What does /k/ think about the dark forest theory? Do you think we should prepare in a scenario where aliens aren't exactly friendly? I know the U.S. military do have contingent plans for a hypothetical alien invasion
Dark forest theory
What does /k/ think about the dark forest theory? Do you think we should prepare in a scenario where aliens aren't exactly friendly? I know the U.S. military do have contingent plans for a hypothetical alien invasion
The US should develop a droplet just in case.
Sorry OP, space operas aren't real
If there are aliens, they are just as stuck on their homeworld / star system / star cluster as we currently are, and that's not going to change
The one extremely important exception is relativistic weapons fired at other planets when they show signs of intelligence. But we're at the stage where no civilization capable of firing one at us would know of our presence yet (Earth being potentially capable of life/having biosignatures is different). Any civilization capable of firing one within a few hundred light years would probably have been detected by now.
There's a chance that we (Earth) were classified as potentially life-bearing and fired on hundreds of thousands of years ago, and if the time of impact is within the next 50 years we're probably fricked, but anything other than that and we're fine.
That ship has sailed, radio transmission from the early to mid 1900s and early warning radar usage has outed us already. In fact an advanced civilization would probably recognize something like BMEWS as a sign that the planet has nuclear weapons held by multiple states fire immediately.
Not talking about radio signals freely going around as a byproduct. Talking about radio signals that is intentionally trying to reach out for people in space.
>radio transmission from the early to mid 1900s and early warning radar usage has outed us already.
lol
Biosignature in atmosphere were transmitting our presence for billions of years, if anyone would want to extinguiah life on Earth it would be done long time ago.
this. light signature gave it away a looooooooooooooooooong time ago before radio has done basically next to nothing.
>In fact an advanced civilization would probably recognize something like BMEWS as a sign that the planet has nuclear weapons held by multiple states
I fricking hate arguments like this because they depend on so many layered assumptions that it's fully meaningless.
If WE, being modern westerners on another plant we're to detect early warning radar, sure, it would make sense to assume that.
Other life, of entirely unknown composition, disposition, political rationality (if any, or anything we could even begin to fathom), cultural specifics (again, if any or anything we could even begin to fathom) etc etc etc, would assume something that made sense to them. If they're capable of assuming at all.
Life entirely unconnected from our own would be vastly more likely to behave in ways that are completely unintuitive to us because our only experience is from this specific planet which is entirely inhabited by one single propogation of life. Everything we've ever interacted with comes from our own family tree. Now think how hard it is to know what other members of our own species are up to.
For example! Why the frick are the Nazca lines there? We've got theories sure, but whatever the purpose was probably seemed pretty obvious to the Nazca.
Think of all the shit we do that's so obvious it doesn't even strike you as weird. We shoot hundreds of tons of explosives into the air on specific days in celebration. Someone viewing from space and lackinf just a little bit of cultural understanding might (somewhat) reasonably think it's a militaristic dickwaving thing.
So, early warning radar emissions would most likely mean absolutely nothing to an alien. They could just as easily assume we do it to please our gods as any other purpose.
Quite a pessimistic outlook but not a wrong one.
Not really, a very high power high gain phased array radar scanning parts of the sky in a predictable pattern, 24/7, for decades, with the specific emitter changing as upgrades happen would be a dead giveaway of a ballistic missile detection radar. Add in other countries doing it as well. I'd bet that the few high altitude nuclear tests we've done would be detectable to an advanced civilization as well. There is no actual reason to do this (remember this is very expensive and very niche technology) even if you account for your moronic god worship shit.
Needing to detect ballistic missiles like this is not something an alien civilization would have problems coming up with. In fact it's quite likely that any civilization at the stage of building relativistic weapons or any futuristic FTL technology would already have gone through this stage, and would immediately recognize an early warning radar.
>Not really, a very high power high gain phased array radar scanning parts of the sky in a predictable pattern, 24/7, for decades, with the specific emitter changing as upgrades happen would be a dead giveaway of a ballistic missile detection radar.
Unless you're a sightless pseudo-frog who evolved with a type of echolocation using some sort of biological radio. Then you detect those radio waves and see it as the equivalent of the Christ the Redeemer statue in South America due to your cultural norms. You get very confused when you land to share the Good News of Sightless Frog-Christ and the skeletons wearing meatsuits start projecting small pieces of metal at you out of metal tubes. Those metal bits move fast but must also have some religious significance.
>Unless you're a sightless pseudo-frog who evolved with a type of echolocation using some sort of biological radio. Then you detect those radio waves and see it as the equivalent of the Christ the Redeemer statue in South America due to your cultural norms. You get very confused when you land to share the Good News of Sightless Frog-Christ and the skeletons wearing meatsuits start projecting small pieces of metal at you out of metal tubes. Those metal bits move fast but must also have some religious significance.
Gregory Benford in Galactic Centre already did this.
mate. that is at bottom the same argument.
It makes perfect sense TO US because we have:
- disconnected individual loci of consciousness necessitating communication and competition
- separate polities in some manner of competition with eachother.
- cultural values that allow a specific amount of space for the destruction of other members of our own groups. (if you place either greater or lesser significance on life then warfare or competition may take radically different forms)
- deep set cultural values for a specific type of political competition.
- physiology that means nuclear weapons have long term effects which change how and why we consider using them.
- a lifespan that may appear either very long or very short relative to an alien. Differing lifespans could mean entirely different modes of competition or cooperation.
- technological progress that has occured in a particular sequence (with no material necessity to have occured in that sequence elsewhere)
- physiological senses that necessitate enhancement in certain ways
- geology and atmosphere that permit the use of long range sensing using specific forms of radio waves
- planetary characteristics and atmosphere that mean our air travel has to work in specific ways (for example, if it's trivially easy to fly on another planet long range radar would not provide nearly the same use. Or on a planet covered in water a missile could possibly be the worst method for delivering a weapon)
The list could go on forever.
Point is, if you alter any one or combination of all of these physical and sociological factors the presence of radio emissions could mean wildly different activities or purposes. it is very easy to think like humans because we ARE humans. It is very difficult to think like a fully alien lifeform because we have zero context on what may cause them to think, act or exist in the manner that they do.
Wish we had a board(that isn't fricking dead) to discuss this kind of stuff where this kind of effort and thought would be appreciated.
/x/ is the schizophrenic moron containment board
/x/ is /misc/2/
I think PrepHole is about as close as you're gonna get.
Every once in a while there's a great thread between people posting the same tired infinite jest memes and the people that think posting atlas shrugged ever seven hours makes ayn rand any less of an economically illiterate child.
Thx.
You could conceivably and with only modest resources send colony ships out of your system at an appreciable (>1%) fraction of lightspeed using either nuclear pulse drives or laser propulsion. At this rate it would take only a few centuries to get the ball rolling on colonization and you would have a significant stellar empire within only a couple of millions of years - the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago. It's possible that another intelligent species beat us to the punch by a few million years. If you imagine what our tech might look like a thousand years hence, well just think what a million or ten million years might do.
There is no Earth like planets within vicinity of Sun.
Maybe you would find one say at 100LY.
>Ship can survive 10000 years travel
No.
We can't even send individual humans to other planets in our own solar system, what the hell are we supposed to do if interstellar aliens show up in force? I don't think there is a realistic plan we could make, other than "Die."
The best thing to do is to not send signals openly until we are confident in our ability to fend against extraterrestrials.
We can't get people to stop producing carbon, how are we supposed to control EM emissions? It's the same problem as well - the processes that produce it offer a huge benefit to the societies and individuals (organisms) that use them, so we should expect those organisms to outcompete those that don't.
Being able to make "rational" decisions "as a species" is a concept that futurists take for granted without even thinking about how impossible that is.
>how are we supposed to control EM emissions?
The concern is extremely high power or very high gain transmissions, your cell phone is fine. Pic related is going to be a "hey I have nuclear weapons!" beacon for any planet in its field of view.
Yeah let's just shut off our early warning radars and submit to nuclear annihilation, shut off our weather radars and set agriculture back decades, shut off our air traffic control radars and accept a few plane collisions a year, just in case there's aliens.
>The best thing to do is to not send signals openly until we are confident in our ability to fend against extraterrestrials.
Anon Earth planet type is hint of itself. Plannet with room surface temperature and oxygen and water spectral lines in atmosphere? Surely "doesn't need close inspection". You are betrayed by your homeworld itself. And telescope needed to detect planet types is not really different in difficultt from radiotelescope to detect radio transmitions.
>The best thing to do is to not send signals openly
Your planet is doing that since life appeared on it.
Humanity is such a pile of primitives overall (tons on this board) that I have zero doubt anything arriving couldn't trivially subvert a majority of the global population and have them actively working for the aliens. It'd be trivial for a strongly super human intelligence to ingest all our culture, crack our halting states with a far superior theory of mind, and then manipulate most of us. Like shit, merely posing as properly chosen religious entity would win over billions.
I could definitely see a colonial alien power seizing control of a unitary state like the PRC (in much the same way that the Spanish seized control of the Aztec empire) and using to try and subvert humanity via a divide and conquer strategy similar to what the British used in India, but there are open questions to be answered on whether this would actually work with a non human force at the head.
Either way, a xenophobe insurgency is all but guaranteed
Post your gun homosexual.
By the way, any race capable of space travel would have overcome the civilization destroying mind virus that is Atheism and would be, if anything, hyper dogmatic.
Lmao
Atheoids never recovered from contact with basic pattern recognition.
By the way did you know that israelites and Atheists vote identically on every issue?
What age was Aisha again?
>just call em israelites!
I am not believing in your israelite on a pike.
Such hate for own kind.
If aliens arrived and demanded you kiss their feet and suck their dick, you'd ve first in line, and voluntafy
My gf could suck alien duck as long as I get to watch.
>suck alien duck
kinky
Typical American cuckold fantasy. Sad. Chads let the gf watch while they frick the aliens.
Chinese duck is more likely.
he's only stating the obvious moron.
>we're about to lose the only US accessible space station
>no shuttles
>cant get rides from RU anymore
>ZERO forward observation posts in space or Lunar territory
>no nation as of right now can even send a person to the lunar surface and return
Ever heard of Crew Dragon and Artemis?
>what the hell are we supposed to do
STAY ON TARGET!
they didn't count on us having porkins
>We can't even send individual humans to other planets in our own solar system
We can, we just don't spend money on it because bureaucrats are mindless buttholes.
If the Dark Forest theory is correct we're probably already dead and don't even know it, barring managing to go transhuman/superhuman before whatever inbound relativistic strike can hit. There is absolutely fricking nothing we could do with our level of tech and development against anything capable of sending anything interstellar. The "preparation for the scenario" would be to coordinate either between nations or under a species-wide government and not be moronic. Stop broadcasting (ideally have never broadcasted) willy-nilly, work hard to expand through the solar system, develop tech to let us survive stealthily, etc. With an all out effort we could probably have some chance within 40-90 years, though we'd look very different at that point then now.
But that's not the exciting soft scifi answer anyone wants and humans have no proven good at dealing with even obvious clear major problems. There is no way most of us will do any such effort.
The dark forest theory also implies that its also possible that they may be friendly, but also not risking an interaction. The theory in general just expands on the possibility to why we haven't found much in spacr yet.
I by definition can't second guess a strongly superhuman intelligence, but even imagining a theoretical pretty human-good or human-neutral civilization (ie, something we could classify on some level by our own morality), I have a hard time imagining them looking at how humanity is doing on Earth and thinking "yeah these guys will be great neighbors". Maybe with the wisdom are far more development and known alien history (obviously we only have a datapoint of 1, ourselves) intelligent beings having a phase like humanity's is common and most get through it. But alternatively perhaps we're an example of a bad one known to have a high chance of going rampant if it develops far enough. Though I dunno, maybe anything out there can afford to wait and see what pops out of our networks, and figures humanity will be wiped out/controlled by our own creations/post-human descendents anyway.
At any rate kinda pointless to worry about beyond yet another motivation to try to develop and do alright for our own reasons.
You are basically describing humanities first encounter with the Vulcans in the Star Trek universe
They saw what we had done to ourselves and what we were trying to achieve and saw in that a reflection of their own historical mistakes and triumphs, which prompted them to open diplomatic relations once warp travel was achieved
I have comfort in knowing the USA will be the last one standing if they don't nuke the shit out of us. My plan is just to use a Hakim until I die.
lol anon USA would get targeted first in a fantasy scenario precisely because it's strongest. In reality nothing on this planet is worth jack shit and attacks would be hyper kinetic strikes coming in from the oort cloud or something produced by self replicating factories seeded out there, or alternatively super intelligent swarms replicating on earth or a million other options we can't even comprehend. Nothing /k/ino about it I'm afraid.
The dark forest theory is stupid. Humanity unwittingly sent radio signals into space long before anyone even thought about the risk of being discovered by alien civilizations. Why should other species be different in this regard?
I mean, part of the theory suggests that all of those other species end up getting btfo just as well.
>What does /k/ think about the dark forest theory?
it's nonsense.
aliens are demons. praying and 556 will take care of the problem.
Shut up demon
Never heard of it. Aliens are probably already here tho
It's a chink sci fi series that's been recently shilled on PrepHole, after it drew some attention on reddit (go figure). I call it the new blood meridian
It's not a chink concept and it's been written by another author before the chink named it.
What are some other good sci-fi along the lines of three body? Battle of Darkness was cool as shit.
Here's my moronic gambit: take ourselves hostage. Plant nukes in every major city, buried just underground across the fertile landscapes, frickin everywhere. And then we tell the ayys that if there's any attempt to subjugate us, the little planet gets it.
Of course, if it's our destruction they want then it's a moot point, but better to go out on our own terms, right?
I am a space squid from the star system Alpha Centauri and you are a goy, goyim.
If the lip green homies can banter I think we'll be okay.
Goy isn't even a slur, you dumb goy.
Whatever you say, worshipper of the lord of lies.
Not that i would ever doubt random screenshot, but can you provide chapter and page, and if said claim is part of halakha, mishna, gemara, rashi's commentary, tosafot, or other minor commntaries and discussions?
I would like to check it out for myself.
It is when I use it. Non-Jews are bad news. Every israelite needs to be armed and ready, we're gonna reenact Esther 9.
Oh, if a chatbot said something, it's definitely true and not just AI-generated nonsense based on what you want to hear and what they want to push
Would our women leave us for alien d if it gave them more pleasure
Your girl already left you for her dog.
>Verification not required.
>dog
I saw a clip on /gif/ of a chick being fricked by a horse before the thread got nukes. Women would flock to aliens if they had superhuman dicks.
t.
alien girls are built for human men
>I know the U.S. military do have contingent plans for a hypothetical alien invasion
Do they? What is the plan? They must have war gamed it once and realized it was all useless. Unless glowies actually have some wacky tech like antimatter weapons, Alcubierre drives, Tipler cylinders or waterdrops I don't think we would last 5 minutes
There was a few documents that detailed about the military setting up contingent plans against hypothetical aliens/zombies. For the aliens, its pretty much nukes and less direct approach to combat.
>waterdrops
qrd?
sci-fi magic missile
>muh super secret wunderwaffe
You couldn't even beat inbred goatherders and asiatics.
>You couldn't even beat inbred goatherders and asiatics.
We beat them literally every time we fought them though.
>nooo you should have genocided all of them
We could if we felt like it you know.
Did you win the war?
will you frick off, vatBlack person?
why are you even in this thread, since this is all above your intelligence?
>You couldn't even beat inbred goatherders and asiatics.
>Win every military engagement you have with them
>They're so critically moronic and mentally backwards you can't rebuild their society, they simply won't stop raping kids, lying, and shitting in the streets
>Leave them to scrounge around in the dirt for another few years
>Hurrrrrrrrr we WUN
Yeah bud. You won.
Dark Forest theory is Chinese projection where they imagine everything a zero sum game. An alien civilization will not give a frick about some randoms on the other side of the galaxy. The amount of resources and energy in this galaxy alone is beyond our imagining and there is zero evidence of any kind of shortage. We're living in an interstellar wilderness, with stars millions of times larger than our sun whose gravitational force alone could be harvested for effectively infinite energy, and Chinese sci fi authors want to imagine that some ayys gonna nuke us cause we might steal some asteroids
If we find somebody building a Dyson sphere, then we can get worried. Until then, the most likely reason why ayys aren't talking to us is because there is no need to. Tell me, how regularly do you feel the urge to talk to BR's? Not at all? I thought so.
to be fair dark forest as a sci-fi concept was reasoned backwards as a solution to the fermi paradox, long before china thought to use it for propaganda.
still a shit theory that only makes sense under fictional conditions. which is probably why that book had to make up weapons that aren't even in the realm of plausible, far future science. just strait up magic but with science jargon.
It's a dumb solution to the Fermi Paradox for the reasons I already mentioned. Not only are we not getting any communications, we're also not detecting any large structures that would indicate an advanced species going around monopolizing resources and destroying any civilization it comes into contact with. It has even MORE problems than the regular Fermi Paradox, because it implies something is out there and it is a greedy hostile little shit.
>because it implies something is out there and it is a greedy hostile little shit.
as much as I dislike dark forest theory that's not what it's about. dark forest assumes advanced civilizations eventually develop what are essentially super nukes that can somehow delete planets from across the universe. so that everybody that far down the tech tree realizes they're in a cold war with every other advanced species and the only way to survive is to both preemptively nuke any developing species before they get their own super nukes and stay as unnoticeable as possible lest they get nuked themselves. hence why we can't find any signs of intelligent life.
no it's not. this shit is not hard to look up.
Not exactly super nukes, but it assumes there's someone out there that may be capable of destroying/conquering civilizations and the ones that is surviving is trying their best to stay hidden
needs the cold war analogy in there or there's nothing stopping the strongest civilizations from advertising themselves, negating it being a solution to the fermi paradox.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis
>The term "dark forest" was coined for the idea in 2008 by science fiction author Liu Cixin in his novel The Dark Forest.
You're right. It's not hard to look up.
now quote the sentence directly following that one.
Everything about the Dark Forest we know today came from the Three Body Problem. You may as well say HG Wells invented it if you think "well maybe ayys are hostile" is good enough evidence for authorship.
uh huh, so what exactly differentiates the three body problem's interpretation the forge of god (which you refused to quote). not that I expect a coherent answer from somebody that thinks it boils down to aliens being hostile.
Because the Three Body Problem actually brought it to public relevance and named it. Nobody in the West actually thought aliens would seriously behave like this, because there is no logical reason for them to do so, but it fits well within the CCP's worldview. Everyone else is a barbarian competitor to the peaceful noble civilization of the Middle Kingdom.
In fact, the attachment of Forge of God to the Dark Forest is an extreme reach. It is a typical alien invasion story. A far better example of this "solution" would be Dead Space, which has the Fermi Paradox as part of its cosmic horror plot. But nobody is calling it the Dead Space theory, now are they?
>Because the Three Body Problem actually brought it to public relevance and named it
so you're differentiation is that it's more popular. yeah, like how Steve Jobs invented the computer. got little too obvious that you're just talking shit now.
and since you didn't quote it I'll spell it out for everybody else. the forge of god written 20 years before the three body problem explores a solution to the fermi paradox in which humanity is like a crying baby in a hostile forest, rather than dark. hostile forest doesn't roll off the tongue apparently.
the three body problem tries to tack stuff onto the metaphor like everybody being hunters in the forest, but doesn't really add anything of substance and it falls apart when you think about it too much.
It is YOUR position that is equivalent to saying the Ancient Greeks invented the steam engine. Dark Forest theory was irrelevant until the Three Body Problem. Period.
Ayykshyually the problem was tackled in best way by "the killing star" by Pellegrino and Zebrowsky (btw, Pellegrino is buddy with Cameron and guy responsible for ISV Venture Star concept ) , and then touched by Peter Watts in blindsight and one of his short stories.
Both preceed TBP.
From "killing star"
>When we put our heads together and tried to list everything we could say with certainty about other civilizations, without having actually met them, all that we knew boiled down to three simple laws of alien behavior:
>1. THEIR SURVIVAL WILL BE MORE IMPORTANT THAN OUR SURVIVAL.
>If an alien species has to choose between them and us, they won't choose us. It is difficult to imagine a contrary case; species don't survive by being self-sacrificing.
>2. WIMPS DON'T BECOME TOP DOGS.
>No species makes it to the top by being passive. The species in charge of any given planet will be highly intelligent, alert, aggressive, and ruthless when necessary.
>3. THEY WILL ASSUME THAT THE FIRST TWO LAWS APPLY TO US.
(...)
It's an entirely new situation, emerging from the physical possibilities that will face any species that can overcome the natural interstellar quarantine of its solar system. The choices seem unforgiving, and the mind struggles to imagine circumstances under which an interstellar species might make contact without triggering the realization that it can't afford to be proven wrong in its fears.
Got that? We can't afford to wait to be proven wrong.
They won't come to get our resources or our knowledge or our women or even because they're just mean and want power over us. They'll come to destroy us to insure their survival, even if we're no apparent threat, because species death is just too much to risk, however remote the risk...
(1/?)
2/?
>The most humbling feature of the relativistic bomb is that even if you happen to see it coming, its exact motion and position can never be determined; and given a technology even a hundred orders of magnitude above our own, you cannot hope to intercept one of these weapons. It often happens, in these discussions, that an expression from the old west arises:
> "God made some men bigger and stronger than others, but Mr. Colt made all men equal."
>Variations on Mr. Colt's weapon are still popular today, even in a society that possesses hydrogen bombs. Similarly, no matter how advanced civilizations grow, the relativistic bomb is not likely to go away...
>Imagine yourself taking a stroll through Manhattan, somewhere north of 68th street, deep inside Central Park, late at night. It would be nice to meet someone friendly, but you know that the park is dangerous at night. That's when the monsters come out. There's always a strong undercurrent of drug dealings, muggings, and occasional homicides.
>It is not easy to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. They dress alike, and the weapons are concealed. The only difference is intent, and you can't read minds.
>Stay in the dark long enough and you may hear an occasional distance shriek or blunder across a body.
>How do you survive the night? The last thing you want to do is shout, "I'm here!" The next to last thing you want to do is reply to someone who shouts, "I'm a friend!"
>What you would like to do is find a policeman, or get out of the park. But you don't want to make noise or move towards a light where you might be spotted, and it is difficult to find either a policeman or your way out without making yourself known. Your safest option is to hunker down and wait for daylight, then safely walk out.
>There are, of course, a few obvious differences between Central Park and the universe.
>There is no policeman.
>There is no way out.
>And the night never ends.
These were from "killing star" (btw central park reference tells you when it was written)
And then theres Peter Watts :
>Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with gentle intelligence — spiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened than we, a great galactic siblinghood into whose ranks we would someday ascend. Surely, said the Optimists, space travel implies enlightenment, for it requires the control of great destructive energies. Any race which can't rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf.
>Across from the Optimists sat the Pessimists, who genuflected before graven images of Saint Fermi and a host of lesser lightweights. The Pessimists envisioned a lonely universe full of dead rocks and prokaryotic slime. The odds are just too low, they insisted. Too many rogues, too much radiation, too much eccentricity in too many orbits. It is a surpassing miracle that even one Earth exists; to hope for many is to abandon reason and embrace religious mania. After all, the universe is fourteen billion years old: if the galaxy were alive with intelligence, wouldn't it be here by now?
>Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didn't have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials — but if there are any, they said, they're not just going to be smart. They're going to be mean.
2/3
>It might seem almost too obvious a conclusion. What is Human history, if not an on going succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots? But the subject wasn't merely Human history, or the unfair advantage that tools gave to any given side; the oppressed snatch up advanced weaponry as readily as the oppressor, given half a chance. No, the real issue was how those tools got there in the first place. The real issue was what tools are for.
>To the Historians, tools existed for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treated nature as an enemy, they were by definition a rebellion against the way things were. Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world which poses no threat?
>Human civilization had a lot of branches, not so long ago. Even into the twenty-first century, a few isolated tribes had barely developed stone tools. Some settled down with agriculture. Others weren't content until they had ended nature itself, still others until they'd built cities in space. We all rested eventually, though. Each new technology trampled lesser ones, climbed to some complacent asymptote, and stopped.
3/3
>But history never said that everyone had to stop where we did. It only suggested that those who had stopped no longer struggled for existence. There could be other, more hellish worlds where the best Human technology would crumble, where the environment was still the enemy, where the only survivors were those who fought back with sharper tools and stronger empires. The threats contained in those environments would not be simple ones. Harsh weather and natural disasters either kill you or they don't, and once conquered — or adapted to — they lose their relevance. No, the only environmental factors that continued to matter were those that fought back, that countered new strategies with newer ones, that forced their enemies to scale ever-greater heights just to stay alive.
>Ultimately, the only enemy that mattered was an intelligent one.
>And if the best toys do end up in the hands of those who've never forgotten that life itself is an act of war against intelligent opponents, what does that say about a race whose machines travel between the stars? The argument was straightforward enough. It might even have been enough to carry the Historians to victory — if such debates were ever settled on the basic of logic, and if a bored population hadn't already awarded the game to Fermi on points. But the Historian paradigm was just too ugly, too Darwinian, for most people, and besides, no one really cared any more.
If the night never ends, you might as well go towards the light, since hunkering down just means that eventually someone will stumble upon your hiding hole.
>by "the killing star" by Pellegrino and Zebrowsky (btw, Pellegrino is buddy with Cameron and guy responsible for ISV Venture Star concept ) , and then touched by Peter Watts in blindsight and one of his short stories.
Ah, a man of taste.
You can also mention Berserker Probes by Fred Saberhagen
>. They'll come to destroy us to insure their survival, even if we're no apparent threat, because species death is just too much to risk, however remote the risk...
>(1/?)
If they are advanced they know about us since millions of years. They would already come or destroyed our world if this would be their wish.
I will tell you the black pill. Earth life and human civilization are most likely too uninteresting for aliens to bother.
Advanced civilizations that are 100 million of years old probably saw life and civilization like ours hundreds of times. Nothing to be interested or worried about. We will pass away before their dinner.
Absolutely tired of this moron pill. We've seen around 2 million species, and our drive to know more has only increased, and were talking about crookedness of bug wiener tier differences in some cases, and not a completely new civ. We already have propably hundreds of full time myrmecologists, thousands of entomologists hundreds of thousands of hobbyists, and tens of millions of people who could be interested in a insect documentary. What you get with hyper advanced and populous civs is not disinterest but even more highly spesific interests(unless sociological rules break down due to escapist tech). In a population of trillions i'm sure theres got to be thousands of homologists and propably a couple homosexuallogists specializing in OP studies.
>>1. THEIR SURVIVAL WILL BE MORE IMPORTANT THAN OUR SURVIVAL.
>>If an alien species has to choose between them and us, they won't choose us. It is difficult to imagine a contrary case; species don't survive by being self-sacrificing.
>>2. WIMPS DON'T BECOME TOP DOGS.
>>No species makes it to the top by being passive. The species in charge of any given planet will be highly intelligent, alert, aggressive, and ruthless when necessary.
>>3. THEY WILL ASSUME THAT THE FIRST TWO LAWS APPLY TO US.
This is fricking moronic because it assumes that the first choice that an alien species has to make when detecting another one is directly
>NOOOOOK OR NO NOOOOOK???
A species that has already mastered the technology to make relativistic kill vehicles also has the technology to spread out from their initial gravity well. Such a species does not have to immediately NOOOOK every single alien civilization they detect, since it isn't about life or death for them anymore.
>Soveit Union space tech
>Nook, nook, nook!
And in the end of the series even the author admits the DF theory can't be sustained.
Aliens start trading with each other on "meeting trader planets" and working together in the end.
Three Body Problem merely coined the term - gave the dangerous universe theory a name, "The Killing Star" was over a decade before and TBP borrows heavily from it.
Are you 20 something? I remember reading about that general theory, wasn't called Dark Forest, but still, before The Three Body Problem or The Dark Forest were published. It's not a new idea, only the idea that it's Chinese and the name is.
>The hypothesis was described by astronomer and author David Brin in his 1983 summary of the arguments for and against the Fermi paradox,[13] for which this hypothesis is one potential solution.[8][10] In 1987, science fiction author Greg Bear explored the concept in his novel The Forge of God.[14] The term "dark forest" was coined for the idea in 2008 by science fiction author Liu Cixin in his novel The Dark Forest.[15][16]
Kys
>it was an irrelevant theory until a chinese guy made it world famous and coined the term
Wow. Thanks for proving my point.
It wasn’t irrelevant or unknown before 2008. I myself was personally aware of the theory before then. The concept had been around since the 80s and was even in a sci-fi novel predating the Three Body Problem series.
Yeah, I don't know anything about any of the books they're talking about, I haven't heard of them before today. But the Fermi paradox has interested me for a while so I am familiar with this version of the great filter, although I am inclined to believe that the great filter is that interstellar travel is basically impossible.
Maybe when we finally understand what gravity is, we will have other ways of manipulating spacetime that we can't even imagine right now, which will allow for FTL. But nothing short of teleportation will help with time dilation.
>I am inclined to believe that the great filter is that interstellar travel is basically impossible.
There's nothing impossible about interstellar travel. The most likely reason for us not having seen any intelligent life out there is simply that we are among the first to emerge.
He is talking about distances and time commitment. They are too great.
>There's nothing impossible about interstellar travel
Range and time of travel coming form that.
>let's build machine that will work for 200000 years, when our civilisation can be considered existing for 2000 years
Space has to much scale for hairless monkeys. It is like ant trying to jump over a mountain.
You are absolutely insane
How fast do you think we're gonna be going between stars? A quarter of the speed of light sound reasonable? What do you suppose hitting a hydrogen atom at 1/4 light speed would do to your ship? There's stuff between the stars, too
>What do you suppose hitting a hydrogen atom at 1/4 light speed would do to your ship?
What do you think cosmic rays are? A single hydrogen atom travelling at 1/4th the speed of light hitting something wouldn't even produce a noticeable flash of light.
But wait, I don't get it. If they're trying to stay hidden, why would they nuke developing civilizations? I get it's a pre-emptive "they might break the status quo/nuke us in the future thing" but how are the super nuke launches undetectable, but they have to hide everything else about them like EM transmissions and not building dyson spheres or whatever the frick?
Its almost like the entire "Dark Forest" concept is moronic.
>Its almost like the entire "Dark Forest" concept is moronic.
The author abandons the concept in the last book of the series. There are sort of "marketplace planets" where aliens meet each other and trade.
Much later on, most aliens work together to stop universe from being completely eradicated along with their heritage.
Interstellar trade in non FTL universe is moronic.
>Interstellar trade in non FTL universe is moronic.
And why is that?
Because one dollar put into bank at 5% interest rate would be 1.5 Sextillion dollars 1000 years after.
What are your merchant selling again?
>What are your merchant selling again?
300 exabytes of anime waifu AIs.
Nothing to trade. It takes centuries for shipments of goods to arrive, and there's almost nothing worth sending to begin with since most star systems will just flat out have all the stuff you need there.
Only because our typical lifespan is 80ish. If we lived for 1000 years you’d be able to go on a relativistic journey and your kids would still be alive when you got back.
Which is why you'd bring your family on the ship with you.
We never know how many wanted to work together, it's never revealed if it's 1% or 90%
>
>The author abandons the concept in the last book of the series. There are sort of "marketplace planets" where aliens meet each other and trade.
>Much later on, most aliens work together to stop universe from being completely eradicated along with their heritage.
You must be talking about the last book that was not written by the original author, but by some fans instead.
>that would indicate an advanced species going around monopolizing resources
Plenty of such candidate objects.
But space is incredibly vast and old.
We only been on the Moon for a brief second, no advanced civilization would care about us.
There aren't any problems with the fermi paradox.
This 100%, Dark Forest was theorized early in such works as "The Killing Star" by Western writers/scientists a good decade plus before the chinks. The only good thing out of "Three Body Problem" is the theory was fleshed out and made digestible.
In "The Killing Star" basically the moment Humanity became capable of relativistic speed/travel is the moment our galactic neighbors struck and wiped out all life on earth - seeing us as too dangerous of a "Neighbor".
Dark Forest is a convenient explanation for the Fermi Paradox forgetting that in nature an organism that makes contact with a potential threat will either Fight, Flight, Posture, or Submit/Surrender.
Which would mean that first contact with an unknown species can go either way, esp if they've long known that we're here. They could enslave us, they could absorb us into their galactic empire as one of many lower races that provide them labor and combat force, they could uplift us and absorb us/one sided alliance with us against a greater threat, they could destroy us utterly, frick with our evolution, or give us ultimatum's limiting us to our solar system - the possibilities are endless.
That being said its probably a good thing we cant detect shit because the moment we do, well, shit goes both ways. The good thing about dark forest is that it stresses, strongly, that we should be a lot more careful with EM/sending signals into space, and should try to stay hidden the best we damned can until we inhabit multiple solar systems and planets
>in nature an organism that makes contact with a potential threat will either Fight, Flight, Posture, or Submit/Surrender
How prepared is /k/ for aliens submitting to us?
In the best case scenario as outlined:
Every other intelligent species we encounter would be pre-space faring or primitive.
Primitives would absolutely submit as we would be as gods to them, and we probably would interfere with them for a long time until we spread out and developed some lovey dovey star trek "don't frick with the primitive civilizations" laws.
Civilizations that are more advanced pre-type I would almost certainly posture but would be succeptible for uplifting and absorption into our empire. They could put up a fight.
We would probably wipe out intelligent species that we saw as extremely grotesque and incapable of living within our empire. We're Omnivores, we can expect a lot of intelligent life to also be, but what happens when we try to integrate an intelligent species of pure predators that would eat the lesser races in our empire (or even humans) for food? We'd fricking kill them.
Flight obviously isn't an option for a Pre-Type I.5 civilization
I'm not sure I buy the predator argument. For one it's not access to broccoli that holds civilisation together and I don't see how a civilisation built around hunting lesser members would work - as the 1997 audiovisual thesis 'The Pest' demonstrated. Even if the species is some all-assimilating hivemind without a concept of other intelligence, it would need careful management but then we're talking about pruning.
The real problem would be something like Blindsight where the mental framework of sapience becomes the problem and we're the evolutionary aberration and we have the choice of losing our fundamental identity or getting heemed on a galactic level.
>Dark Forest is a convenient explanation for the Fermi Paradox forgetting that in nature an organism that makes contact with a potential threat will either Fight, Flight, Posture, or Submit/Surrender.
The Dark Forest is the most sensible answer to the Fermi paradox and projecting terrestrial organism behaviors onto extraterrestrials is stupid and anthropomorphizing them with nonsense like empires and slavery is even stupider. The only two qualities a space-faring species or entity needs, is the drive and ability to expand through space. Other highly very common qualities are going to be things like logic, planning and the ability to perceive how competition for resources may interfere with continued expansion. What's probably going to be rarer is mammalian qualities like altruism, fairness, tribe hierarchy concepts etc.
And even in the astronomically unlikely case that that a lot of ayys evolve to be humans with green skin that have emotions, ethics, malleable social constructs etc. all it takes is one highly advanced, expansive killer civilization that's out to blap the competition and it's a dark forest scenario for everyone regardless of how the majority of civilizations in the area would otherwise behave.
>Making rock go fast is the easy part: Fusion engines baby!
Lmao, no. Developing even one RKV is solidly in the realm of a type 2 civilization, let alone one that could somehow be powered by a fusion rocket. I feel you really do not understand the unimaginable amount of energy required to accelerate a projectile to any whole number % of C.
>the ability to perceive how competition for resources may interfere with continued expansion
What fricking resources? There is absolutely fricking nothing that a civilization would need from the bottom of another goddamn gravity well.
Any species or entity that is space faring or has the potential to be space faring also has the potential to compete for the materials and energy that an expansionist species will want at some point and for a species or entity that operates in the time scales and scope of an expanding type 2 civ or beyond, there is no other civ far enough away to not be using resources that the more advanced civilization will need at some point, especially if the competition is allowed to progress to a type 2 or beyond too.
And if a civ or entity wants to survive and expand forever, then it's basic logic that removing potential competitors before they can become competitive is safer and more efficient than leaving them alone.
>Fastest human made object reached 0.02% of C
Which is not even close to meaningful relativistic speeds, let alone the sort of speed/mass required to create a RKV capable of glassing a planet.
>if there's a starfleet like entity vs an ultimate exterminator is very likely the exterminator will be technically outmatched by the cooperative races assuming the races have been in contact for an undetermined but extended period of time
So in this scenario we're assuming:
>Ayys will try to establish contact with other civilizations when a more advanced civilization is glassing anyone that it comes into contact with.
>Ayys will try to cooperate with each other and do so in a functional manner.
>Ayy cooperation will result in some sort of advantage that enables the defeat of a superior civilization that is capable of swatting them individually.
Which conversely relies on the assumptions that:
>Ayys don't hide from everyone to avoid getting killed.
>Ayys that attempt contact don't get found by the killer first.
>Cooperation between alien species is possible.
>Cooperation can overcome a more advanced enemy.
Anthropomorphism of aliens is pretty stupid, but imagining the galaxy as an episode of star trek is even dumber.
>Which is not even close to meaningful relativistic speeds, let alone the sort of speed/mass required to create a RKV capable of glassing a planet.
Yeah, I know.
Just look at what it will take us to get to our closest planet, 8 months in one way.
>>Ayys don't hide from everyone to avoid getting killed.
Pragmatically speaking, in a universe where Dark Forest is practiced a species or group of species will realize that technological explosions can happen more than once and that if contact with an alien race no matter the technological difference between the two can catalyze such an explosion they will seek out aliens even just to use them for their own survival.
>>Ayys that attempt contact don't get found by the killer first.
Yeah, I'll give you that I'm assuming the determined exterminators aren't omnipresent or omnipotent.
between alien species is possible.
I'm making an assumption, that ayylmaos can at least make pragmatic decisions, this includes forcing interstellar relations to work because the alternative is potentially getting killed by a hypothetical 3rd party that's playing a hunter role
can overcome a more advanced enemy.
Not cooperation itself, if 8 species at our technology level used lasers to communicate with each other across some 20ly distance no amount of cooperation is going to save them from getting glassed. The assumption I'm making is that technological explosions can happen more than once and that multiple races coexisting would egg each other on to make technological changes at a much higher rate than a lone hunter civilization could by themselves so in the event a cooperative came into contact the greater the amount of time they've been working with each other the more likely it will be that they'll be better prepared to face that threat of extinction, that and aliens would be able to see the benefit in mutual defense and potential safe havens if their world is destroyed they can fall back to a friendly system with ready-made infrastructure
>rarer is mammalian qualities like altruism
Altruism isn't a mammalian only quality.
>I feel you really do not understand the unimaginable amount of energy required to accelerate a projectile to any whole number % of C
Fastest human made object reached 0.02% of C and that was a probe.
A nuke popping a manhole cover accelerated it to 0.017% of C.
Idk, I mean, if we add time into the mix, we will be capable of some large numbers but yeah, right now or in near future, it is pure science fantasy.
>Fastest human made object reached 0.02% of C and that was a probe.
No. Fastest delta V achieved by man made object was 0.008C
Why don't gravity assists count?
>expansive killer civilization that's out to blap the competition and it's a dark forest scenario for everyone regardless of how the majority of civilizations in the area would otherwise behave.
Except your forgetting the part of the dark forest theory assumes that contact between races can catalyze a technological explosion, if there's a starfleet like entity vs an ultimate exterminator is very likely the exterminator will be technically outmatched by the cooperative races assuming the races have been in contact for an undetermined but extended period of time
>The Dark Forest is the most sensible answer to the Fermi paradox
No, the most sensible answer to he Fermi Paradox is that intelligent, tool-using life is exceedingly rare and FTL / relativistic travel is simply not possible. The galaxy is full of life, the overwhelming majority of which will never develop into anything resembling human civilization and the tiny fraction that does will never make it out of their local star cluster let alone span the galaxy.
>. The good thing about dark forest is that it stresses, strongly, that we should be a lot more careful with EM/sending signals into space, and should try to stay hidden the best we damned can until we inhabit multiple solar systems and planets
That's absolutely moronic. Earth and our biosphere have been signalling to cosmos for eons that we are here.
>chink scifi
>dyson sphere
There's actually some evidence that we may found a dyson sphere. Aside from that, dark forest theory didn't originated from china.
It's from the Three Body Problem.
>There's actually some evidence that we may found a dyson sphere.
Just like there's evidence for life on Venus, aliens found by SETI, UFOs seen by aircraft carriers, etc. It's people seeing what they want to see in noise.
since it has to be brought up in every fricking one of these threads, the Dyson sphere thing was reddit s-o-y facing about a star that dims occasionally because of dust or some other shit between it and us
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabby%27s_Star
But I want to believe.
Too bad.
Correct take. The three body series is grade A chink cope and you could just change the aliens for ebil west and you'd have opium wars in space.
The probable truth is, that either sapient life is really rare and we're alone in our galaxy ir if sapient is common, then we're so far out on the rim of the milky way that we don't matter. We're literally some shitty pacific island on the far side of the globe.
>If we find somebody building a Dyson sphere, then we can get worried.
They are dozens of Dyson Sphere candidates.They are just not possible to confirm without interstellar travel
>dozens of Dyson sphere candidates
That we can see. And since we can see their stars that means they’re either under construction, damaged or derelict. A complete Dyson sphere would completely block the light of its host star. There could be millions of them ‘in sight’ but we wouldn’t see shit besides another cold dark black bit of space.
>There could be millions of them ‘in sight’ but we wouldn’t see shit besides another cold dark black bit of space.
Dyson sphere doesn't block out the effects of gravity dumbass. We would absolutely see the gravitational effects of a dyson sphere massive enough to completely block out the light given off by its star. Not to mention the thermal radiation that the sphere would have to give off not to boil itself.
>Dyson sphere doesn't block out the effects of gravity dumbass. We would absolutely see the gravitational effects of a dyson sphere massive enough to completely block out the light given off by its star. Not to mention the thermal radiation that the sphere would have to give off not to boil itself.
Oh you mean IRAS 20369+5131 ? 🙂
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0004-637X/698/2/2075/pdf
>Figure 5 shows the spectrum of IRAS 20369+5131 in the
low least-squares set, the closest approximation to a Dyson
sphere signature in the sample. There is also confirming MSX
infrared data shown as open squares for this source. For completeness, several filter points from DIRBE are shown as open
circles. At small wavelengths they lie well above the extrapolated blackbody distribution, MSX, and the closest 2MASS
source. It may have been that the wide angular resolution of
DIRBE overlapped a second source. There is no visible star
Dyson spheres are not a practical means of energy collection, even for a civilization capable of building them
If a dyson sphere is close enough to visually detect we should have received a bunch of communications by now
>Dyson spheres are not a practical means of energy collection, even for a civilization capable of building them
There can be a vanity project
>If a dyson sphere is close enough to visually detect we should have received a bunch of communications by now
LOL, why ? Do you communicate with mold in your bathroom?
Im talking about detecting intra-species communications you dunce
>This search has shown that at best there are only a few quasi-plausible Dyson sphere signatures out of the IRAS LRS sample in the 100 K < T < 600 K temperature region. This limit includes both pure and partial Dyson spheres. With several possible exceptions all the “good” sources identified in this search have some more conventional explanation other than as a Dyson sphere candidate. In spite of the fact that there are many mimics such as stars in a late dusty phase of their evolution, interesting Dyson sphere candidates are quite rare.
It's not about resources, it's about preemptively eliminating competition. If they let us live then one day we might think about starting our own space empire - that would be very pesky for them indeed.
I love it, nothing amuses me more than picturing the sheer chaos that would be humanities entrance into a galaxy-wide Mexican standoff
>dark forest theory
If they have practical interstellar travel there is no "prepare" for them. They can erase life on our planet and there is literally nothing we can do about it.
If they don't, we will likely never run into them.
what if they have practical interstellar travel but it is extremely limited in terms of the mass and volume that can be transported, like air freight here on earth
That's even worse. That means they're moving fast enough they can cram some dudes in a small craft and expect them to make the journey in a single lifetime, and have it be short enough they have supplies. That means that thing is going an absurd percentage of the speed of light, even that presents its own problems. If they're going faster than light it's even more over of course.
Regardless if they have small craft interstellar travel, they can throw a minivan at us at their cruising speeds and end all life on earth.
I've never heard of this theory but any theory that relies on you going to a place where no where else is, is exactly where other people are going to go to kill game animals. Look at during the last two world wars, people nearly eradicated the deer population. You're gonna be bumping more elbows than you think in those kind of locations. Why do you think all the rich people buy places on islands they hope you displace all the locals and put shock collars on their security.
The best way to prepare for aliens is to give them a belly full of lead and a pool of their own blood to drown in.
>What does /k/ think about the dark forest theory?
Largely bullshit, Eistenianian relativity makes any galaxy spanning empire basically impossible therefore I doubt any alien civilization could even consider invading
If there was a species that had the technology to travel over that distance through space and arrive at earth, what chance would we realistically have?
I feel it would be like the Sentinalese using bows trying to go against a modern military
>What does /k/ think about the dark forest theory?
It's moronic. It's the cosmic equivalent of the schizo preppers preparing to shoot everyone else the moment that SHTF, and then when SHTF all the schizos kill each other off in the first 3 days after which the people capable of forming and defending communities inherit everything.
I think we should keep doing what we're doing. If anyone's out there they've already detected us, the only reason we're not a second asteroid belt is because they think its a trap and we want them to shoot us for some unknown reason. We're like a skinwalker.
The Dark Forest idea specifically is stupid because by attacking anything you see you risk exposing yourself. Lets say you find a planet with sapient life and fire an RKV oops it belongs to a species who controls 20,000 worlds and now you have thousands of RKVs heading to your homeworld or an invasion fleet to punish your species on a genetic level.
Even the logic of the dark forest falls apart, consider the deep abyss of the ocean. Not only is some shit not trying to hide, some is actively trying to be spotted, like an angler fish, their whole plan is to be spotted.
You don't have to launch from your own world. You have a roaming fleet fire, so that there is no way return fire would hit you.
So if you have the tech to have a roaming fleet, what makes you think the others wont have one as well? Congratulations, you just antagonized a civilization that you can't kill by destroying their home with one strike.
as /tg/ said it
And then the rest of the galactic community who DO value cooperation get together and stomp them flat, or at the very least lend substantial aid to whoever they're attacking.
Kind of like how North Korea decided they were going to annex South Korea, and then a massive coalition of non-shithole countries intervened and caused North Korea - and their Chinese puppetmaster - to suffer a humiliating defeat. Or how Russia decided it was going to invade Ukraine and "roast all the hohol piggies" and instead found an entire generation of their young men getting shredded by Western weapons given to Ukraine by a whole lot of countries who dislike the whole "might makes right, kill anyone who isn't us" asiatic mindset.
At worst you'd see this latter situation play out - the aggressor has enough of a strategic deterrent that you can't intervene (this could be star-killing weapons or something) directly, but you can still give tons of aid to whoever's under attack; and of course whatever belligerent species is trying to wipe others out will find itself cut off from the rest of the interstellar community as far as research, trade, etc goes, lagging further and further behind.
Cooperation works. The Dark Forest idea is based on oriental despotism and we can see IRL how much of a miserable failure that is. The species who go into space with optimism, seeking new friends, will find and make new friends and become stronger for it. The paranoid lunatics will be left isolated and backwards.
>the galactic community
But the galactic community never forms because the ones who send signals out to the friendlies are also heard by the not-so-friendlies, who dart them from their own system.
That's part of the dark forest theory.
Building some kind of weapon that can destroy planets in other systems is kinda already something we could possibly do under the constraints of current engineering and if we're looking in our neighborhood, so the opportunity cost of nuking the competition is pretty low compared to all the alternatives. In game theory the winning outcome is the path of least resistance. That is, all risk is negated if you just shoot first. So it's not just the aggressive species wiping out rivals, it's also species that are being rational and pragmatic.
I mean, it's all bullshit, but it's fun to think about.
>In game theory the winning outcome is the path of least resistance
the OG finding of computer science game theory is that cooperation is the winning strategy when the game is played on a continuous basis. and explains how cooperation evolved in some of the most basic lifeforms. look up tit for tat. not that it necessarily applies to galactic war.
Cooperation is the winning strategy in the constraint of a system that rewards it. There is no reward for cooperating across the stars. In the reward matrix there's no payout for sending lame binary code messages across space that take forever to get there or whatever you have in mind for cooperation.
>There is no reward for cooperating across the stars
the reward is not having spend all of your resources on an intergalactic war. and instead spend it terraforming and colonizing neighboring planets like the drake equation predicts.
If the drake equation is correct then the solar system should at a minimum be littered with probes from countless other civilizations gathering information about our system
uh yeah, that's why we have the fermi paradox, and then the dark forest theory in response to it, and then this thread.
It's perhaps the dumbest response the most reasonable one (which makes sense according to the dark forest theory because FTL is presumed impossible in the scenario) is that the distances are so vast that we can never reasonably expect to find another sapient species.
It's like looking for diamonds but you can only look over a 500 square foot area of beach. Diamonds exist, but you're not likely to find any in the highly limited area you can reasonably find them.
Hehe, who knows.
>But the galactic community never forms because the ones who send signals out to the friendlies are also heard by the not-so-friendlies, who dart them from their own system.
Do you understand how fricking big the galaxy is? Not to even talk about the rest of the universe. It's over 100k light-years across. FTL isn't a thing nor will it ever be, so from the moment you detect something halfway across the galaxy, they had 50k years to move away from that planet, and at the earliest you can wipe them out 50k years from now if you have near light speed missiles. That's 100k years they've had to further evolve and spread from their planet of origin, and you've just declared your intention to eradicate their race. What do you think will happen?
On a galactic scale, trying to wipe out a planet is like an anime fight where everyone keeps hitting the after image of their opponent because they are moving so fast, and everyone keeps monologuing while leveling up to the next stage of their evolution between blows.
>some guy 50,000 ly away blah blah
The dark forest hypothesis is predicated on the idea that intelligent life is everywhere so there'd be someone in your local star cluster to fire the weapon at you
So if it is literally everywhere, what is stopping the inevitability of two or more civilizations cooperating and surging so far beyond everyone else in technology as the result from happening?
Listen, man, we're trying to find out why life isn't everywhere. That is the purpose of this thought experiment, to find an answer for the Fermi paradox, or at least identify its great filter. As unlikely as it may be, it's at least plausible, and the power of friendship isn't a good enough reason to dismiss it as a matter of course
Anon, which one of the following scenarios is more plausible:
>intelligent life is everywhere and everyone is capable of wiping out planets or star systems remotely and everyone is just staying really quiet because they assume everyone else is Chinese. Ohh and we've never detected anything that could be the remains of a star system what was wiped out with technology but surely that just means the weapons they have are more advanced than we can even imagine?!
Or
>We're the first
>we're first
Statistically astronomically unlikely based on the drake equation, which has to be accepted to even talk about the scenario
Is it more likely than everyone else in the galaxy being focused primarily on survival? I don't know, what was life in this planet selecting for for billions of years? Do we think it would be different elsewhere?
>Statistically astronomically unlikely based on the drake equation,
>he doesn't know about phosphorus gate
I know what it is, but if we're just assuming that every civilization eventually progresses to space travel and colonization, someone would only have to beat us by a few hundred thousand years to be a giant neon sign in the sky, and there are a lot of chances for someone to beat us to the punch
But they clearly don't, every civilization is going to have to pass a great filter before it is able to ascend to Type I and spread outside of it's own solar system. Said filter could be global nuclear war, or it could be a multi-planet civil war contained to the solar system a la the Expanse
It is possible that the filter could be something as simple as the development of advanced intelligent life, and thus it would be behind us already
Then our planet alone passed it several times already.
Well, obviously it's only passed once. Some other animals are intelligent but are never going to amount to much - dolphins and whales *may* be similarly smart as us (and we're going to fricking start talking to them soon) but lacking opposable thumbs or fire making capability, they were never going to go to the stars.
Similarly octopuses.
Dolphins, whales, monkeys, crows, border collies, beavers, parrots and few others I belive.
Or there is a series of great filters and we have yet to pass the one which allows us to actually colonize outside our solar system.
I mean we don't even have the ability to efficiently store energy yet, nor the ability to mine asteroids, moons and other planetary bodies within our own solar system yet.
The great filter is probably going to be Artifical Intelligence. I'd imagine AI gets so advanced for a pre/Type-I that it threatens life or at the best causes a war that results in said near/type-I from technologically regressing hundreds of years plus.
If an AI were to win against its creators, well it itself is substantially limited on what it can reasonably achieve and likely ends up dying off.
That still leaves you with a hyper-advanced AI that sees the universe as its property, something you would potentially notice.
I have a suspicion that the great filter is actually social decay that happens once civilisations enter the post-scarcity era.
>I have a suspicion that the great filter is actually social decay that happens once civilisations enter the post-scarcity era.
It could be both.
AI makes life trivially easy, society decays. AI has all the energy it needs within its own solar system and is unable to travel relativistic so it only pokes outside of its own solar system.
It either kills its creators or they die out anyway due to mass degeneration - then eventually the AI loses its power sources and is never able to say make a dyson sphere around its own star and it too dies off.
Either way AI is a threat
Maybe AI isn't dangerous and we are just projecting our fears on it and giving it sinister properties due to our primordial part of the brain yelling "RUN!" when we think about a piece of sand having abstract thought.
I think our relationship with AGI models will be similar to our relationship with nukes, perpetual mistrust which will make us risk everything over simple misunderstandings, like the countless false alarms of incoming missiles that happend in 60s and 70s.
>Is it more likely than everyone else in the galaxy being focused primarily on survival? I don't know, what was life in this planet selecting for for billions of years? Do we think it would be different elsewhere?
Trying to just lie still is the losing strategy if you assume all other civilisations will attempt to snuff out everyone else the moment they detect them. If that was the case you should assume that your original planet is already the target of an incoming attack and just try to abandon it as soon as possible. It is impossible to hide a planet wide civilization from alien telescopes.
What people don't realize is that there should be hundreds of thousands or millions of planets with life on them for every planet with technologically capable civilization. We already have the technology to study the atmospheric composition of exoplanets, so we'll detect life long before we find intelligent life.
JWST should start focusing more on planets than the early universe this year so I would wait for that.
>We already have the technology to study the atmospheric composition of exoplanets, so we'll detect life long before we find intelligent life.
We might have already done so.
https://futurism.com/the-byte/rumors-james-webb-life
"RUMORS CIRCULATING THAT JAMES WEBB HAS DISCOVERED LIFE ON ANOTHER WORLD
"IT'S JUST THAT THEY DON'T WANT TO RELEASE OR CONFIRM THOSE RESULTS UNTIL THEY CAN BE ENTIRELY SURE, BUT WE FOUND A PLANET THAT SEEMS TO BE GIVING OFF STRONG SIGNALS OF BIOLOGICAL LIFE."
>No doubt, the evidence so far is encouraging. The biosignature detected on K2-18 b is a molecule called dimethyl sulfide, a smelly substance that on Earth is produced only by living organisms.
Ehhh
Imagine the smell
There is a chance that we're the most advanced life in our galaxy, of course there are other galaxies, but if we ended up the first Type I in the Milky Way we would be in a very, very good position long term
NTA
We'll, I doubt we are the first.
Not implying that moronic theory where life formed while the ambient temperature of the universe was warm enough for oceans to form on planets without a star, which is frickin moronic since they clearly forgot about the radiation, lack of heavier elements, short lived nature of this window and of course, they forgot about the stars that were the size of solar systems at this point and exploded with such violence that they would kill everything in their local cluster.
What I am saying is that our planet could support us much much earlier, bout 1.5 billion years earlier, but our evolutionary processes stagnated and it took global ice ages, volcanic events and other for our bacteria to start cooperating.
>we've never detected anything that could be the remains of a star system what was wiped out
Do you realize for how inceredibly short time we've been able to survey the outer space? We've never detected anything because it might've happen in 1547 or 2000 BC.
Do you think that the remains would just vanish? No.
>Do you realize for how inceredibly short time we've been able to survey the outer space? We've never detected anything because it might've happen in 1547 or 2000 BC.
The funny thing is, we actually see a lot of ambiguous stuff in space.
If you talk to astronomers in private over a beer or drink it isn't that uncommon to hear that they believe some things to be signs of artificial manipulation.
But not kiddie stuff like flying saucers or green men. More like deep stellar structures in the galactic core or plasma streams from distant galaxies.
Advanced civilizations would be millions of years ahead of us, their works would be vast and colossal to what we can achieve.
life is everywhere and everyone is capable of wiping out planets or star systems remotely and everyone is just staying really quiet because they assume everyone else is Chinese. Ohh and we've never detected anything that could be the remains of a star system what was wiped out with technology but surely that just means the weapons they have are more advanced than we can even imagine?!
Contrary to your limited knowledge and popular opinion there are tons of objects in space that could be megastructures.
It's just that humanity is very undeveloped and not even on the level of ants to the aliens.
Here's a list of hundreds of unidentified space phenomena
https://seti.berkeley.edu/exotica/
>Is it more likely than everyone else in the galaxy being focused primarily on survival?
Your error is to assume we don't see signs of alien civilizations. In fact FERMI Lab has detected dozens of Dyson Sphere candidates. It's simply not widely publicized. Also for the reason that we simply are unable to confirm them as artificial.
https://disclosurelabs.wordpress.com/2014/02/16/search-yields-17-potential-dyson-sphere-candidates/
I'm really, really hoping we're the first/most advanced in our galaxy.
In the Universe? Almost certainly not. But a type 2.5 kardyshev scale human civilization spanning the entire Milky Way being discovered by a type 3 is a lot more preferable than eating a reletavistic kill vehicle as a type 0.5 human civ from a Type 1.5 alien civ
Oh yeah I really hope this is the case. Right now there's a definite chance it might be, so long as all those UAP rumors and allegations are a bunch of horseshit. And we don't really have much solid evidence to prove otherwise! So that's promising
>Right now there's a definite chance it might be, so long as all those UAP rumors
UAP's could be just as well plasma/ electromagnetic lifeforms with intelligence equal to cats or dogs that don't recognise biological things as alive
>On a galactic scale, trying to wipe out a planet is like an anime fight where everyone keeps hitting the after image of their opponent because they are moving so fast, and everyone keeps monologuing while leveling up to the next stage of their evolution between blows.
Made me smile
this kek, muh relativistic kill vehicle is a meme. It’s fricking impossible to hit something as small as a planet even from just a few light years away for the following reasons:
>we want to snipe them before they snipe us so we want our RKV to arrive as fast as possible
>however, it will be impossible to carry out any kind of course corrections at a high speed, so our first trajectory estimate must be PERFECT
>there is no way to be sure we’ve accounted for every perturbing body in the target system because even a moon or asteroid belt could cause a trajectory shift but be very hard to detect reliably
>it is difficult to predict the effects of the interstellar medium as well, especially at relativistic speeds where everything is more sensitive
>we could fling a shitload and hope one of them hits, but if they miss it’s REALLY OBVIOUS they’ve been targeted and they’ll start shooting back
>what if they have settlements on other planets or stations in system? Then they could rage ping everyone else even if we hit and now the rest of the neighborhood knows we’re genocidal and where we are, or they could also shoot back if their other settlements are advanced enough
Basically there’s only downsides and nobody understands anarchism or game theory.
, it will be impossible to carry out any kind of course corrections at a high speed,
But it is possible.
what sensor are you gonna use to get high-accuracy information to find the corrected trajectory? How certain can your measurements be when the relative velocity is so high? How sure are you that dust moving at .9c hasn’t shifted your trajectory enough to force an over- or under-shoot? What propulsion system can you use to make the (probably very small) adjustment in flight? These aren’t trivial questions.
There's absolutely no reason to assume that a civilization capable of producing an RKV wouldn't also be able to make high fidelity observations of the target system, have a way of producing enough delta-v to make course adjustments at relativistic speeds or to have terminal guidance systems capable of using both to hit a target. Something being "hard" isn't a relevant argument, since accelerating an object to relativistic speeds is also hard and if anything the "impossible" problems you're coming up with are vastly easier to solve than producing that sort of velocity.
Hell, a civilization with the technological capability of accelerating an RKV would probably have the computing power to simulate the firing zone down to dust motes and use that to calculate trajectory, quite literally, perfectly.
Making rock go fast is the easy part: Fusion engines baby! Even nuclear thermal or fusion bomb engines are viable for a big enough vehicle. Those are all pretty viable for humanity within a few centuries. But I think you vastly underestimate not only the technical challenges, but the fundamental physical limitations of seeing distant objects. You need EXTREMELY precise estimates mass/location of all the meaningfully large objects in the target system. At present we might have uncertainties on the order of like 1% - 10% for the mass of a planet — and that’s really good! You need way smaller than that to accurately predict all the perturbations. You also need different tech depending on the relative orientation of the target star system! You cannot just make telescope bigger. You could try crazy shit like traveling to the solar gravity lens (550 AU for us) to amplify images, but that might not work in all cases and might not be good enough.
Planets are big targets and they move in very predictable ways. So I don't really think it'd be all that hard to wipe out Earth with an RKV.
However - and this ought to be said - there's reason to assume that we might have widespread, self-sustaining space colonies within the next 1000 years. Said colonies would be small enough to maneuver enough to be unpredictable, they could be small enough to be undetectable (or we just build them too slowly for the attackers to detect), and we might even have numerous small spaceships that would certainly be too unpredictable to target from that far away. If you wait for the cataclysms on Earth to subside and the atmosphere to cool you might even be able to recover the planet within only a few more centuries. I mean even if you smash it to pieces, the chunks would coalesce.
So you would still need to send some sort of war fleet, is what I'm saying. That would be substantially more costly, time consuming, and easy to defend against (you need to decelerate, so we will see them coming a long way away)
You vastly underestimate the effect of small initial errors over such a huge distance at high speed. Planets are predictable… but a mass estimate that’s off by a few percent for a Jupiter-mass fatty near your target could seriously frick your trajectory prediction. Earth is fricking SMALL. Get tugged just a bit the wrong way and you miss.
I think it'd be pretty easy to estimate mass for every major body in the solar system down to double digit levels for any interstellar civilization... Even so, you can make adjustments to the trajectory. And, also, those civilizations can probably shoot 1000 at a time.
>But the galactic community never forms because the ones who send signals out to the friendlies are also heard by the not-so-friendlies, who dart them from their own system.
What if they colonize multiple systems before getting detected?
>Detect planet
>Dart them
>Get darted back
>Species that didn't dart first survives because they had multiple worlds and weren't psychopaths
Even the core logic of the dark forest falls apart, have you ever been to a forest? It's loud as shit, birds, squirrels, larger animals make plenty of fricking noise and birds are colossal homosexuals who love to be seen as well as heard. Using the dark forest's moronic logic birds should be extinct for constantly giving away their position. Or lets look at the deep sea where plenty of species are bio luminescent, outright giving away their position in an otherwise stealthy environment.
It's like the whole thing is a shitty inaccurate allegory for nuclear war.
I'm not saying that the dark forest hypothesis is good or even reasonable, I'm saying that "I'm cooooperating" is a moronic rebuttal to it
>I'm saying that "I'm cooooperating" is a moronic rebuttal to it
NTA, but you haven't substantiated why it would be moronic. Cooperation, even between species, arose naturally on Earth, which can reasonably be said to be a more competitive environment than interstellar politics since competition for resources isn't really a factor (space is big as shit).
Dismissing cooperation out of hand is moronic, especially since it can bring benefits you can't get from immediately exterminating all advanced life you come across (Cultural exports, alien poontang).
Your main argument seems to be the assumption that from any transmissions it would be intercepted by a hostile species AND that that species would get around to exterminating the transmitter before ANY friendly entity would hear it or respond.
tangential but being able to trace the dart back to it's source is not a given. could also disguise the weapon as an unlucky stray asteroid with apparent sender.
Even then it is predicated on the possible target not already knowing about you. If you're some homosexuals sitting on you're homeworld and another species has populated thousands, they very well might have already scoped out your homeworld.
Or you can send probes with gibs and an automatic response system which make it clear you have been detected, you can choose to evacuate your planet if you can while waiting to see what happens, but the fact the probe revealed itself rather than just go back to informe where you are for a strike should be enough evidence they aren't interested in a surprise alpha strike to kill you, the probe can also be used to agree on a specific place where you can rendezvous if you want to talk or get on a chat or just be left alone or eveb advise if you may be subjected to an attack from a hostile force.
By creating an scenario of over-commitment you may achieve great things, what is more historically speaking you can compare modern age China eith Japan, where China opted for isolationism and went through the Century of Humilliation whereaa Japan opted to embrace modernity and became so powerful and advanced it required the largest armada in human history and nukes to be halted.*
* and this was in part because the west in turn didn't support well enough the pro-democratic factions within Japan, so again historical experience makes it clear, you stick together or you get into trouble.
>What does /k/ think about the dark forest theory
It hinges on optimistic and unproven assumption that interstellar travels are possible.
Dark Forest theory is outdated.
Modern telescopes can detect bio signatures and future ones can image a planet with it's biosphere.
Any advanced civilization would be able to detect a life bearing planet for millions of years before civilization would appear.Likewise you can detect farming patterns and city lights(if aliens use them), as well as atmospheric traces of industrial activity.
There is no hiding in space.
>Modern telescopes can detect bio signatures and future ones can image a planet with it's biosphere.
I like the spirit but you're misunderstanding something. the problem isn't that we can't see what's on these planets, it's that the planets are hiding among trillions of galaxies hosting billions of stars. it's not within our current technology to scan the tiniest fraction of what's visible to us for these signs for life.
Sure, but for an advanced species it very well might be and the whole point of the dark forest is dealing with unknowns. If you might have been watched all along, outing yourself as a psychopath is the worst possible thing you could do.
>dark forest "theory"
Only a chinsect could come up with such a grimderp cosmology.
Back in the real world, firing any sort of relativistic planet-killer is going to be VERY detectable to any observer perpendicular to the launch vector.
Why would the aliens violently destroy us if they could control us without our knowing instead?
What do they gain from that? Our expertise at making anime waifus?
The biosphere, our historical and evolutionary record, alternate perspectives on math, science, and language
>What do they gain from that?
The only thing at the bottom of a gravity well that might interest any species capable of interstellar travel is biodiversity and debating philosophy with someone from totally different culture.
>Our expertise at making anime waifus?
For a species that has exhausted their own sources of entertainment, absolutely.
Culture is one commodity that can't be easily mined by a space faring civilization.
What if ayys scoure the galaxy in search of art and culture?
Well they would be able to uplift us and guide us into a lopsided alliance in their favor (or integrate us into their empire) against another species.
I would assume that some intelligent life out there might have an even harder time at reproduction than humans do
If we're breaking physics one way, we'll break them the other way. I'm not scared of the doomsday pseudoscience weapon because we'll just block it with our pseudoscience shield, easy.
Except our physics aren't complete, not by a long shot.
That just adds to my argument. Dark forest theory is rooted in our current understanding, it's a flawed scenario based on flawed physics and a flawed model of the universe. If our models were perfectly accurate, sure, spooky relativistic missiles would be bad, but we're jumping to conclusions on the kind of challenges we face. If we and other aliens are able to make these crazy superweapons that go beyond our understanding of technology, we can probably make some defenses that go beyond our understanding of technology.
I'm not arguing for this theory, I'm not that anon, I think this theory is pretty daft.
yes its such a good theory fearmongering that we've been beaming evidence of our existence into space for hundreds of years and this might attract aliens but we haven't detected any in return
I believe we are the progenitor race.
Universe is actually incredibly young and we are at like 0.000001% of its predicted lifespan (before stars start to burn out, heat death of the universe is even further away).
To have life you need heavy elements, like carbon and iron.
To have heavy elements you need first stars to burn out and collapse again to form planets.
Solar system is in the very first generation of systems that could even theoretically bear life
And life on Earth has been impossibly lucky. I could list all the impossibly lucky cosmic coincidences that allowed us to even exist as multicellular organisms, let alone reach space.
That's a widely accepted theory these days, our star is even that of a dying breed that was formed in a more primordial universe.
Red dwarf stars will be the progenitors of life in our universe for trillions of years to come.
It's not a "Theory" it's some chinkoid sci fi author's fanfiction about why there's no aliens.
>Do you think we should prepare in a scenario where aliens aren't exactly friendly?
If there are hostile aliens out there, the first message we get back after they receive ours will be a heavy object traveling at 99.9999999999% the speed of light into the earth.
It's honestly a moot point to even consider countering unless you see them first.
>will be a heavy object traveling at 99.9999999999% the speed of light into the earth.
It will just burn out as comet after hitting solar system space (heat from collision with gas and dust in the solar system space).
The Dark Forrest isn't internally consistant. The main predicate for it is that life must expand exponentially. Dark Forrest meanwhile guarantees that civilizations shit themselves at the prospect of revealing themselves to the point that random exploration is a no-no (while its not stated, the only reason outside of plot-hole why Trisolarans didn't send an invasion fleet to Earth before learing about its status (which would make sense in any other universe - might as well invade the closest solar system if yours is dying) is because they were afraid of stepping on someone elses toes.
So basically, Dark Forrest can't exist, because all civilizations would be in a basic agreement that its fricking insane to use reletivistic weapons, as they would destroy free real estate in the process.
Not to mention that the author openly states that Dark Forrest is the least likely reality of our Universe, but its interesting and scary so a great thing to write about.
Planets doesn't matter in Dark Forest scenario.
If you can travel between stars you need to be space based civilisation and species.
If you are hairless monkey bound to jungles on the planet forget about stars. You would never reach stars. It's pipe dream that monkeys can fly around stars like some nu Columbus with his caravels. Only species for whom space is convinient habitat can fly bettwen stars (some cyborg, transhuman or mechanical civilisation coming out of monkeys civislation and ascending above weakness of monkeys flesh). And species that ascended above jungles doesn't care about jungles anymore.
They have no such plans because we have literally zero intel about aliens.
Well, that may not be entirely true if you believe that UAP stuff. Actually as a matter of fact I saw one of those "silver cigar" UAPs fly over my house the other day. Who knows if it was really an alien spacecraft or what. Either way there's not a lot of ways we can deal with those guys if their technology is as advanced as they say.
In the context of the three body problem it doesn't make sense, the trisolarans and their sophon communication devices practically nullify the supposition of the Dark Forest that the time it takes to communicate and differences between races cannot be overcome, in the context of regular logic and common sense of two species, no matter how different and technologically gapped could spur each other into progressing then alien races aren't potential enemies to be exterminated as they're discovered they're a resource to be exploited to mutual benefit. So even if only half of all aliens would work diplomatically and only half of that are sincere in the effort and wouldn't eventually turn on the group they are discouraged from doing just that because they know that at least half of their "allies" would come to the aid of a species they turn on while none of the species that would potentially turn on the group would come to their aid. That and trade would make both races obscenely wealthy.
The issue with aliens is nobody has any idea what is actually true about them. Aliens could not exist, exist and be equally, less than, or more technologically advanced than us, could just be regular ass wildlife but on another planet, may be friendly or hostile, may not be able to reach us or see us, or may be choosing not to, they could be fighting their own wars against another intelligent race, or they could even just be plants, or they may be incapable of space travel at all, or they may even just not exist. Given how rare life is on other planets they may even just be another planet with humans. The answer has so many levels of unknown that basically any guess is valid. So far all research shows we really might be alone, earth is all there is forever.
This theory is moronic. It's very unlikely that all aliens would come to the same conclusion. Just look at humans, even in just one specieses there is so much diversity of thougt.
Here is the real problem with every alien theory: space is fricking huge, intelligent life is rare, and faster than light travel is 100% impossible.
People theorize that there must be hundreds of thousands of intelligent species just in our galaxy, but they are spread over thousands of lightyears away from each other, so the only way they could interact with each other would be ftl travel.
But if some civilization did develop ftl technology, we would know about it. When humans developed better boats, in 200 years, all large landmasses were reached by explorers, colonists etc. Even if only a couple hundreds of civilizations discovered ftl travel. If that was the case, we would likely already know about them, since they would have reached Earth, or left some of their junk behind, or we picked up their radio signals etc.
Since no such thing happened, it's likely that it's absolutely impossible to surpass the speed of light, and workarounds like bending spacetime are also not feasable.
So, most likely alien civilizations exist and we will never be able to meaningfully interact with them. If we are lucky, we may pick up some space trash or a radio signal.
>But if some civilization did develop ftl technology, we would know about it.
Why would they tell you that they are superior to you, even if they were of pure mind?
I'm approaching it from the law of large numbers.
Out of millions of civilizations that can reach Earth, at least one would either do it in a way that we can observe or will actively seek to interact with us, neither of which happened so far.
Grainy videos of something in the sky do not count.
>Grainy videos of something in the sky do not count
Why not? Not even when the video was taken by military aircraft?
Maybe they don't consider us worth the travel time/resources and those that do just send few drones to monitor us?
Also, that is US government released footage.
The drake equation states more or less that the galaxy should be full of intelligent life, so it should be impossible for aliens to keep us in the dark because there are so many of them that it's inevitable that at least one alien civilization out there really wants to contact us and be our friends and should already possess the capability
The Fermi paradox says "well if the drake equation is true then why hasn't this happened yet"
It's all a matter of speculating about probability and drawing conclusions about some sensible presuppositions
If you're excited about the idea of intelligent alien life out there, the great filter is a problem, whether or not we're past it. If we're already past the great filter and colonizing the galaxy is inevitable, intelligent life only has a few hundred thousand years left to progress past the great filter before we grab every suitable world and make it nearly impossible for any new species to arise (even if we aren't intentionally trying to do this) and a few hundred thousand years is nothing on the time scale that life evolves
If we're not yet past the great filter that at least means the galaxy could be teeming with intelligent life but none of them can interact with each other. Or it could be the dark forest or some variation thereof, someone advanced and powerful is keeping it this way, whether to keep all the resources to themselves or for other reasons (maybe they just think their god likes it this way)
For me, us being early is the most rounded explanation there is with minimal "ifs" and the estimated lifespan of the universe shows this pretty clearly, also red dwarf stars.
If we're first, then we're probably going to be the last too, that's the point of bringing up the fact that a few hundred thousand years is nothing on the evolutionary timescale
Colonizing a planet pretty much kills off any chance of intelligent life arising there and this happens whether or not we try, for the same reason that we won't find another sapient species on earth
Maybe we will figure out a way of terraforming dead planets like Venus or if we are really going into science fantasy, catching wandering planets and anchoring them to a star, that planet being our and ours alone since it would never develop and stuff like that.
Have a little faith in humanity now that we entered into the Information Age and religions are dead.
You think space China is going to give a shit about other life? When the human colonization effort takes off, there's going to be dozens of space Chinas all controlling multiple systems and all possessing the capability to colonize the easiest candidates which are also going to be the places intelligent life has a chance of evolving
I guess I am not that pessimistic yet.
Sad we won't see any of it tho
I feel like there are two different arguments associated with DF theory.
>the risks of revealing ourselves to aliens outweight the benefits at this time so we shouldn't send our signals to space carelessly
Sensible.
>we must immediately attack any alien civilization that reveals itself
moronic.
>so we shouldn't send our signals to space carelessly
>Sensible.
Except Earth has been doing this since billions of years.
The universe is expanding and we'll never be able to explore more than 5 percent even if we get 99 percent the speed of light.
We are alone and trapped in this galaxy with all the Black folk.
>you can only watch
Nice meme, Universe.
Apparently, the rate of expansion is not that high but there is no concensus since measuring shit while only being capable of seeing it from one point in space is really hard and messy.
"If ET" did stop by, most likely he landed in a third world country and will come back in 5k years to see if things improved.
Sad to think 1st contact will be with... someone who must rape.
I hereby give permission to have my brain placed in a generation ship and shot into space.
1st alien's I come across I'll advise to stop by the white woman will frick anything.
If they have interstellar travel and are hostile, there is absolutely nothing you can possibly do to stop them.
The tech gap between a starfaring civilization and ours would make Amazonian hunters trying to defend themselves from a US combined arms offensive look like a near peer conflict.
It seems like something has been lurking in the oceans for a while now, sporadically releasing other probes and drones. I don't think we'd even be able to do anything to them currently. Ayys have long been known to frick around with nuclear devices as a seeming show of force. They seem to be here to tard wrangle and make sure we don't -ack ourselves.
I also agree that if anything figured out we were here and they were hostile... we would have been dead a long time ago.
aliens do not exist
descriptions of encounters and abductions align with medieval demon possession
UFOs do not behave like corporeal craft that obey the laws of physics, prompting alium wackos to propose that they are "extradimensional beings"
its literally just biblical demons, and the best defence is being a baptized chrismated member of the Church, making the sign of the Cross, and saying the Jesus Prayer.
mald
you do realise your gods don't exist, that your religion is that of slaves coping with their existence and why they are being tortured with such fate, your enemy, Lucifer, is nothing but a misinterpretation of the story about a king of Tyre, your holy trinity a translation error in KJV, your king, Christ, nothing but fanfiction by Constantine the Great.
lmao, your aliens are literally just fairy tales and myths couched in scientific terms but without any of the historical or traditional basis to support them.
not gonna bother addressing any your points since they are so laughably uneducated, I hope you enjoy the rest of your day chief.
>any of the historical or traditional basis to support them
What historical or traditional basis does something require to be scientifically supported?
someone who is uncritically religious ridiculing the idea of aliens is so funny
Even funnier is that he runs away almost the moment anyone calls him on it
not every alien is an omnipotent gray humanoid. Even bacteria can be aliens as long as its extraterrestrial. But you don't call bugs demons
If the aliens have FTL they are so far beyond us that literally nothing we could make would matter.
>If the aliens have FTL
FTL doesn't exist, nor will it ever.
Yeah, mate, I have some bad news for you, might want to learn a bit about the double slit experiment and its implications.
If you think the double slit implies some kind of FTL information transfer I think you are the one who needs to do some reading bud
Nta but I haven't heard a convincing argument as to why quantum entangled particles couldn't be used for faster than light communications assuming he was talking about the double slit delayed experiment
>Nta but I haven't heard a convincing argument as to why quantum entangled particles couldn't be used for faster than light communications assuming he was talking about the double slit delayed experiment
Because you still need to have the information on how the particle was measured for you to get the entangled information out from it. It's like you have a USB stick with unbreakable encryption, and the contents of the USB stick are quantum entangled with the contents of another USB stick that generates the encryption key the moment that you put a message on it. Technically the contents of both USB sticks are identical 100% of the time, but you can't encrypt the message within until someone physically transmits the encryption key to you at maximum at light speed.
Like, technically the contents of the USB stick did travel faster than light, but you can't encrypt the message until the encryption key arrives at regular ass speed of light.
decrypt*
There's nothing in your scenario that suggests that there can't be a second set of unencrypted usb sticks that could be used to transmit the key so the person with the encrypted USB could decrypt it
But that's the thing. You can't transfer the encryption key faster than light.
Does anyone else have an almost irrational and innate hatred of aliens? I have no idea whether they exist or not, but the very idea of another species not only being more intelligent than us but also intruding on our solar system enrages me.
And leftism is bad because....?
founded on ugly people tearing down beauty and success while also failing to exist without censorship.
Leftism is what created the modern world and separated Europeans from anyone else.
But I'll leave you to your epic and worthy fight against this windmill to yourself.
Yeah, sry for ruining a good thread.
I think you might be talking about liberalism, or at least let's make a distinction between 18th century liberalism (the reason why the US exists at all) and modern leftism
you oxygen thieves.
Hey homosexual, you still haven't posted gun:
Also why are you on an anonymous imageboard if you're going to be this recognizable anyways?
Yes it is probably real. We would see most intelligent life we encounter out there as something repugnant and not deserving the protections of artificial laws like the Geneva Convention. Think Starship Troopers.
I think about the fact that ants are more successful than humans in many ways
In spite of our efforts to eradicate them, they are endemic everywhere they could possibly exist on this planet, and would almost certainly survive any catastrophe that doesn't manage to annihilate the whole planet
If the dark forest theory is true were already toast as of like the 1950's when we started dumping fricking heaps of intelligent radio signals into space. Anyone with 3 Body Problem level tech has already long since pinged us, watched all of Gunsmoke via quantum entanglement television and there's a massive hyper accelerated warhead hurtling to our sun right now that will detonate it at literally any time between right this second and the entire foreseeable future weather its tomorrow or 10,000 years from now.
The concern is so beyond us there really isn't much you can do but ignore the possibility and continue as normal.
Maybe some of the media they've received will scare them
I think the book already showed that the only answer is MAD. Just be ready to kill all of them if they as much as look in our direction, even if that means our own demise.
It's a plot device that worked ok for two books out of three, and stopped working when the third book got a new author (chosen purely because of Party loyalty) and he focused on details that were never meant to be fleshed out.
If you mean as a real strategy, lol.
Wait, Cixin didn't write the third book?
Is that why it was such a whiplash and ended like a wet fart?
Boy Howdy! This week's been our GAYEST spacebattles raid yet!.
I am an atheist and here is one of my ar-15s
It's your turn to post guns now
Oops, here it is
Post guns + proof magic exists or
Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Sufficiently explained magic is indistinguishable from technology. In your pc there's esoteric sigils transporting invisible energies to bring you messages from idiots across the world, can you honestly say it's NOT magic?
Magic isn't real so that expression doesn't even make sense
And we haven't encountered either one so it's also pointless
NTA
It makes perfect sense.
>unexplainable things are magic
>advanced technology is unexplainable
>therefore magic is magic
I hate that expression so much because it is utterly bereft of any meaning whatsoever
It is a non-statement, something that just is or isn't, but it isn't wrong.
What conclusions can we draw from the statement or what predictions can we make based on the statement given that we agree that magic isn't real?
But magic is real, it is an idea that almost any human understands.
>by definition a thing that is not understandable
>"everyone understands it bro"
The concept, not its mechanics.
The issue is that we already have a more accurate descriptor, "unexplained phenomenon"
Calling a real life phenomenon magic implies that in addition to being unexplained, it must also be at some fundamental level unknowable, and nobody, particularly not a physicist, is going to call something unknowable. The idea that a thing is unknowable is itself unknowable. It's all just sophistry and the term isn't useful.
Think you are overthinking it.
It is just a simple little saying that makes you think how someone from the past would react to our technology.
>Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Sufficiently explained magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Like the other anon said, so far we've encountered neither magic nor technology that can't be understood using some sort of coherent and logical model of the universe.
>In your pc there's esoteric sigils transporting invisible energies to bring you messages from idiots across the world, can you honestly say it's NOT magic?
Not magic, just autism.
CAPTCHA: MAHG00
Sounds like bs. Allen contact would probably be similar to first contact with the Americas
ITT: Schizo bullshit, no weapons
I guess abstract thought might appear as insanity to a lesser mind.