5 ms·

Dark forest makes no sense to me. Why would a civilization eradicate another, spending huge amounts of resources (time, energy, material) when the universe has

• piker 6mo ago
  Makes some sense to me, as the prisoner's dilemma dictates at least some fraction will try to kill you. So you've got to go first. Reminds me of the Dan Carlin take on aircraft carriers in World War II: if you in a carrier spotted an opposing carrier and didn't send everything you had before it spotted you, you were dead. The only move was to go all in every time.
  • the_af 6mo ago
    Surely that logic applies if you're at war with the other side? If you start attacking carriers of random superpowers, you only invite further destruction...
    • piker 6mo ago
      Yes, but in this case the aircraft carriers represent the entire civilization and there is no repeat player such as nations in times of peace. So if you spot an alien civilization with even a 1% probability of trying to kill you, you don't really have the opportunity to "wait and see". And there's no meta higher-level arrangement that will protect you.
• Phemist 6mo ago
  The dark forest is conditional on that it does not require huge amounts of resources to eradicate another civilization and that (over time) the universe turns out not to be of a scale enormous enough (and in the book there are agents working to actively make it smaller). Bringing it back to the dark forest of idea space, it is an interesting question whether the the space of feasibly executable ideas being small (as this essay assumes) is inherently true, or more of a function of our inability to navigate/travel it very well. If the former, then yes it probably is/will be a dark forest. If the latter, then I would think the jury is still out.
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• nate 6mo ago
  Are you asking about the 3 body problem version of this? Spoiler alert: The folks doing the eradicating aren't spending much time/energy/anything on eradicating. It's one large missile through space. I think the gist is: sure, we humans can't conceive of getting to anyone else in the universe in any timescale, but if we can keep ourselves from destroying ourselves, we'll eventually figure it out. And we'll spread. And we'll kill everything that isn't us in the process as we've done as explorers on this planet. So really in 3BP: it's inexpensive to eradicate. But insanely expensive to possibly get the intention wrong of any other civilization you encounter. They might kill you. (again, this is just my interpretation of what 3BP said)
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  • thomashop 6mo ago
    I don't think it's correct that we destroyed everything that isn't us. If we take all living beings, we have destroyed only a small percentage.
    • 05 6mo ago
      Not counting by total terrestrial vertebrate biomass.
• cbau 6mo ago
  To quote from the book: > “First: Survival is the primary need of civilization. Second: Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant. One more thing: To derive a basic picture of cosmic sociology from these two axioms, you need two other important concepts: chains of suspicion and the technological explosion.” 1. you can never know the intentions of other entities, and they cannot know yours (chain of suspicion) 2. technology level grows unpredictably (technological explosion) 3. the goal of civilization is survival 4. resources are finite but growth is infinite As soon as you identify another entity in the forest, even if they cannot annihilate you at present and signal peace, both could change without warning. Therefore, the only rational move is to eradicate the other immediately. (Especially if you believe the other will deduce the same.) Elimination in the book is basically sending a nuke, not a costly invasion force. not sure it actually is true, but that's the argument in the book
  • bethekidyouwant 6mo ago
    That’s true among human societies as well, but trade leads to more prosperity.
  • deleted 6mo ago
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  • jmull 6mo ago
    I really liked those books, for all the creative ideas... it's fine that they don't all work, but the Dark Forest has to be among the worst of them. It was unfortunate it was highlighted. Some rebuttals, going point by point... 1. you can know the intentions of other entities by observing and communicating with them. 2. technology explosions, like pretty much exponential phenomena, are self limiting. They necessarily consume the medium that makes them possible. 3. and 4. civilizations aren't necessarily sentient (ours certainly isn't) and don't have an agency, much less goals. Individuals have goals, and some may work for the survival of the civilization they belong to. But others may decide they can profit if they work with the aliens. 4. Multiple civilizations may well come into competition over resources, but that's more of an argument about why the forest would not be dark. Practically speaking, a civilizations that opts to focus on massive, vastly expensive efforts to find and exterminate far flung civilizations because they may become a rival in the future may be easily outcompeted by civilizations that learn to communicate with and work with other civilizations they encounter.
• 0x3f 6mo ago
  Competition kills margins (profits, security, QoL), so the budget for eradication should be quite high, but generally speaking the idea is to destroy even fledgling upstarts, back when the cost is low.
  • lstodd 6mo ago
    And the idea does not make sense once you include intel being incomplete into the equation: what if the preemptive strike will not attain complete eradication? You might or might not fatally cripple the opponent, but retaliation can do that too and you cannot be sure that it won't. It's MAD all over again.
    • 0x3f 6mo ago
      Well if they're only an upstart, they don't have the ability to destroy you _yet_. You 'nuke' them in the hope they won't get that ability. You're aiming to stop MAD from being a thing. In those terms, the US should have been nuking and dominating everyone, and the idea was floated after WW2, but I believe they were precluded by practical limitations. If they had developed the tech outside of wartime, and built up a stockpile, maybe that is indeed what would have happened and we'd have a one-world government already.
      • lstodd 6mo ago
        Point is you cannot know if they are an upstart (whatever upstart means). It can be misinterpretation, it can be camoflage, it can be anything. But once you rain death you're better be prepared to be grateful for what you are about to receive back.
        • 0x3f 6mo ago
          Depends on the context. We certainly knew nobody else had nukes.
          • lstodd 6mo ago
• Hikikomori 6mo ago
  A space war is not needed, they could just send a few missiles to take out anyone. I have my own theory of dark forest and AGIs. That there's some collection of AGIs out there allowing evolution to develop intelligence anywhere it happens and takes them out once it produces an AGI, or if it doesn't performs a reset. They have literally all the time available to them, can easily travel the vast distances if needed.
• sebastianconcpt 6mo ago
  Agree, is a fiction based in accepting the premise of zero-sum game. It denies that more advanced civilizations might have better models of the universe where they know this isn't an issue and we're just stupid teenagers in the neighborhood playing dangerous games and merely taking a look every now and then to see if we prove we will survive ourselves.
• lifeformed 6mo ago
  "Timescales that makes sense" may be a human reasoning but not necessarily the reasoning of inconceivably advanced timeless civilizations. Sure, that planet of fish may be harmless now, but what about in a quick three billion years when they have FTL and AGI and Von Neuman probes and Dyson spheres and antimatter bombs? Easier to click the delete button now to save the trouble later.
  • the_af 6mo ago
    The laws of physics apply to the civilization of alien fish too, it's not a human specific timescale. They have nothing to fight over with us, no reason to spend effort developing weapons to reach us, if they do have weapons they'd have a much higher probability of wiping themselves up first, and no way for their weapons to reach us within a time boundary that makes sense for any sentient race. Dark Forest seems to be based on a scifi/fiction need to have conflict with "the other", which is thrilling but doesn't necessarily reflect the real cosmos.
    • red-iron-pine 6mo ago
      the dark forest is based on trying to answer the fermi paradox as to how the universe is so big but we haven't seen any other sign of life anywhere answer: because they're all dead, or in hiding the author then writes a book around that idea
      • the_af 6mo ago
        Isn't this more or less what I just said? Except I added in this and other comments why it's not a very convincing explanation for Fermi's paradox either. In other words, > answer: because they're all dead, or in hiding I understand this is what the Dark Forest theory argues, but it works because it's meant for a scifi book; it's just not a very good explanation for the real universe.
    • lifeformed 6mo ago
      That's still making assumptions based on our human understanding of the cosmos. Our "laws of physics" could be a localized understanding in our region of space, and much, much, much more powerful entities could operate outside of that, where our perception of time and scale does not meaningfully apply. It would be near-zero cost to destroy potential threats, so they might as well. It's like humans eliminating pests and pathogens. It's standard hygiene, a low cost preventative practice. Nobody is targeting a single bacterium, they're just wiping down dirty spots. It's an interesting concept in the book because of how imaginative it gets with scaling.
• viccis 6mo ago
  It's a silly concept IMO because it assumes that civilizations with the ability to do interstellar travel or communication make the decision to not do so because they have knowledge of an interstellar force that destroys any civilization that does so. It would seem like any civilization that becomes aware of such a force would be destroyed, so how would all of these surviving ones know of the danger? Actual dark forests are quiet because a mix of the animals' instinct and visible signs of danger. While it's possible that some civilizations would hypothetically be able to observe what happened to others and keep quiet, they would all have to do so to solve the contradictions of Fermi's paradox.
  • the_af 6mo ago
    It's silly at multiple levels. As an explanation of Fermi's Paradox it fails to explain why, if all these dead civilizations are detectable enough to get destroyed, we haven't detected any. Even if they are now extinct, their emissions must have been great enough to get them killed. So where are they? It's very, very unlikely all of them went quiet because they learned of this out of pure theoretical reasoning. So where are their "corpses" so to speak? And if they cannot be detected easily, because they are too far apart or emissions are near impossible to detect or recognize as evidence of intelligent life (the more likely actual explanation of Fermi's Paradox other than the simpler "they just aren't there"), then there's no risk of destruction.
    • viccis 6mo ago
      Exactly. I think it's popular because it takes a difficult question and answers it with a conceptually elegant answer that has an evocative and spooky nature metaphor. Unfortunately, since it's so poorly grounded, any second order imagery built off it doesn't really add an explanatory power and usually just winds up as a tortured metaphor. For example, Yancey Strickler's The dark forest theory of the internet blog post (which he later spun into a book) that made it so popular in think pieces like this completely misunderstands even the dark forest theory metaphor itself. 1: https://www.ystrickler.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet/ https://www.ystrickler.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-int...