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  • This is just plain evil.
    by pr337h4m
  • I think the only way discovering aliens will end well for them or us is if they’re equal to us in intelligence and military capability.
    by dabinat
  • The real dark forest is not the fear of alien species but because the species that think like that wipe themselves out long before any interstellar travel is possible
    by poulpy123
  • Spreading as close to the speed of light as possible with von Neumann probes generally defeats the dark forest, no? Either you win (spread to every star system) or the forest stops being dark from the border wars between alien probes and their manufacturing systems.
    by benlivengood
  • I have always found the dark forest theory silly. What is the idea there? If you are silent, hungry night predator will not find you? Because that is how evolution has built them - in odrer to survive they need their food to actively advertise its location?

    Somehow all those theorists imagine the space civilization that likes to kill - yet has not discovered any ways to find something killable. So the apex space predators hope that the prey will send the signals into space. That's how they became the killing machine - by never searching.

    This also reminds me of the catch 22 of space colonization - the civilization whose genetics promote conquests and colonization will most likely kill itself in internal wars way before colonizing any noticeable part of the space. And peaceful civilization has time to grow to power but does not have colonization needs. The space predator civilization will most likely die in nuclear war before they have chance to gather together and make peace to pursue space colonization as one.

    by r00f
  • Spoiler alert for the dark forest trilogy but the overall series thesis revealed at the very end is that the human capacity to extend goodwill towards the unknown principally rescues us from the dark forest.

    It was the oppressed daughter of the scientist whose first act of extending trust to an uncontacted alien species set on course the events that would be uniquely ours in defiance of the dark forest theory.

    Ultimately, our two species do come to peacefully cohabitate. This would not be possible if we all thought as the unknown third species who destroyed the star targeted by the spell.

    by gavmor
  • > Everything is probabilities and risk, but can we really accept any risk when it comes to something as important as the future of the human species? That's the part of the Dark Forest that gets me - the game theory of uncertainty. No player in this game wants to destroy the other. But the risk of another civilization taking into their head that they want to spread their culture at the end of a ray-gun is too great.

    I'm ignoring the depraved morality of this stance for the sake of argument. But I wouldn't ignore the depravity of it if it were something we really had to face.

    This logic is incredibly flawed. Everything is indeed probability and risk, but deciding to wage war on any civilization we detect even if they don't exhibit aggression is taking the chances that they'll be hostile from something less than 100% to exactly 100%. Then add the risk that we'd lose that war, and the decision to attack in the absence of hostility becomes a much greater risk than the decision to wait until they exhibit hostility first.

    Also, as an aside, if we take the author's logic as sound, then we absolutely have to destroy all genAI companies. The genAI industry has been constantly telling us about how there's a substantial risk that their product will destroy us, after all.

    by JohnFen
  • Why not kill your neighbor? After all, there's no telling when he'll get it in his head to come kill you. Might as well go ahead and murder anyone you bump into, they might be a murderer themselves!
    by unrented7977

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