What do you think of The Dark Forest Theory?

[Stellar Colonies]

Most life, intelligent or not, is probably either so well-adapted to their environment that they never have any pressure to develop the means to leave their origin point and die out, or are so destructive to their own environment that they wipe out their capability to leave and die out anyway. On top of that, intelligent life which can strike out into space (disregarding for a moment hypothetical life which developed in space or in an environment which allows them to access it a lot more easily than ours) is probably incredibly rare and trending more towards the latter when it does develop. If any actually have have spread across the galaxy and have been doing their thing to the galactic ecology, it is possible that we might not be able to distinguish their impact from the natural environment regardless since it's all integrated into our observations of what we assume as being untouched by intelligence, although that last bit may be unlikely.

Dark Forest is interesting but probably not any more likely than other hypothetical solutions, including the above which was pulled together from a mishmash of other ideas.

[Eahland]

I think it's a combination of:

a) The period where a technological civilization outshines their sun in the radio band is brief, in historical terms, after which they either move to less visible communications technologies or collapse back to a primitive level. (Jury's still out on which way we're going.) Unless our period overlaps theirs (modulo lightspeed lag), we won't see them. Note that we've only even had the ability to detect radio signals for about 125 years, and have only really been trying for 50 or so. That's not a very big bubble, in astronomical terms.

b) Interstellar travel is Hard, and logistically not worthwhile. What's the point of trying to strike up a conversation with your neighbors if it's going to take a thousand years to get a reply back — assuming your civilization and theirs are still around and capable of communicating by then — and even longer to go visit them?

The latter is also much of the reason I think the Dark Forest Hypothesis is highly unlikely. Every indication is that launching an interstellar attack would be prohibitively difficult, so anyone else who might be out there is not a threat to us, and we're not a threat to them.

[Asherahan]

I like to believe in HFY just because.

There is no scary Alien Empire.

We are the scary multiple world wars, mass extinctions and fuck ton of Atomic weapons that make Aliens go.

Oh Hell to the Fuck no are we making first contact with this race.

[Bombadil]

The OP doesn't explain the theory fully.

In the novel, the argument is laid out like this:

All life desires to stay alive.
There is no way to know if other lifeforms can or will destroy you if given a chance.
Lacking assurances, the safest option for any species is to annihilate other life forms before they have a chance to do the same.

The actual outcome is that any species stupid enough to announce itself is destroyed, and those that don't are, essentially, in a dark forest.

I'd done an OP on this a few years back -link - that asked the question a little more bluntly..

[Seangoli]

If the Dark Forest were true, there would be a reason for it, and we would almost certainly be able to detect that reason. Even if it was just the space equivalent of giant, scary footprints.

I think there are better explanations for the Fermi Paradox.

The explanation could be that we are in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. Alien life could exist but it might be in the center of the galaxy or on the side farthest from us and we just happen to live in a life desert.

You don't even need to get into "galactic backwater" territory to reject the Fermi Paradox.

Simply put, we are not capable of seeing anything one could remotely presume to be advanced technology, we have barely looked to begin with, and we have no idea what to look for. Our most "comprehensive" searches involve looking for radio waves, which are a 150 year old technology for us, is incredibly piss poor for communication on solar scale, let alone an interstellar scale, and fades into background noise being all but indistinguishable from background radiation at only a few dozen light years. Hell, as we have .entered the digital age, we have actually reduced our broadcasting on radio wave frequencies, and one would presume the same would hold true elsewhere. We literally could have spent fifty years looking for something that simply isn't a sign of intelligent at all.

To bring this further, we can only now barely image exoplanets, and even then the amount of actually useful information we derive is "yep, there's a planet there". Everything else we find is significantly more indirect information.

A highly advanced civilization could exist a mere 100 light years from us, and we would likely not even be able to tell given our abilities. A planet-sized spacecraft in the Oort Cloud might as well be utterly invisible unless they specifically and intentionally tried to communicate with in a manner we would be looking for, which is not at all a given.

Until we get to a point where we can actually observe a meaningful enough percentage of the Galaxy with a granularity that goes beyond "looking for century old human technology", then there is zero reason to postulate absurdist solutions like the Dark Forest, or frankly any other solutions.

The difference between having never looked at all and what we have done in looking for life might as well be non existent. For all our searches are worth, we might as well have never looked at all.

[Bombadil]

The explanation could be that we are in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. Alien life could exist but it might be in the center of the galaxy or on the side farthest from us and we just happen to live in a life desert.

You don't even need to get into "galactic backwater" territory to reject the Fermi Paradox.

Simply put, we are not capable of seeing anything one could remotely presume to be advanced technology, we have barely looked to begin with, and we have no idea what to look for. Our most "comprehensive" searches involve looking for radio waves, which are a 150 year old technology for us, is incredibly piss poor for communication on solar scale, let alone an interstellar scale, and fades into background noise being all but indistinguishable from background radiation at only a few dozen light years. Hell, as we have .entered the digital age, we have actually reduced our broadcasting on radio wave frequencies, and one would presume the same would hold true elsewhere. We literally could have spent fifty years looking for something that simply isn't a sign of intelligent at all.

To bring this further, we can only now barely image exoplanets, and even then the amount of actually useful information we derive is "yep, there's a planet there". Everything else we find is significantly more indirect information.

A highly advanced civilization could exist a mere 100 light years from us, and we would likely not even be able to tell given our abilities. A planet-sized spacecraft in the Oort Cloud might as well be utterly invisible unless they specifically and intentionally tried to communicate with in a manner we would be looking for, which is not at all a given.

Until we get to a point where we can actually observe a meaningful enough percentage of the Galaxy with a granularity that goes beyond "looking for century old human technology", then there is zero reason to postulate absurdist solutions like the Dark Forest, or frankly any other solutions.

The difference between having never looked at all and what we have done in looking for life might as well be non existent. For all our searches are worth, we might as well have never looked at all.

Anyway, we're doing a perfectly good job destroying our planet by ourselves, we don't need no steenkin' aliens..

[Big Bad Blue]

We have not found any "aliens" because there are none to find. Any other advanced civilizations that may have been, are or are to be are all too far away to possibly have any interaction with ours. We are effectively alone in the cosmos, and there is no Planet B. So let's let go of the sci-fi pie in the sky and get down to the business of solving our problems in the here and now.

I like to believe in HFY just because.

There is no scary Alien Empire.

We are the scary multiple world wars, mass extinctions and fuck ton of Atomic weapons that make Aliens go.

Oh Hell to the Fuck no are we making first contact with this race.

Besides which, we're made out of meat.

[Duvniask]

This is my first time hearing it, but... That's not a theory. It's a hypothesis that doesn't even make sense.

Are humans hiding? No.

Are pine trees, dolphins, paramecia, and [pick another species of your choice] hiding? No.

Are all living things on Earth intelligent enough to hide? No.

Are all living things on Earth mobile enough to hide? No

So why the fuck would every species on every inhabited planet except Earth want to hide, know how to hide, and have the mobility to hide -- but we're the only planet in the universe that didn't get the memo? That's complete bullshit.

We haven't found aliens because there are not any in our solar system, and other solar systems are really far away. There isn't any need for any further explanation once you wrap your head around just how far "really far away" is.

You could not misunderstand the Dark Forest hypothesis any more if you tried, lol.

What matters is what advanced species do. Dolphins, as far as we know, don't emit radio signals into space.

And the very fact that humans are not hiding means we could be in danger, per the hypothesis.

[New Galactic States]

This is my first time hearing it, but... That's not a theory. It's a hypothesis that doesn't even make sense.

Are humans hiding? No.

Are pine trees, dolphins, paramecia, and [pick another species of your choice] hiding? No.

Are all living things on Earth intelligent enough to hide? No.

Are all living things on Earth mobile enough to hide? No

So why the fuck would every species on every inhabited planet except Earth want to hide, know how to hide, and have the mobility to hide -- but we're the only planet in the universe that didn't get the memo? That's complete bullshit.

We haven't found aliens because there are not any in our solar system, and other solar systems are really far away. There isn't any need for any further explanation once you wrap your head around just how far "really far away" is.

You could not misunderstand the Dark Forest hypothesis any more if you tried, lol.

What matters is what advanced species do. Dolphins, as far as we know, don't emit radio signals into space.

And the very fact that humans are not hiding means we could be in danger, per the hypothesis.

I know right

[Seangoli]

This is my first time hearing it, but... That's not a theory. It's a hypothesis that doesn't even make sense.

Are humans hiding? No.

Are pine trees, dolphins, paramecia, and [pick another species of your choice] hiding? No.

Are all living things on Earth intelligent enough to hide? No.

Are all living things on Earth mobile enough to hide? No

So why the fuck would every species on every inhabited planet except Earth want to hide, know how to hide, and have the mobility to hide -- but we're the only planet in the universe that didn't get the memo? That's complete bullshit.

We haven't found aliens because there are not any in our solar system, and other solar systems are really far away. There isn't any need for any further explanation once you wrap your head around just how far "really far away" is.

You could not misunderstand the Dark Forest hypothesis any more if you tried, lol.

What matters is what advanced species do. Dolphins, as far as we know, don't emit radio signals into space.

And the very fact that humans are not hiding means we could be in danger, per the hypothesis.

Appealing to what advanced aliena would do, while simultaneously mentioning radio waves, is pretty damn hilarious. Radio waves are antiquated on Earth, and funnily enough our radio "bubble" has been decreasing in potency in recent years as we reached and passed the digital age. Couple this with the broadcast bubble decreasing in potency exponentially with distance, and we are practically invisible to any alien looking directly at us, even assuming they are looking specifically for radio waves specifically at our planet, and are specifically within 150 ylight years of our world (as before thenz we weren't even sending those signals out). The reverse is true for us looking elsewhere.

It is also an incredibly useless form of communication at the distances we are looking at, as the immense energy needed to have potent enough directed signals that would be distinguishable from background noise is immense, and the time scales involved utterly maddening.

The Galaxy appears quite because we are effectively blind and deaf when it comes to seeing anything. Whether or not it actually is quiet is another matter, but every solution to the Fermi Paradox presupposes that the Paradox's logical underpinning are valid suppositions. They are not. There is zero reason to come up with these "solutions", simply because there is no paradox to begin with.

[Cetacea]

So like are Humans the Dark Empire in this theory? Are They hiding from us?

[New Galactic States]

So like are Humans the Dark Empire in this theory? Are They hiding from us?

Humans are the Idiots screaming into space “HEY, OVER HEREEEEEEE”

The evil empire is another alien species

[Chan Island]

The explanation could be that we are in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. Alien life could exist but it might be in the center of the galaxy or on the side farthest from us and we just happen to live in a life desert.

You don't even need to get into "galactic backwater" territory to reject the Fermi Paradox.

Simply put, we are not capable of seeing anything one could remotely presume to be advanced technology, we have barely looked to begin with, and we have no idea what to look for. Our most "comprehensive" searches involve looking for radio waves, which are a 150 year old technology for us, is incredibly piss poor for communication on solar scale, let alone an interstellar scale, and fades into background noise being all but indistinguishable from background radiation at only a few dozen light years. Hell, as we have .entered the digital age, we have actually reduced our broadcasting on radio wave frequencies, and one would presume the same would hold true elsewhere. We literally could have spent fifty years looking for something that simply isn't a sign of intelligent at all.

To bring this further, we can only now barely image exoplanets, and even then the amount of actually useful information we derive is "yep, there's a planet there". Everything else we find is significantly more indirect information.

A highly advanced civilization could exist a mere 100 light years from us, and we would likely not even be able to tell given our abilities. A planet-sized spacecraft in the Oort Cloud might as well be utterly invisible unless they specifically and intentionally tried to communicate with in a manner we would be looking for, which is not at all a given.

Until we get to a point where we can actually observe a meaningful enough percentage of the Galaxy with a granularity that goes beyond "looking for century old human technology", then there is zero reason to postulate absurdist solutions like the Dark Forest, or frankly any other solutions.

The difference between having never looked at all and what we have done in looking for life might as well be non existent. For all our searches are worth, we might as well have never looked at all.

And yet none of it matters for disproving the Dark Forest theory.

The Dark Forest posits that every single other intelligent species in the universe is hiding their existence on purpose, presumably because of some great threat.

If they were all doing this, that would mean the threat would be of such magnitude, and so obvious, that even with our baby steps we would be able to detect its existence.

[Eahland]

Oh yeah, and if there does exist some undiscovered technology that would allow a more advanced species to tell the universal speed limit where to get off and make an interstellar attack not logistically ridiculous, that also implies far better ways to communicate than spewing slow old radio-frequency photons into space. If there's an advanced civilization with FTL starships out there, we're not going to be seeing their radio communications, because radio is a really dumb way to communicate when you've got FTL starships. If nothing else, the old adage, "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tapes," really comes into its own when the station wagon is FTL, so just hauling a trunk full of physical media to the destination is also the low-latency way to do it.

[Autorium]

Eh sure, but our species is too young to know yet

[San Lumen]

I think its ridiculous. More like there already is a galactic government and we aren't part of it because we aren't ready or extraterrestrials are already here and don't want to make first contact because they feel humans couldn't handle it yet.

[San Lumen]

You could not misunderstand the Dark Forest hypothesis any more if you tried, lol.

What matters is what advanced species do. Dolphins, as far as we know, don't emit radio signals into space.

And the very fact that humans are not hiding means we could be in danger, per the hypothesis.

Appealing to what advanced aliena would do, while simultaneously mentioning radio waves, is pretty damn hilarious. Radio waves are antiquated on Earth, and funnily enough our radio "bubble" has been decreasing in potency in recent years as we reached and passed the digital age. Couple this with the broadcast bubble decreasing in potency exponentially with distance, and we are practically invisible to any alien looking directly at us, even assuming they are looking specifically for radio waves specifically at our planet, and are specifically within 150 ylight years of our world (as before thenz we weren't even sending those signals out). The reverse is true for us looking elsewhere.

It is also an incredibly useless form of communication at the distances we are looking at, as the immense energy needed to have potent enough directed signals that would be distinguishable from background noise is immense, and the time scales involved utterly maddening.

The Galaxy appears quite because we are effectively blind and deaf when it comes to seeing anything. Whether or not it actually is quiet is another matter, but every solution to the Fermi Paradox presupposes that the Paradox's logical underpinning are valid suppositions. They are not. There is zero reason to come up with these "solutions", simply because there is no paradox to begin with.

Does potency mean it gets weaker with time? I thought every time you watch tv or listen to the radio the signal goes across the earth and out into space.

[Stellar Colonies]

Appealing to what advanced aliena would do, while simultaneously mentioning radio waves, is pretty damn hilarious. Radio waves are antiquated on Earth, and funnily enough our radio "bubble" has been decreasing in potency in recent years as we reached and passed the digital age. Couple this with the broadcast bubble decreasing in potency exponentially with distance, and we are practically invisible to any alien looking directly at us, even assuming they are looking specifically for radio waves specifically at our planet, and are specifically within 150 ylight years of our world (as before thenz we weren't even sending those signals out). The reverse is true for us looking elsewhere.

It is also an incredibly useless form of communication at the distances we are looking at, as the immense energy needed to have potent enough directed signals that would be distinguishable from background noise is immense, and the time scales involved utterly maddening.

The Galaxy appears quite because we are effectively blind and deaf when it comes to seeing anything. Whether or not it actually is quiet is another matter, but every solution to the Fermi Paradox presupposes that the Paradox's logical underpinning are valid suppositions. They are not. There is zero reason to come up with these "solutions", simply because there is no paradox to begin with.

Does potency mean it gets weaker with time? I thought every time you watch tv or listen to the radio the signal goes across the earth and out into space.

Basically, our radio noise is diminishing as we get more efficient with transmitting signals, and what we've already sent out is degrading into meaningless noise as it expands through space.

Both of those are probably why we haven't detected anything elsewhere, assuming other intelligences also develop radio or even exist close enough in space and time for us to detect it.

[San Lumen]

Does potency mean it gets weaker with time? I thought every time you watch tv or listen to the radio the signal goes across the earth and out into space.

Basically, our radio noise is diminishing as we get more efficient with transmitting signals, and what we've already sent out is degrading into meaningless noise as it expands through space.

Why is it diminishing? Its therefore not true when I watch The Weather Channel every morning that the signal goes out into space?

[Stellar Colonies]

Basically, our radio noise is diminishing as we get more efficient with transmitting signals, and what we've already sent out is degrading into meaningless noise as it expands through space.

Why is it diminishing? Its therefore not true when I watch The Weather Channel every morning that the signal goes out into space?

I'm now unsure about the first claim so I'll hold it in limbo, but as a signal expands through space, its intensity is decreasing as the amount of signal seen from a specific location decreases as that volume expands, and that diminishing intensity is increasingly drowned out by background noise from natural sources in space and obscuring material.

Eventually it becomes indistinguishable from the rest of the universe, although that distance increases based on the sensitivity of what's listening.

[San Lumen]

Why is it diminishing? Its therefore not true when I watch The Weather Channel every morning that the signal goes out into space?

I'm now unsure about the first claim so I'll hold it in limbo, but as a signal expands through space, its intensity is decreasing as the amount of signal seen from a specific location decreases as that volume expands, and that diminishing intensity is increasingly drowned out by background noise from natural sources in space and obscuring material.

Eventually it becomes indistinguishable from the rest of the universe, although that distance increases based on the sensitivity of what's listening.

What's to say an advanced extraterrestrial civilization hasn't developed a extremely powerful radio telescope that enables them to watch the initial broadcast of the Weather Channel from May 2nd 1982?

[Space Squid]

I think its ridiculous. More like there already is a galactic government and we aren't part of it because we aren't ready or extraterrestrials are already here and don't want to make first contact because they feel humans couldn't handle it yet.

I think it would be more ridiculous for aliens to be organized along massively anthropocentric lines, then it would be for them to conform to a structure we see sometimes in nature.

Mind you, I don't necessarily agree with OP. But it requires far fewer unjustified assumptions then what you propose. What you propose is like saying that if Bigfoot is real, then Bigfoot society is most likely organized as a strictly caste-based anarcho-socialist republic.

[Eahland]

Appealing to what advanced aliena would do, while simultaneously mentioning radio waves, is pretty damn hilarious. Radio waves are antiquated on Earth, and funnily enough our radio "bubble" has been decreasing in potency in recent years as we reached and passed the digital age. Couple this with the broadcast bubble decreasing in potency exponentially with distance, and we are practically invisible to any alien looking directly at us, even assuming they are looking specifically for radio waves specifically at our planet, and are specifically within 150 ylight years of our world (as before thenz we weren't even sending those signals out). The reverse is true for us looking elsewhere.

It is also an incredibly useless form of communication at the distances we are looking at, as the immense energy needed to have potent enough directed signals that would be distinguishable from background noise is immense, and the time scales involved utterly maddening.

The Galaxy appears quite because we are effectively blind and deaf when it comes to seeing anything. Whether or not it actually is quiet is another matter, but every solution to the Fermi Paradox presupposes that the Paradox's logical underpinning are valid suppositions. They are not. There is zero reason to come up with these "solutions", simply because there is no paradox to begin with.

Does potency mean it gets weaker with time? I thought every time you watch tv or listen to the radio the signal goes across the earth and out into space.

Every time I watch TV, the signal comes into my house over a physical cable and only travels by radio from my wireless access point to my Roku. (And it wouldn't even do that if they'd put an actual Ethernet port in my Roku.) I can barely get usable signal from my WAP at the end of the block.

When I listen to the radio, that's also coming over a radio transmitter that's only good for about fifty feet, and that only because my car hasn't got a proper line-in for my MP3 player and the cassette deck insists on spitting out the cassette adapter, so I have to use an FM adapter. Because screw listening to commercial radio that's 50% advertisements and plays the same crappy music all the time (and since when is Pearl Jam classic rock?), except during peak drive times, when they inexplicably abandon the music entirely in favor of morons yapping, when I can stuff thousands of tracks of music I actually like, that has no advertisements or morons yapping, on a device I can put in my pocket.

Since the digital revolution, we've moved hard from blanketing the planet with high-power analog radio-frequency push media to pulling our media over digital cables, and only maybe using low-power radios for the last short-range hop to our mobile devices.

[Eahland]

Basically, our radio noise is diminishing as we get more efficient with transmitting signals, and what we've already sent out is degrading into meaningless noise as it expands through space.

Why is it diminishing? Its therefore not true when I watch The Weather Channel every morning that the signal goes out into space?

Probably not, because The Weather Channel is probably coming into your house on a physical wire.

[Space Squid]

At a certain point, it's not even about the signal being weak. It's about the noise obscuring it.

If you throw a pebble into the ocean in Spain, the ripples aren't going to be detectable in Cuba, no matter how sensitive your instruments are. The churning of the ocean will have completely subsumed your signal.