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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?

#131

Post by hnbad »

yreg wrote: post #44
InsomniacL wrote: post #23

I have a theory that intelligence isn't particularly rare however the rate of development may be. It has long been alluded to in Sci-Fi that humanity's rate of development is fast (Humans vs Vulcans, Halo universe, etc). I imagine that one of the great barriers is that a civilisation with a lower rate of development may stuck in an industrial type era unable to progress before doing irreparable damage to their enviro…

To be fair, even with our (fast paced?) rate of development we have a hard time to tech fast enough to outrun the industrial damage. On the other hand, only total extinction might be truly "irreparable".

It's also not correct to claim we are no longer "stuck in an industrial type era" just because most of the Western world is post-industrial. We largely offloaded the industrial era into the third world.

You don't see kids in coal mines in England but you do see people dipping circuit boards in vats of acid without protective equipment in India. We may be investing in renewables in the US and Europe but we still flood parts of Africa and the Sea with crude oil and all that lithium doesn't mine itself.

The "Industrial Age" may be over but the damage is still being done and all the shiny new tech is largely window dressing. It's also not yet clear that the shiny post-Industrialism can easily exist without the rest of the world perpetually playing "catch-up" (i.e. whether it really is catching up) as our quality of living heavily hinges on underpaying other countries for resources and labor.

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

#132

Post by not_jd_salinger »

delecti wrote: post #105
hashkb wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We're currently undergoing the largest mass extinction event that will easily rank in the top 6 of life on this planet and could possibly compete with the end-permian. What makes you think we could possibly survive? Because we're the cause? Plenty of species in the past that have caused extinction events also perished.

It seems far more questionable to assume we won't risk extinction in the geological near term. The parent is downvoted more out of existential fear rather than an honest assessment of the situation.

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

#133

Post by edgyquant »

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…

> 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?

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

#134

Post by taneq »

Mordisquitos wrote: post #12
HotHotLava wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't the counterpoint be that those civilizations like us that do not obscure their location are quickly eradicated by others in the forest? So the forest also acts like a filter for those that are not careful enough.

I don't see that as a counterpoint, but more of a post hoc theory. How could the eradicators detect and destroy their victims before we detected any signal at all from the victims? And why haven't the eradicators come for us yet? Of course, this could always be explained by the distances involved and the limitations of light speed, but that would make the Dark Forest hypothesis redundant as an explanation as to why w…

> How could the eradicators detect and destroy their victims before we detected any signal at all from the victims? And why haven't the eradicators come for us yet?

Because most civilizations are probably still a 100+ light years apart and we just haven't been around and listening for that long? Even if we've theoretically had the chance to detect another early civilization the other listeners have been listening for aeons longer than us and are much better at it.

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

#135

Post by Causality1 »

syops wrote: post #43
Causality1 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can send a weapon you can probably send some kind of Von Neumann probe with genetic and cultural data to create a seed colony

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.

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

#136

Post by TrainedMonkey »

kryogen1c wrote: post #110
pharke wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, cli…

> 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.

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

#137

Post by edgyquant »

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.

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.

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

#138

Post by godshatter »

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 and learning how to live in them.

There could be trillions of habitats out there and we'd never know it. From small low-orbit stations orbiting home planets to larger complexes orbiting their stars instead up to generation ships moving to the next star to mine for more resources or to build more ships due to population limits being hit. Once you've perfected the building of habitats that are large enough and are tailored to your species specific needs, why mess around with planets that can kill you in so many different ways?

Maybe the reason we don't see anyone is because we can't resolve even very large habitats at light-year distances and the reason we don't run into them is because we don't have anything they can't get somewhere that isn't already inhabited. Perhaps they avoid inhabited systems because of the dangers involved.

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

#139

Post by jmull »

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 quickly and easily out-compete/out-advance civilizations that did not. "Malevolent" civilizations would inevitably run into more advanced cooperating civs sooner or later and be checked, either learning to cooperate themselves or lose.

Put another way, the assumptions used to build out the hypothesis, "Chains of Suspicion" and "Technological Explosion", don't make sense either. "Chains of Suspicion" assumes civilizations cannot communicate, yet the dark forest hypothesis assume civilizations can destroy each other. That's a contradiction. If you can physically interact, you can communicate (and as I pointed out before, with much, much less energy/resources than it takes to destroy). And "Technological Explosion", as written in the book, assume exponential technological growth could occur at any point, which seems to be nonsense to me. Any kind of exponential growth necessarily depends on a medium primed with the resources for that growth and stops when the resources are expended (which is never all that long, given the nature of exponential growth).

I cringed every time this idea was forced into the forefront of the books. They are such great and imaginative books, I don't mind at all that not all the ideas really pan out, but it was a little hard to stomach every time the plot turned on this weak idea.

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

#140

Post by edgyquant »

Retric wrote: post #49
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

....we have never hit anything at interstellar distances, which are several orders of magnitude farther than interplanetary distances.

I didn’t say we have, just that we can. The closest Star is ~268,770 AU where voyager 1 is only 152.6 AU. However, being able to target a probe within 50 feet at 150AU, means hitting a planet sized target at 4.25 light years. Building a probe large enough and fast enough to do significant damage at the other side is the hard part, not targeting. Calculating where a planet sized object would be by the time our probe g…

Voyager is not traveling a relativistic speeds. We could definitely defend against someone sending voyager at us.
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