the Fermi Paradox I want to plug is this one by Sandberg, Drexler, and Ord.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404

Most people when doing the Fermi estimate for the number of civilizations in the Galaxy use numbers that tend to result in a lot of them. But different people use very different numbers in different steps. If you look at the ranges of values that different people assign to the different terms then suddenly it doesn't seem very unlikely that intelligent civilizations could be rare.

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

#110

Post by kryogen1c »

pharke wrote: post #94
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…

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, climate change, natural resource depletion... taleb is right. we need an agent of chaos to make anti-fragility valuable. otherwise we learn the lesson the hard way. by dying.

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