As applied to aliens, I think the Dark Forest frame is almost certainly wrong. Perhaps it’s useful in other contexts, and I know you repeatedly disclaimed its accuracy in the alien context, but at least for others I want to explain why it’s unlikely.
Basically, there are two reasons:
The only technological civilization we know—humanity—hasn’t tried at all to hide.
To expand on the first, consider that humanity has consistently spammed out radio waves and sent out probes with the express hope aliens might find them. Now, these are unlikely to actually give away Earth’s location at any distance (the probes are not moving that fast and are hard to find, the radio waves will fade to background noise quickly), but the important thing is that hiding is not on the agenda. Eventually, we are very likely to do something that really is very visible, such as starting up a Dyson Swarm. Consider that ancient humans were arguably often in analogous situations to a Dark Forest, and that the dominant strategy was not indefinite hiding. Hiding is something of an unnatural act for a civilization that has already conquered its planet.
To expand on the second, the cost to send self-replicating probes to every star system to search for life in your galaxy is trivial for even a K-2 civilization, and doable within a few million years, and their origin could be masked if you were paranoid. Building enormous telescopes capable of spotting biosignatures, or even techosignatures, is also possible. (And even if there was some technology that allowed you to hide, you’d have to invent that technology before you’re spotted, and given galactic timescales, other civilizations ought to have scoped out the entire galaxy long before you even evolved.)
For what it’s worth, I think the two most likely Fermi Question answers are:
We’ve fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the universe. (ex. simulation hypothesis)
We’re the only intelligent civilization in at least the Milky Way.
Doesn’t sound very convincing to me. Sufficiently advanced tech could allow things like:
build an underground civilization 50 kilometers below the surface of a rocky planet
settle in the emptiness between galaxies, too far away from anyone to bother looking for you
run your civilization of ems on extremely-low-energy computers somewhere in the Oort Cloud
hide deep in a gas giant or even in a star
run your digital mind on a carefully manipulated natural process (e.g. modify a bunch of growing salt crystals or stellar magnetic processes into doing useful computations)
go nanoscale, with entire civilizations running on swarms of nanoparticles somewhere in a small molecular cloud in the intergalactic space
In some of these scenarios, you could look right into a busy alien city using every possible sensor, but not recognize it as such, while standing one meter away from it.
As for why bother with stealth, one can view it as a question of costs and benefits:
if you don’t hide, there is some risk that your entire civilization will be killed off. Makes sense to invest at least some resources to reduce the risk.
if you hide, there is some cost of doing the hiding, which could be negligible (depending on your tech and philosophy). E.g. if your civ is already running on a swarm of nanoparticles for practical reasons, the cost of hiding is zero.
“Sufficiently advanced” tech could also plausibly identify all those hidden civilizations. For example, an underground civilization would produce unusual seismic activity, and taking up some inner portion of a gas giant or star would alter their outward behavior. Ultimately, civilizations use mass-energy in unnatural ways, and I don’t see a fundamental physical principle that could protect that from all possible sensing.
More importantly, I don’t think your suggestions address my point that hostile civilizations would get you before you even evolve.
But, let’s grant that you’re the first civilization to evolve in your galaxy, or at the least among the first before someone starts sending out probes to prevent any new civilizations from arising and threatening them. And let’s grant that they will never find you. That is a victory, in that you survive. But the costs are astronomical: you only get to use the mass-energy of a single planet, or star, or Oort Cloud, while someone else gets the entire galaxy.
To put it another way: mass-energy is required for your civilization to exist and fulfill its preferences, so far as we understand the universe. If you redirect any substantial amount of mass-energy away from its natural uses (stars, planets, asteroids), that’s going to be proportionally detectable. So, you can only hide by strangling your own civilization in its crib. Not everyone is going to do that; I seriously doubt that humanity (or any artificial descendant) will, for one.
(This comes back to my link about “no stealth in space”—the phrase is most commonly invoked when referring to starships. If your starship is at CMB temperatures and never moves, then yeah, it’d be hard to detect. But also you couldn’t live in it, and it couldn’t go anywhere! You want your starship—your civilization—to actually do something, and doing work (in a physics sense) is detectable.)
Hard disagree to point 1. The fact that humanity hasn’t tried to hide is not counter-evidence to the Dark Forest theory. If the Dark Forest is correct, the prediction is that all non-hiding civilisations will be destroyed. We don’t see anyone else out there, not because every civilisation decided to hide, but because only hiders survived.
To be clear: the prediction of the Dark Forest theory is that if humanity keeps being louder and noisier, we will at some point come to the attention of an elder civilisation and be destroyed. I don’t know what probability to put on this theory being correct. I doubt it ranks higher than AI in terms of existential risk.
I do know that ‘we haven’t been destroyed yet, barely 100 years after inventing radio’ is only evidence that there are no ultra-hostile civilisations within 50 light-years which also have the capability to detect even the very weakest radio signals from an antique Marconi. It is not evidence that we won’t be destroyed in future when signals reach more distant civs and/or we make more noticeable signals.
The problem with Dark Forest theory is that, in the absence of FTL detection/communication, it requires a very high density and absurdly high proportion of hiding civilizations. Without that, expansionary civilizations dominate. The only known civilization, us, is expansionary for reasons that don’t seem path-determinant, so it seems unlikely that the preconditions for Dark Forest theory exist.
To explain:
Hiders have limited space and mass-energy to work with. An expansionary civilization, once in its technological phase, can spread to thousands of star systems in mere thousands of years and become unstoppable by hiders. So, hiders need to kill expansionists before that happens. But if they’re going to hide in their home system, they can’t detect anything faster than FTL! So you need murderous hiding civs within at least a thousand light years of every single habitable planet in the galaxy, all of which need to have evolved before any expansionary civs in the area. This is improbable unless basically every civ is a murderous hider. The fact that the only known civ is not a murderous hider, for generalizable reasons, is thus evidence against the Dark Forest theory.
Potential objections:
Hider civs would send out stealth probes everywhere.
Still governed by FTL, expansionary civ would become overwhelmingly strong before probes reported back.
Hider civs would send out killer probes everywhere.
If the probes succeed in killing everything in the galaxy before they reach the stars, you didn’t need to hide in the first place. (Also, note that hiding is a failed strategy for everyone else in this scenario, you can’t do anything about a killer probe when you’re the equivalent of the Han dynasty. Or the equivalent of a dinosaur.) If the probes fail, the civ they failed against will have no reason to hide, having been already discovered, and so will expand and dominate.
Hider civs would become so advanced that they could hide indefinitely from expansionary civs, possibly by retreating to another dimension.
Conceivable, but I’d rather be the expansionary civs here?
Hider civs would become so advanced that they could kill any later expansionary civ that controlled thousands of star systems.
I think this is the strongest objection. If, for example, a hider civ could send out a few ships that can travel at a higher percentage of lightspeed than anything the expansionary civ can do, and those ships can detonate stars or something, and catching up to this tech would take millions of years, then just a few ships could track down and obliterate the expansionary civ within thousands/tens of thousands of years and win.
The problem is that the “hider civ evolved substantially earlier” part has to be true everywhere in the galaxy, or else somewhere an expansionary civilization wins and then snowballs with their resource advantages—this comes back to the “very high density and absurdly high proportion of hiding civilizations” requirement. The hiding civs have to always be the oldest whenever they meet an expansionary civ, and older to a degree that the expansionary civ’s likely several orders of magnitude more resources and population doesn’t counteract the age difference.
As applied to aliens, I think the Dark Forest frame is almost certainly wrong. Perhaps it’s useful in other contexts, and I know you repeatedly disclaimed its accuracy in the alien context, but at least for others I want to explain why it’s unlikely.
Basically, there are two reasons:
The only technological civilization we know—humanity—hasn’t tried at all to hide.
There is no stealth in space.
To expand on the first, consider that humanity has consistently spammed out radio waves and sent out probes with the express hope aliens might find them. Now, these are unlikely to actually give away Earth’s location at any distance (the probes are not moving that fast and are hard to find, the radio waves will fade to background noise quickly), but the important thing is that hiding is not on the agenda. Eventually, we are very likely to do something that really is very visible, such as starting up a Dyson Swarm. Consider that ancient humans were arguably often in analogous situations to a Dark Forest, and that the dominant strategy was not indefinite hiding. Hiding is something of an unnatural act for a civilization that has already conquered its planet.
To expand on the second, the cost to send self-replicating probes to every star system to search for life in your galaxy is trivial for even a K-2 civilization, and doable within a few million years, and their origin could be masked if you were paranoid. Building enormous telescopes capable of spotting biosignatures, or even techosignatures, is also possible. (And even if there was some technology that allowed you to hide, you’d have to invent that technology before you’re spotted, and given galactic timescales, other civilizations ought to have scoped out the entire galaxy long before you even evolved.)
For what it’s worth, I think the two most likely Fermi Question answers are:
We’ve fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the universe. (ex. simulation hypothesis)
We’re the only intelligent civilization in at least the Milky Way.
Doesn’t sound very convincing to me. Sufficiently advanced tech could allow things like:
build an underground civilization 50 kilometers below the surface of a rocky planet
settle in the emptiness between galaxies, too far away from anyone to bother looking for you
run your civilization of ems on extremely-low-energy computers somewhere in the Oort Cloud
hide deep in a gas giant or even in a star
run your digital mind on a carefully manipulated natural process (e.g. modify a bunch of growing salt crystals or stellar magnetic processes into doing useful computations)
go nanoscale, with entire civilizations running on swarms of nanoparticles somewhere in a small molecular cloud in the intergalactic space
In some of these scenarios, you could look right into a busy alien city using every possible sensor, but not recognize it as such, while standing one meter away from it.
As for why bother with stealth, one can view it as a question of costs and benefits:
if you don’t hide, there is some risk that your entire civilization will be killed off. Makes sense to invest at least some resources to reduce the risk.
if you hide, there is some cost of doing the hiding, which could be negligible (depending on your tech and philosophy). E.g. if your civ is already running on a swarm of nanoparticles for practical reasons, the cost of hiding is zero.
“Sufficiently advanced” tech could also plausibly identify all those hidden civilizations. For example, an underground civilization would produce unusual seismic activity, and taking up some inner portion of a gas giant or star would alter their outward behavior. Ultimately, civilizations use mass-energy in unnatural ways, and I don’t see a fundamental physical principle that could protect that from all possible sensing.
More importantly, I don’t think your suggestions address my point that hostile civilizations would get you before you even evolve.
But, let’s grant that you’re the first civilization to evolve in your galaxy, or at the least among the first before someone starts sending out probes to prevent any new civilizations from arising and threatening them. And let’s grant that they will never find you. That is a victory, in that you survive. But the costs are astronomical: you only get to use the mass-energy of a single planet, or star, or Oort Cloud, while someone else gets the entire galaxy.
To put it another way: mass-energy is required for your civilization to exist and fulfill its preferences, so far as we understand the universe. If you redirect any substantial amount of mass-energy away from its natural uses (stars, planets, asteroids), that’s going to be proportionally detectable. So, you can only hide by strangling your own civilization in its crib. Not everyone is going to do that; I seriously doubt that humanity (or any artificial descendant) will, for one.
(This comes back to my link about “no stealth in space”—the phrase is most commonly invoked when referring to starships. If your starship is at CMB temperatures and never moves, then yeah, it’d be hard to detect. But also you couldn’t live in it, and it couldn’t go anywhere! You want your starship—your civilization—to actually do something, and doing work (in a physics sense) is detectable.)
Hard disagree to point 1. The fact that humanity hasn’t tried to hide is not counter-evidence to the Dark Forest theory. If the Dark Forest is correct, the prediction is that all non-hiding civilisations will be destroyed. We don’t see anyone else out there, not because every civilisation decided to hide, but because only hiders survived.
To be clear: the prediction of the Dark Forest theory is that if humanity keeps being louder and noisier, we will at some point come to the attention of an elder civilisation and be destroyed. I don’t know what probability to put on this theory being correct. I doubt it ranks higher than AI in terms of existential risk.
I do know that ‘we haven’t been destroyed yet, barely 100 years after inventing radio’ is only evidence that there are no ultra-hostile civilisations within 50 light-years which also have the capability to detect even the very weakest radio signals from an antique Marconi. It is not evidence that we won’t be destroyed in future when signals reach more distant civs and/or we make more noticeable signals.
The problem with Dark Forest theory is that, in the absence of FTL detection/communication, it requires a very high density and absurdly high proportion of hiding civilizations. Without that, expansionary civilizations dominate. The only known civilization, us, is expansionary for reasons that don’t seem path-determinant, so it seems unlikely that the preconditions for Dark Forest theory exist.
To explain:
Hiders have limited space and mass-energy to work with. An expansionary civilization, once in its technological phase, can spread to thousands of star systems in mere thousands of years and become unstoppable by hiders. So, hiders need to kill expansionists before that happens. But if they’re going to hide in their home system, they can’t detect anything faster than FTL! So you need murderous hiding civs within at least a thousand light years of every single habitable planet in the galaxy, all of which need to have evolved before any expansionary civs in the area. This is improbable unless basically every civ is a murderous hider. The fact that the only known civ is not a murderous hider, for generalizable reasons, is thus evidence against the Dark Forest theory.
Potential objections:
Hider civs would send out stealth probes everywhere.
Still governed by FTL, expansionary civ would become overwhelmingly strong before probes reported back.
Hider civs would send out killer probes everywhere.
If the probes succeed in killing everything in the galaxy before they reach the stars, you didn’t need to hide in the first place. (Also, note that hiding is a failed strategy for everyone else in this scenario, you can’t do anything about a killer probe when you’re the equivalent of the Han dynasty. Or the equivalent of a dinosaur.) If the probes fail, the civ they failed against will have no reason to hide, having been already discovered, and so will expand and dominate.
Hider civs would become so advanced that they could hide indefinitely from expansionary civs, possibly by retreating to another dimension.
Conceivable, but I’d rather be the expansionary civs here?
Hider civs would become so advanced that they could kill any later expansionary civ that controlled thousands of star systems.
I think this is the strongest objection. If, for example, a hider civ could send out a few ships that can travel at a higher percentage of lightspeed than anything the expansionary civ can do, and those ships can detonate stars or something, and catching up to this tech would take millions of years, then just a few ships could track down and obliterate the expansionary civ within thousands/tens of thousands of years and win.
The problem is that the “hider civ evolved substantially earlier” part has to be true everywhere in the galaxy, or else somewhere an expansionary civilization wins and then snowballs with their resource advantages—this comes back to the “very high density and absurdly high proportion of hiding civilizations” requirement. The hiding civs have to always be the oldest whenever they meet an expansionary civ, and older to a degree that the expansionary civ’s likely several orders of magnitude more resources and population doesn’t counteract the age difference.