Beyond “Fermi’s Paradox” XVI: What Is the “Dark Forest” Hypothesis? • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by dfilppi » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 2:31 PM UTC

yreg wrote: post #71

tener wrote: post #42

The Dark Forest makes so many (explicit and implicit) assumptions it starts to feel extremely dodgy. There are also falacious arguments embedded within it which fail to imagine numerous possible scenarios simply by following "tried and true" paths copy-pasted from sci-fi novels. TLDR: The forest analogy fails because civilizations are not singular entities (like animals are) but rather complex structures which can me…

I agree with your other critisising points but I think presumptions (2) and (3) make sense somewhat. It's safe to assume that for any self-replicating life evolution takes place, universally. The genes (no matter on their biological implementation) are always evaluated by one fitness function only – whether they succeed in spreading around. Life isn't optimised for surviving per se, but it is optimised for replicatin…

I suspect that any advanced species would abandon life as soon as possible. E.g. become non-biological and immortal. Then interstellar travel is trivial.

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

#82

Post by sha256kira » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 2:32 PM UTC

throw1234651234 wrote: post #68

hashkb wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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

#83

Post by yreg » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 2:32 PM UTC

bob33212 wrote: post #78

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.

Civilizations are only detectable for a short period of time. Once they understand physics, they no longer need radio waves or Dyson spheres or to travel through what we call spacetime.

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

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

#84

Post by TaupeRanger » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 2:33 PM UTC

LatteLazy wrote: post #10

Mordisquitos wrote: post #4

Am I missing something, or is this article very narrowly missing the most damning criticism of the Dark Forest hypothesis according to the article's own logic? The first paragraph of the “ Criticism ” section says: > Overall, the Dark Forest Hypothesis has an internal logic and consistency that makes it an appealing (if somewhat somber) potential resolution to Fermi’s age-old question. Unfortunately, it also suffers…

1 exception doesn't disprove this rule. There could be any number of reasons for one or some civilisations to broadcast but not be destroyed: * it takes time, we've only been broadcasting for 70 years or so. 70 light years isn't that far. * we are far from dangerous listeners (we are right out on an arm in the milky way galaxy) * all planets broadcast for a while at least (we did so without any serious consideration)…

The book responds to most of the "not there yet" concerns. The idea is that if there are 1,000 species aware of even primitive life on a particular planet, chances are at least one of them will be close enough for it to be worth the effort to destroy it. This is because technological development is exponential and you can't predict if/when a planet will produce dangerous technology equal or greater than your own. If you wait, you only increase the risk of being destroyed.

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

#85

Post by aetherson » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 2:34 PM UTC

kadoban wrote: post #63

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…

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

Short lived on those timescales, yes. But not necessarily short lived in terms of our perspective.

If we imagine that in the last 5 billion years, there have been a good solid 10,000 post-industrial civilizations, and each of those civilizations has lasted 10,000 years (in the post-industrial stage where they're detectable), then that implies that of the last 5,000,000,000 years, 100,000,000 of them have been host to a post-industrial civilization: a given year has on average 0.02 currently present civilizations in it.

Now, this hypothesis does probably imply that significantly interstellar civilizations are impossible, since it seems like if you've colonized say 20 stars, what disaster could possibly end your civilization?

(I think the most likely scenario is that we're the only civilization ever to have developed in the Milky Way. Everything else seems like it assumes a lot of additional stuff.)

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

#86

Post by gilbetron » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 2:36 PM UTC

bobcostas55 wrote: post #24

evrydayhustling wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As other commenters have said, we can't take our own viewpoint as an example of what kinds of civilizations survive because our technological age is so young. But IMO Dark Forest is bunk anyway, because it assumes that projecting power over interstellar distances is easier than defending yourself. That's not true within terrestrial history ... even though the arrival of colonists was massively disruptive to populatio…

>because it assumes that projecting power over interstellar distances is easier than defending yourself This seems really obviously true to me. Accelerating a rock to relativistic speeds is pretty easy, defending against a rock potentially coming from anywhere in space traveling at relativistic speeds is extremely difficult.

> Accelerating a rock to relativistic speeds is pretty easy

Huh? How? I haven't seen any proposal that doesn't start with the assumption that we can inject a rock with a preposterous amount of energy let alone hit (in astronomical scales) a ridiculously small target, not to mention navigate all the gravity wells in between.

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

#87

Post by baron_harkonnen » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 2:36 PM UTC

Given that most complex life is probably carbon based, and given the one planet with complex life we can observe, my guess is that most complex life runs into one of two paths:

1. You don't have enough easily accessible hydrocarbons in ground to build a civilization advanced enough to even get you into space.

2. You do have enough hydrocarbons which leads to inevitable overshoot, and accompanying collapse before you ever get close to figuring out interstellar travel. Exponential growth patterns lead you to either exhaust the carrying capacity of your planet, or you end up warming your planet too much and die off (or a little bit of both).

We're a pretty good case study between 1 and 2. Right now we're in a race to see if we can exhaust our hydrocarbons or overheat our planet first, there seems to be no realistic alternative (plenty of nice fantasy ones though).

If we had reached peak oil in the early 80s (or sooner) we would have likely avoided catastrophic climate change, but would have started a major population shift downwards towards 1 billion, where we would have likely stabilized but with no major technical progress (technological progress is largely a function of energy).

We didn't though, so now it seems like we are going to continue to increase the rate we combust hydrocarbons until we create an unlivable planet (at least for us). A few billionaires are making some cool toys, but we don't seem to be able to survive until we're anywhere near interstellar travel.

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

#88

Post by yreg » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 2:37 PM UTC

dfilppi wrote: post #81

yreg wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your other critisising points but I think presumptions (2) and (3) make sense somewhat. It's safe to assume that for any self-replicating life evolution takes place, universally. The genes (no matter on their biological implementation) are always evaluated by one fitness function only – whether they succeed in spreading around. Life isn't optimised for surviving per se, but it is optimised for replicatin…

I suspect that any advanced species would abandon life as soon as possible. E.g. become non-biological and immortal. Then interstellar travel is trivial.

That makes sense, but machines and culture(s) still undergo evolution, unless replication and changes (mutations) are prevented. (Again, the ones that are good at spreading are more prevalent.) What do you think?

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

#89

Post by crowbahr » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 2:37 PM UTC

pharmakom wrote: post #61

jerf wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your logic but would add one more thing to it: There is no compelling reason to wait until a planet conclusively proves it has intelligence on it to nuke it into oblivion with a kinetic kill projectile. You don't really know how long it will take for an intelligent species that could compete with you to arise. Humans have moved pretty quickly on cosmological scales, there's no particular reason to believ…

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.

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

#90

Post by nirui » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 2:38 PM UTC

Mordisquitos wrote: post #4

Am I missing something, or is this article very narrowly missing the most damning criticism of the Dark Forest hypothesis according to the article's own logic? The first paragraph of the “ Criticism ” section says: > Overall, the Dark Forest Hypothesis has an internal logic and consistency that makes it an appealing (if somewhat somber) potential resolution to Fermi’s age-old question. Unfortunately, it also suffers…

Ah... the "Dark Forest Theory". People really put way too much unnecessary time on it.

If the theory was true, then the first thing those "tree-body man" would reasonably do is to just destroy the solar system straight away with that super illegal (to the law of physics) raindrop probe. A civilization with the intention of discover and kill will definitely make their probes efficient kill devices, right? Why pay the expense of identify and kill the "Key actors" one by one when you can delete a entire system for cheap? Just turn the probe into a blackhole to kill the sun, it should be easy if the probe was really that dense.

A more direct attack is rooted in the theory itself: for the theory to be true, a state/condition called 猜疑连 (Chain Of Suspicion) must be created. The content of Chain Of Suspicion is simple:

    - A civilization cannot determine if another civilization is evil
    - A civilization cannot determine if other civilizations will view itself as evil
    - A civilization cannot determine if another civilization will launch an attack against it
    - A civilization cannot determine if itself is evil
    - A civilization cannot determine if another civilization view themself as evil
    - A civilization cannot determine if another civilization will treat itself in such way that been determined unevil
    - ... ... (The article that I quoted from has this at the last line: https://wiki.mbalib.com/wiki/%E9%BB%91%E6%9A%97%E6%A3%AE%E6%9E%97%E6%B3%95%E5%88%99#.E5.8F.B6.E6.96.87.E6.B4.81.E6.8F.90.E5.87.BA.E7.9A.84.E2.80.9C.E5.9F.BA.E6.9C.AC.E5.85.AC.E7.90.86.E2.80.9D.E5.92.8C.E4.B8.A4.E5.A4.A7.E9.87.8D.E8.A6.81.E6.A6.82.E5.BF.B5)

Have you see the hole here? For a civilization that advanced, what are the chances that they're not equipped with also advanced social and science knowledge and skills? Heck, their advanced probe could probably even do all the observation and tests fully automatically and report the result back. The Chain Of Suspicion will never form to begin with because they CAN determine the facts if they really wants to. And then so the Dark Forest will never form too (at least not for the advanced side).

Now, let's talk about some serious thing. Because I've noticed some people uses the Dark Forest Theory to explain the relation between nations (yes, Earth nations). So it is really important to realize that the entire theory is nothing more than a plot device that Liu Cixin employed for his novel, among many other plots. Most of them are there to make the story more convenient, instead of more logical (as I have said, based on the theory, the logical thing to do is to wipe everything out at contact, how convenient that the probe "JuST cAnT" huh?).

So, if the theory inspired you do to something good, then nice, go ahead, have a good life, help people, communticate with others, try to understand others, have fun. However, if you believe the "Dark Forest Theory" is THE true governing rule of the universe, then you probably overthink it too much, stop it, it's not healthy. And guess what, the planet we're living on hosts multiple civilizations, you stick with us now no matter what.