“Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

Dark forest hypothesis explains this in a “dark” way. They exist but are smart enough to hide from hostile hunter/predator life forms. Meanwhile our dumbasses are blasting radio signals into space like a little kid trying to talk to every stranger they see.

It's also largely bunk. More a story than a hypothesis, really. Game theory shows cooperation beats aggression on a long enough timescale. Politics shows alliances and MAD deters first strike. Even actual "dark forests" are full of animals that have bright colors and make loud noises.

I really wish natives of places we discovered knew about this. they could've evaded all the bad parts and just explained how it is just a story.

Cooperation depends on you and your potential allies surviving long enough to be able to contact each other, and being strong enough to counter the threat. We don't know whether we will develop capabilities fast enough to counter an enemy that e.g. at the first sign of radio started accelerating a bunch of super-dense (hence small, hard to detect and stop) kinetic kill devices our way.

MAD is utter bunk. It depends on rational actors that also believes the other actors are rational. Even Reagan realised the folly of MAD after Able Archer in 1983, and realising the Soviet leadership genuinely seemed to believe the US might be prepared to strike first. If either side thinks the other side is irrational and preparing a first strike, MAD falls apart. If either side is actually irrational, it also falls apart.

But MAD also depends on a sufficient ability for both sides to do serious harm. If one side sees a first strike as an opportunity to prevent the other side from gaining that ability, MAD also falls apart, and the thinking behind it can again then push a rational but callous actor to strike first to prevent being pushed into a MAD scenario.

Cooperation might eventually win out, but that won't help you if your civilization has long since been wiped out.

Dark Forest depends on the presumption that interstellar travel is worth engaging in (ie it's possible to do faster than light), and that spectacularly devastating weapons are possible. So far we have no reason to believe that either of those assumptions is smart.

Faster than light travel isn't needed (and IIRC doesn't occur in the series the dark forest name comes from). Spectacularly devastating weapons are definitely possible - redirect an asteroid into an inhabited planet and you're likely to kill most of its inhabitants; redirect enough and you can kill almost everything. That's not even getting into things like antimatter, gamma rays, etc. The dark forest hypothesis doesn't need destruction of solar systems to be possible, just severe damage to civilisations.

> and IIRC doesn't occur in the series the dark forest name comes from

The Trisolarians developed FTL travel while they were on the way to Earth, IIRC.

I tried to look it up. I think they didn't ever get FTL, based on https://www.reddit.com/r/threebodyproblem/comments/1blvikg/c... and https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/trisolaris-in-wh40k.....

They had the sophons which allowed them to convey information via quantum entanglement, i.e. instantly.

They - and the humans - developed close to light speed traveling which IIRC has the same underlying mechanics as that blackout-galaxy-safe-space thing which is the message that your civilization is not harmful.

Ah, yes, you are right. They managed to speed up their travel time to Earth greatly, but they did not reach or surpass the speed of light. I have to read the trilogy again.

The Indigenous peoples of the Americas knew well enough about the value of cooperation and alliance. That's why they had stuff like the Iroquois Confederacy, and switched between working with the British, the French, and the colonies depending on which was best for each individual group of natives at any one time. To present them as pure victims powerless before the might of white settlers undermines the political and cultural agency that Native peoples in fact had, and exercised.

The predominant form of relationship between European and Native American peoples for hundreds of years was trade, not war. The tragedies and the atrocities that resulted were a slow burn of conflicting interests and epidemiological naïveté, both between Europeans and Natives and also within each group. That's quite different from the hiding and decapitation strikes usually presented as "dark forest hypothesis", because there's no reason that those specific interests and ignorance would carry over to interstellar society (and every reason that they would need to be overcome in order to become interstellar in the first place).

But why do people always use the fate of resource-constrained preindustrial societies (both Europe and America) to try to predict relationships between hyper-advanced Kardashev-level civilizations anyway? It really seems to me like some kind of projected shame. You can see this too with Liu Cixin. He came from a country that was recently dominated, and has more recently been preparing to dominate its neighbors, so his story pretends nothing better is possible. I suppose that's comforting for some, and questioning it brings out people who show what it's really about.

Google Trends shows the top 10 countries for "Dark forest hypothesis" include the US, Taiwan, China, Peurto Rico, HK, Canada, and Aus [1]— Places with a prominent recent or ongoing imperial history, whether as victims or victimizers. I actually find the "dark forest" narratives quite disturbing, not as a prediction of our future, but as a window into the psyche of people who seem to want it to be one.

You might as well say the Romans had a slave-based economy, so therefore spacefaring empires must also be looking for human slaves! That's got exactly the same amount of validity as the Native comparison. But economic and military incentives obviously change as technology and culture develops. If anything, the fact we used to kill a lot of natives, and we don't so much anymore, is a strong sign that advanced societies can trend towards being less genocidal.

1: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=%2Fg%2F11jyk5h9nj...

Cooperation only depends on anyone, in the history of ever, having at any point survived long enough to contact each other and form an alliance. Once a critical mass of parties that prefer cooperation has been reached, all future cooperative parties are at an automatic advantage over aggressive parties.

You can see shades this of this, e.g., in the difference between single-round versus iterated Prisoner's Dilemmas.

> MAD is utter bunk. It depends on rational actors that also believes the other actors are rational. Even Reagan realised the folly of MAD after Able Archer in 1983, and realising the Soviet leadership genuinely seemed to believe the US might be prepared to strike first.

What do you think the long-term prospects are of a species that goes around flinging RKVs at people? No more North America and no more Eurasia, if that happened. Maybe South America and Africa can pick up the pieces. Just because irrational hyperaggressive actors can briefly exist doesn't mean you're likely to encounter them. They won't survive for long.

MAD exists whether or not any particular participant believes in it, because it's just the cause and effect of competing powers each with their own agency. Or else we wouldn't be here. Even the Soviets knew that a possible US first strike was better than a guaranteed US retaliatory strike, which would happen if they struck first.

> Cooperation might eventually win out, but that won't help you if your civilization has long since been wiped out.

The whole "Fermi Paradox" arguments are based on an extreme form of "eventually, we should expect to see aliens, so why haven't we already?" This doesn't mean aggressive civilizations don't exist, but the reasons to think they're prevalent are overblown.

Valid arguments tbh. In the struggles between European and Native American, there is the aspect of being able to escape and continue to pose as a threat and such. There is no total extinction. But in dark forest theory there is the total extinction of home planet aspect, without giving in your own location (no vengeance or kill switch can be carried towards you). And also attack factor being so much more advanced that there is little to no defense against it.

In our world, we never had this level of capability amassed in one hand. We were never tested in this scale. But lets think there was a button in cold war that completely erased soviets with no harm to planet, no harm to the western world and without anyone noticing the origin of this action. How many in U.S. would press that button? I think we would've pressed many times. And later, to know that another planet might be having a button exactly like this that they can press and erase us? we would press first so they never get the chance to do it. Paranoia and self preservation prevails, sadly.

I believe our cooperation in society also relies on our capability of projecting power be it physical or economical. The weaker individuals power becomes, the louder powerful peoples actions become. Saying this as Non-U.S citizen, right now the richest guy can easily interfere in state dealings, act like the president in a way, maybe this is evolution of lobbying tradition there but could you imagine such a thing happening in ancient Greece or even in Rome? What prevented this was citizens' ability to exert power. Right now there is little of that, power disparity is huge and so there isn't as much of a cooperation. Sorry if this part deviated from topic or smth. It is just I believe it 100% depends on real, physical factors rather than how advanced we get mentally.

> all future cooperative parties are at an automatic advantage over aggressive parties.

No, that does not follow, because it assumes any cooperation gives sufficient leverage to be able to resist. But an enemy lobbing kinetic kill devices at high speed from locations that does not give them away would require far more advanced tech to stop.

> What do you think the long-term prospects are of a species that goes around flinging RKVs at people? No more North America and no more Eurasia, if that happened. Maybe South America and Africa can pick up the pieces. Just because irrational hyperaggressive actors can briefly exist doesn't mean you're likely to encounter them. They won't survive for long.

On Earth. In space, throwing kinetic kill devices at people won't affect your own territory, and can at least in theory be done without any possibility of tracing it back to you - you "just" need to accelerate a bunch of them outward to starting positions far from your home system. Any civilization smart enough to be able to build devices like that would be smart enough to build autonomous ones that would become operatonal first when in a position that wouldn't give them away.

> MAD exists whether or not any particular participant believes in it, because it's just the cause and effect of competing powers each with their own agency. Or else we wouldn't be here. Even the Soviets knew that a possible US first strike was better than a guaranteed US retaliatory strike, which would happen if they struck first.

The point of the lessons Able Archer is that there were strong indications the Soviets thought there was a line at which point a first strike to preempt a US first strike would be preferable, and that they thought they were getting close to that line.

> The whole "Fermi Paradox" arguments are based on an extreme form of "eventually, we should expect to see aliens, so why haven't we already?" This doesn't mean aggressive civilizations don't exist, but the reasons to think they're prevalent are overblown.

I've seen nobody suggest we have strong reasons to think they are prevalent. That is missing the point. It's one of many possibilities, but one where the temporary existence of even one in any given "neighbourhood" close enough to strike before we've gotten advanced enough to defend against compact kinetic kill devices hammering us at a decent percentage of c (or worse options we don't know about) would mean we'd already be doomed without knowing about it.

It doesn't even need to be a long-lived one. There just need to have been one alive when our first radio signals hit them.

It doesn't even need to successfully kill most civilization. For it to resolve the Fermi Paradox, attacks just need to happen often enough that those who survive quickly decides hiding is the best option just in case.