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0 pointsbryanrasmussen24d ago0 comments

I guess the connection would be human history, a dark forest is a scene of lawlessness and violence and danger in much of that history - at least where stories are concerned.

In the use of the phrase Dark Forest to explain the Fermi paradox it suggests that alien civilizations have kept themselves dark out of fear that the rest of the forest is actually lawless and violent.

In this case though we are entering a dark forest, like Hansel and Gretel, supposedly defenseless against the monsters that lurk in there, but really - they weren't that defenseless were they? I don't think the phrase that apt.

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eru24d ago

> In the use of the phrase Dark Forest to explain the Fermi paradox it suggests that alien civilizations have kept themselves dark out of fear that the rest of the forest is actually lawless and violent.

It's more complicated.

For the Fermi paradox version of the 'Dark Forest' to work, you need civilisations to actively go out and destroy any other form of life they find announcing themselves:

> The "dark forest" hypothesis presumes that any space-faring civilization would view any other intelligent life such as theirs as an inevitable threat and thus destroy any nascent life that makes itself known. As a result, the electromagnetic radiation surveys would not find evidence of intelligent alien life.

Wikipedia has a section on game theory etc.

Without this additional element (basically the version you describe), the dark forest theory doesn't explain the Fermi Paradox: it's just another filter that might perhaps exclude 90% of civilisations, but many civilisations would still be dumb enough to announce themselves. Humans certainly did and keep doing so: it only needs a some people to send a message, and near unanimity to not send anything.

(And that's completely ignoring that our very atmosphere with its chemical imbalance has been sending a strong message of "there's probably life here" for billions of years now. Even our own technology, still in its infancy, is increasingly able to pick up clues about the chemical composition of the atmosphere of exoplanets ever further away from us. And we are still getting better quickly.)

If you add the element that other civilisation are hiding, but come out of hiding just to strike, that breaks down as soon as you have more than two players. Or even just the faint possibility of more than two players.

When you know there are only at most exactly to players, and you are the lurker and find someone else being 'noisy': yes, you have an incentive to strike. When there might be other third parties lurking, you better stay quiet, lest you invite a strike by a third party against you.