The Trisolarians developed FTL travel while they were on the way to Earth, IIRC.
The predominant form of relationship between European and Native American peoples for hundreds of years was trade, not war. The tragedies and the atrocities that resulted were a slow burn of conflicting interests and epidemiological naïveté, both between Europeans and Natives and also within each group. That's quite different from the hiding and decapitation strikes usually presented as "dark forest hypothesis", because there's no reason that those specific interests and ignorance would carry over to interstellar society (and every reason that they would need to be overcome in order to become interstellar in the first place).
But why do people always use the fate of resource-constrained preindustrial societies (both Europe and America) to try to predict relationships between hyper-advanced Kardashev-level civilizations anyway? It really seems to me like some kind of projected shame. You can see this too with Liu Cixin. He came from a country that was recently dominated, and has more recently been preparing to dominate its neighbors, so his story pretends nothing better is possible. I suppose that's comforting for some, and questioning it brings out people who show what it's really about.
Google Trends shows the top 10 countries for "Dark forest hypothesis" include the US, Taiwan, China, Peurto Rico, HK, Canada, and Aus [1]— Places with a prominent recent or ongoing imperial history, whether as victims or victimizers. I actually find the "dark forest" narratives quite disturbing, not as a prediction of our future, but as a window into the psyche of people who seem to want it to be one.
You might as well say the Romans had a slave-based economy, so therefore spacefaring empires must also be looking for human slaves! That's got exactly the same amount of validity as the Native comparison. But economic and military incentives obviously change as technology and culture develops. If anything, the fact we used to kill a lot of natives, and we don't so much anymore, is a strong sign that advanced societies can trend towards being less genocidal.
1: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=%2Fg%2F11jyk5h9nj...
MAD is utter bunk. It depends on rational actors that also believes the other actors are rational. Even Reagan realised the folly of MAD after Able Archer in 1983, and realising the Soviet leadership genuinely seemed to believe the US might be prepared to strike first. If either side thinks the other side is irrational and preparing a first strike, MAD falls apart. If either side is actually irrational, it also falls apart.
But MAD also depends on a sufficient ability for both sides to do serious harm. If one side sees a first strike as an opportunity to prevent the other side from gaining that ability, MAD also falls apart, and the thinking behind it can again then push a rational but callous actor to strike first to prevent being pushed into a MAD scenario.
Cooperation might eventually win out, but that won't help you if your civilization has long since been wiped out.
You can see shades this of this, e.g., in the difference between single-round versus iterated Prisoner's Dilemmas.
> MAD is utter bunk. It depends on rational actors that also believes the other actors are rational. Even Reagan realised the folly of MAD after Able Archer in 1983, and realising the Soviet leadership genuinely seemed to believe the US might be prepared to strike first.
What do you think the long-term prospects are of a species that goes around flinging RKVs at people? No more North America and no more Eurasia, if that happened. Maybe South America and Africa can pick up the pieces. Just because irrational hyperaggressive actors can briefly exist doesn't mean you're likely to encounter them. They won't survive for long.
MAD exists whether or not any particular participant believes in it, because it's just the cause and effect of competing powers each with their own agency. Or else we wouldn't be here. Even the Soviets knew that a possible US first strike was better than a guaranteed US retaliatory strike, which would happen if they struck first.
> Cooperation might eventually win out, but that won't help you if your civilization has long since been wiped out.
The whole "Fermi Paradox" arguments are based on an extreme form of "eventually, we should expect to see aliens, so why haven't we already?" This doesn't mean aggressive civilizations don't exist, but the reasons to think they're prevalent are overblown.
