What do you think of The Dark Forest Theory?

[Eahland]

Also, even for over-the-air broadcast stuff, one of the advantages of digital (which U.S. broadcast television switched to in the early 2000s) is that you can retrieve a useful-quality data stream from a lower-power signal than analog, because all you need is enough differentiation to tell 1s from 0s, and you can perfectly reconstruct the original data. (It's actually a little more complicated than that, but close enough for NSG purposes.)

And, unlike analog signals, which have recognizable patterns in them, digital signals look basically like white noise. (It's because of the data compression.)

[Risottia]

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.

This.

Also, there's the possibility of Humans being the Ultimate Warriors and those Puny Aliens being too afraid of us.

[Rostavykhan]

All I know is that "Dark Forest Theory" sounds like a cool band or album name.

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.

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

An inverse to this theory: There are no other species out there yet because Humans are a progenitor race. Not that I believe it, but it's an interesting theory.

That, or other alien life forms have already been taken out by Von Neumann Probes.

[The Archregimancy]

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.

There's only one further point I would add to this.

Humans are prone to assuming that we would be able to communicate with aliens; we're conditioned by most science fiction to assume as much. However, from an anthropological (xenological?) perspective, aliens may prove to be so conceptually different from us that communication may well prove to be impossible. There's no reason to assume that aliens would share any social or communication points of commonality with humans, and real life doesn't have universal translators (or genius xenolinguists that look uncannily like Amy Adams).

So even if those aliens managed to reach the Oort Cloud, and were actively trying to communicate with us, there's no reason to assume that we would even be able to recognise those communications - short of the aliens piloting their gravity-defying Mercury-sized mothership to within the moon's orbit prior to launching their deadly invasion, of course.

[Duvniask]

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.

I would not presume to be an expert. I am merely referencing Active SETI efforts, which do make use of radio-waves. In any case, all that matters to my point is that it's an active effort made at sending out messages into interstellar space, which is something you wouldn't expect from lower species.

[Seangoli]

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?

Short transfer? We have moved away from radio waves for amost of our communication and moved to cable. Also, the wireless communications we do use is significantly weaker than it was in the past, for transmitting over long distances, as we have found more efficient forms of communication than broadcasting radio waves. We still do use radio wave technology, obviously, but we have significantly reduced our reliance on it.

We have actually decreased our radiowave footprint significantly in the past few decades because of this. Not that it matters for much, as radiowave s are pretty weak unless specifically pointed and as such our broadcast footprint becomes almost indistinguishable to background noise after only a few dozen light years due to the inverse square law and other things producing much stronger radiowaves naturally (such as stars, black holes, the birth of the universe, etc.)

[New Galactic States]

Man, so no one here actually believes the Theory is True?

[Indomitable Friendship]

My thoughts are that aliens have already contacted us and that the governments hide this. The only time they mess with the average person is for abductions, usually.

[Northern Socialist Council Republics]

We don’t know the answer to the Fermi Paradox, full stop.

The Dark Forest Theory is as plausible a solution as any other, I suppose. I like it because it makes for a really neat fictional setting (as proven, really, by the novel trilogy that originally coined the phrase), but that has nothing to do with how true it likely is.

The solution that I’m personally most intellectually fond of is the “sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature” hypothesis.

[Bear Stearns]

this is just larping

[Thai Sweet Billy]

Isn't this a Warrior Cats thing??

[Free Algerstonia]

we're the aliens hiding and the elites are covering it up

[Washington Resistance Army]

We don’t know the answer to the Fermi Paradox, full stop.

The Dark Forest Theory is as plausible a solution as any other, I suppose. I like it because it makes for a really neat fictional setting (as proven, really, by the novel trilogy that originally coined the phrase), but that has nothing to do with how true it likely is.

The solution that I’m personally most intellectually fond of is the “sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature” hypothesis.

The real blackpill solution to the Paradox is that it's the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself and thus nobody has ever created an interstellar civilization because they've all fallen to war, climate change, resource overshoot etc etc before they could properly and truly leave their home planet.

[Northern Socialist Council Republics]

The real blackpill solution to the Paradox is that it's the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself and thus nobody has ever created an interstellar civilization because they've all fallen to war, climate change, resource overshoot etc etc before they could properly and truly leave their home planet.

Ah, yes. The great filter solution.

Bit depressing, but as plausible as anything else.

[Space Squid]

My thoughts are that aliens have already contacted us and that the governments hide this. The only time they mess with the average person is for abductions, usually.

Somewhere in Nevada 1947...

[Indomitable Friendship]

My thoughts are that aliens have already contacted us and that the governments hide this. The only time they mess with the average person is for abductions, usually.

Somewhere in Nevada 1947...

Very British humor . The most plausible explanation I can think of is that aliens coordinate with human leadership to remain relatively unknown. Extraterrestrials seem to treat Earth and humanity as a science project and if they're studying humanity's natural progression, they probably don't want premature broad contact. I don't think the notion of an advanced race visiting us is absurd at all. The universe has vast amounts of time and space; there has to be at least a couple species that reached intergalactic travel, or maybe they're even closer.

[Space Squid]

Somewhere in Nevada 1947...

Very British humor . The most plausible explanation I can think of is that aliens coordinate with human leadership to remain relatively unknown. Extraterrestrials seem to treat Earth and humanity as a science project and if they're studying humanity's natural progression, they probably don't want premature broad contact. I don't think the notion of an advanced race visiting us is absurd at all. The universe has vast amounts of time and space; there has to be at least a couple species that reached intergalactic travel, or maybe they're even closer.

There are so many unjustified presumptions in this that it's not worth dealing with.

[Indomitable Friendship]

Very British humor . The most plausible explanation I can think of is that aliens coordinate with human leadership to remain relatively unknown. Extraterrestrials seem to treat Earth and humanity as a science project and if they're studying humanity's natural progression, they probably don't want premature broad contact. I don't think the notion of an advanced race visiting us is absurd at all. The universe has vast amounts of time and space; there has to be at least a couple species that reached intergalactic travel, or maybe they're even closer.

There are so many unjustified presumptions in this that it's not worth dealing with.

What's unjustified? We already have proof of one technologically advanced species (us). We're already on the cusp of space colonization, so what's to say it hasn't already been done? Are you also definitively saying every single abduction story is fake? The problem with all these things like Fermi & Dark Forest is that they're excessively human-centric.

[Greater Cosmicium]

The aliens took one good look at us, realized what we were doing to ourselves with our technology, then noped the fuck out back to their homeland to tell the researchers there's no intelligent life on Earth.

No need for a Dark Forest "theory" that requires every single civilization to be hiding from some huge, menacing threat.

[Emotional Support Crocodile]

Is the big threatening alien species also hiding, if so how does every other alien civilisation apart from us know about it?

[Space Squid]

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.

There's only one further point I would add to this.

Humans are prone to assuming that we would be able to communicate with aliens; we're conditioned by most science fiction to assume as much. However, from an anthropological (xenological?) perspective, aliens may prove to be so conceptually different from us that communication may well prove to be impossible. There's no reason to assume that aliens would share any social or communication points of commonality with humans, and real life doesn't have universal translators (or genius xenolinguists that look uncannily like Amy Adams).

So even if those aliens managed to reach the Oort Cloud, and were actively trying to communicate with us, there's no reason to assume that we would even be able to recognise those communications - short of the aliens piloting their gravity-defying Mercury-sized mothership to within the moon's orbit prior to launching their deadly invasion, of course.

It's certainly very depressing that we have animals on this planet - placental mammals, of comparable intelligence, that use sound and something like language to communicate - and we've never had a real conversation with them even once. Doesn't seem to bode well for our chances with aliens.

I tell you what though: octopuses kind of give me hope. Of course, octopuses are not aliens. But they're probably as close as you could hope to come to aliens while still being terrestrial animals. They're not vertebrates, they have blue blood, 11 brains, and so on. They certainly seem very alien and unknowable. But they're not. You can interreact with them. Which is especially surprising given that they're solitary animals. But they are very intelligent, and seem able to recognize our intelligence. There's a very human sort of natural curiosity to them that makes them relatable despite everything, and they're actually quite expressive. They'll let you know how they're feeling. If aliens are like octopuses, we still might never be able to speak to them, but we could still have some kind of meaningful relationship with them.

Let's just hope it's not he kind of relationship then ends with us being fried in tempura batter.

[Northern Socialist Council Republics]

No need for a Dark Forest "theory" that requires every single civilization to be hiding from some huge, menacing threat.

One of the key insights of the Dark Forest Theory as developed by other thinkers post-trilogy is that the threat need not actually exist for its conclusions to hold.

The fact that it is not possible to verify the absence of a threat forces civilisations to act as if there exists such a threat, and of course everyone who prepares for a threat becomes a threat themselves.

[Stagnant Axon Terminal]

i believe there is likely other life in the universe. but the dark forest theory simply reads like a fantasy story made up by someone who really likes sci fi but isn't particularly great at writing.

[Autumn Wind]

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?

Or the entire run of Single Female Lawyer.

[Autumn Wind]

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?

Or the entire run of Single Female Lawyer.