150k years or more just feels like too long for a space faring sapient species to exist. Though, if you take it from a charting and exploring angle instead of a colonizing angle that most seem to assume, it does make more sense.
Do you think that internal strife, the instability that comes with large planetary spanning settlements, war with themselves or other sapients, or information loss. would be enough to inflate that number, or would it be negligible in the grand scheme of things?
Also where did that estimate come from?
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The main reason that doesn’t happen in the dark forest theory is because of how incredibly hard it is to detect other civilizations that don’t want to be found. If they haven’t built a mega-structure around their star, then they are basically impossible to find, even if they are blowing up everyone they can find. Not to mention the fact that all it takes to destroy a neighboring civilization is sending a relativistic missile into one of their suns and BOOM. Bye bye solar system. Of course, doing this will most likely alert any civilization who was paying attention to the fact that the universe is in a dark forest state, leading them to start acting accordingly by minimizing their footprint, expanding rapidly, and destroying any civilization that reveals itself.
And because if the vast distances between stars, it takes years to send a message from one star to another, or to even see the result of any action you take over such a distance. This makes it incredibly hard to communicate with other civilizations, as you would be sending a message out when you were 20 and getting a reply back in your late thirties, and that’s assuming the destination is a nearby star. Because of this, civilizations don’t trust each other, and by the time a declaration of peace has been sent to another civilization they may have already sent the bombs and now there’s no way of warning you or telling you.
TLDR; Dark forest works because no one can talk to one another in a timely manner, the only civ’s you can find are the ones that make a lot of (figurative) noise, it is way to easy to destroy systems without being detected, once you’ve made a choice there is no taking it back, and it only takes one to get the ball rolling.
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Would it be possible to counter though? With a net of buoys far enough out you could get a detection system thats early enough to counter a relitivistic missile? Or would it be too far out? I feel like a civilization could develop a counter for such civilization destroying methods especially with something that takes so long to arrive. Simply something thats able shred anything that tries to hit the star system at any amount of speed should be enough. Maybe I should design some anti space defense technology.
Couldn’t that be used to trace back exactly where the bomb came from? A surprising amount can be learned just from looking at how light refracts around a planet, so a lot could be learned by how a star explodes. Having a culprit for who blew up a planet could easily used as information for who is dangerous and who is not, and if you risk revealing yourself through violence it may not be worth it. Not to mention the aggressor has no idea how many star systems an opponent has, if they miss just one, they could fire a counterattack, aswell as backup plans that could keep the war going. Risking ending your civilization for one less loose end seems like a preety bad idea.
This is the part I don’t get the most. I don’t feel like every civilization would jump to “kill all my neighbors.” I know that some might, but it feels disingenuous to assume that all aliens would make the same play. I feel like humans wouldn’t, or atleast would be yelling at eachother for decades, push the button at least once, regret it immediately after, be sad about for a few more decades, and they fight with eachother about whether or not they were justified for a few hundred years after that. Then a couple hundred years later someone uses that as an explanation on why the past sucked.
This is honestly a much more reasonable timeline of negotiation then I would imagine. A civilization prepared for long negotiations like this could actually theoretically deal with such long communication delays. Not to mention that alien species could live for much longer, or are compatible with technology for immortality making these long delays not as big of an issue. Some species could make up a test that they use to decide if an opponent is a danger or not.
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Ok ok ok
Let’s use an example for a moment
Let’s assume that a civilization 100 light years away detects your world as a world with intelligent life on it. It decides that your world is a potential threat and sends a cluster photoids going at 99.9% of the speed of light barreling at your home star (and since these things are moving at relativistic speeds they will need multiple Whipple shields to survive any impacts with dust particles or space debris, which is why they are sent out in clusters). Assuming that your civilization has appropriate detection technology to spot the launch of these missiles (unlikely) and you happen to be looking in the right direction when you would be able to watch these missiles launch (even more unlikely), you would have about 36 and a half days before these missiles hit, so a little over a month, which, sounds like a lot until you remember just how long it takes to travel from planet to planet. Now, realistically, the only defenses you could possibly use to destroy these projectiles are the planets themselves, and they are not exactly the easiest things to move around. Any planet in their way would likely no longer remain a habitable planet (if it was one in the first place) and it would likely be unusable, as the material would be to hot to mine for the next few decades. In other words, it would be unlikely for even a type 1.5 civilization to be able to survive a photoid attack, unless they happened to have some gas giants laying around to hide behind.
Something else to note is that it would take a little over 200 years for the offending civilization to discover the success of their genocide, and in that time they would be more than able to prepare for any counter attack that could be levied against them.
Ok, so, as a nearby civilization you might be able to decern the rough direction that the photoid came from based on the blast, but you can’t know how far it’s traveled. If you were a less advanced civilization you might not even have been able to detect that a photoid had entered that system before the star exploded! But bringing back the information problem. It is incredibly hard to detect a photoid launch, as their brightness is usually drowned out by the star of the civilization that launched them, not to mention this is like a sniper in the trees situation. Sure you know they got shot in the back of the head, but that won’t help you pick them out from the foliage in the trees.
Not all would! In fact most wouldn’t!
Let’s talk about this in terms of biology for a second. Let’s assume there are two genes that a civilization can have or not have, a Hider gene, and a Hunter gene. They are not mutually exclusive, a civilization can have one, both, or neither.
Those with both the Hider and the Hunter gene are silent killers, they are the ones that enforce the dark forest. Their invasion of a space would bring it into a dark forest state by killing any who showed their face, regardless of it’s previous disposition.
Those with just the Hunter gene (also known as loud hunters) are quickly shot down by everyone else because no one wants to deal with that.
Those with just the Hider gene tend to live much longer than the average civilization, and may even expand colonies to many star systems without being noticed, giving them some leeway in case one of them is spotted.
And those with neither the Hider nor the Hunter gene are shunned by the Hiders for fear of revealing them, and killed by the Hunters for fear of a potential threat.
Long communication delays are the largest problem here. They are the reason the dark forest is a viable option for the fermi paradox in the first place. More time between replies means more time for people to second guess themselves. Back to the 100ly civ, they are seeing earth 100 years in the past. They might look at it and think that we are a lost cause, or that our culture might be too incompatible for us to coexist. We may have even been the first to send a message to them, maybe the reason they sent the photoids is because they were worried about the technologies we might achieve or the ways our culture might shift in the time it takes to send a message to us. The safer option from their perspective is to eliminate any potential threat before it can manifest. Technological booms and culture shifts are unpredictable, and on an intergalactic scale by the times you start seeing the signs it’s already happened, and it may already be to late to defend yourself.
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Could one species or a coalition of species still achieve galactic dominance under dark forest?
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Maybe not while the dark forest state is under way, but if they manage to achieve a certain level of dominance over the galaxy, maybe a 2.5-2.6 on the Kardashev scale, then they would probably be able to prevent the dark forest state from taking place, though if a silent hunter dark forest civilization were to make it there first then the entire galaxy would be locked in a dark forest state for the foreseeable future.
In other words, it depends on whether the first civilization to become an overwhelmingly dominant force in the galaxy is cruel or benevolent.
Edit: It would also depend on whether a coalition of nations could survive long enough without destroying itself to become a 2.5 civ.
Edit 2: In other words, whoever gets to the top first gets to set the rules of the game.
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Why would silent hunters keep the dark forest regime even after asserting dominance?
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Because you can never know when someone could have a sudden boom in technology from some broken tech or sudden discovery that puts them above you in power level, so it’s best to eliminate potential threats as they are found. Not allowing any civilization to even approach your power level is a good way of doing that.
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Why not colonize all habitable world to put down these species before they could even become sapient then?
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Non-sapient species aren’t really a threat (with the exception of diseases or hivelike species) but that’s just what I think.
This is a completely viable strategy though. The only problem is actually colonizing every habitable world. Worlds around stars are assets but they are also risks. Potential targets for other snipers to fire on. Most likely hunter civilizations will only mine systems for their resources, while having most of their population living in O’Neil cylinders floating between stars. If one of these civilizations could find a way to place a Dyson sphere and star engine around a star without arousing suspicion, then they could pilot that around the galaxy to fulfill their energy needs. If they couldn’t do that then they could use large sails to capture small dust particles which they could extract radioactive isotopes from to power nuclear reactors, or if they’re advanced enough, fusion reactors.
They would be practically undetectable and untouchable in the interstellar void, which is why they would likely never venture out of it. Less vulnerable that way.
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I suppose we’d be early into the dark forest considering no civs came for us/our planet yet?
That is a plausible outcome, as our planet had life on it coming out of the period of time where it was basically impossible for life to to form, but if we aren’t alone than chances are that we may have just not been detected yet. Perhaps life is sparce, so they are far enough away that they couldn’t detect us with what signals we are emitting now. Maybe if they were near us they would be able to find us, maybe they can listen but not pinpoint a location, but for whatever reason, we likely don’t have any guns pointed at us, that we know of at least.
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Or they’ve already been fired but we couldn’t detect that…
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