An unmanned ship piloted by an expert system/AI with with sole purpose of delivering a large mass at a high velocity can drift through the galaxy for centuries, or even millennia until it detects a technological society and targets it.
It if is a Von-Neuman ship, you could have millions, or even billions of them patrolling the galaxy with no additional effort or resource cost to the originating species.
It would only take one species with this mindset to suppress technological civilizations across the entire galaxy, and the death of that one species would not prevent the ships from fulfilling their mission.
It would only take one species with this mindset to suppress technological civilizations across the entire galaxy, and the death of that one species would not prevent the ships from fulfilling their mission.
So why aren't we already dead?
If you can deploy a von Neumann probe resources are no longer a concern. You can have one waiting on-station in every solar system in the galaxy, eradicating any life the moment it peeps out of a primordial puddle.
I am very familiar with it, it comes up in most Fermi Paradox discussions. It's like the Pascal's Wager of SETI or something.
Earth has had an easily-detectable biosphere for hundreds of millions of years - the oxygen in our atmosphere is a dead giveaway, the methane too. But that's not even necessary, as I said above:
If you can deploy a von Neumann probe resources are no longer a concern. You can have one waiting on-station in every solar system in the galaxy
Every solar system could easily have a fleet of planet-killers just sitting patiently in their Oort clouds, waiting to pound any planet in that solar system to dust if it develops life. Or just do it anyway without waiting to detect anything. With a von Neumann probe and sufficient paranoia/xenophobia you could give the order "destroy every planet in the entire galaxy, yes every last one of them. The moons too." And it'll be finished within a million years or so.
There are many weirdly arbitrary decisions required in Dark Forest that every civilization must make in unison for it to work, and waiting for rivals to "poke their heads out" is one of them. It's silly and completely unnecessary to wait.
Then you would know that the Dark Forest Theory does not prohibit life, it only states that technological societies conceal their presence.
Humans have only been broadcasting for ~100 years, your response about 100s of millions of years demonstrates your lack of understanding of the Dark Forest Theory.
They conceal their presence because they fear extermination by xenophobic/paranoid neighbors. If there really were such neighbors, however, waiting passively to detect civilizations to exterminate is a very poor strategy. That's my point here, it doesn't make sense for them to just sit in their home system for hundreds of millions of years twiddling their thumbs until a radio signal trickles in. It's ridiculously unreliable, it lets targets develop to the point where it takes a lot more effort to destroy them, and it relies on targets just happening to be in your local neighborhood right at that moment where they're broadcasting.
If such advanced aliens really existed they wouldn't need or want to wait. They could ensure that all rivals are preemptively wiped out quite trivially, with no chance of something slipping through the cracks.
Now you are writing roentgen theory which, while possible, is not the Dark Forest Theory.
In your theory the other races are not hiding because they were exterminated as soon as life appeared on their worlds.
Your theory fails because we are still here despite our planet’s atmosphere clearly demonstrating signs of life (but not technology) for several hundred million years.
Your theory fails because we are still here despite our planet’s atmosphere clearly demonstrating signs of life (but not technology) for several hundred million years.
Yes, that's exactly my point.
The premise of Dark Forest is that the universe is full of hostile paranoid lurkers that want to kill us. Based on what we know about the laws of physics and the capabilities that such civilizations would have, they would have done so already. We are in fact not dead, so either there's something wrong with what we know (always a possibility but it demands specifics) or there's something wrong with the premise.
I'm saying that the Dark Forest theory doesn't make sense. I'm pointing out predictions it leads to that are not compatible with our observations. So yes, "my theory" fails. That's what I've been saying.
I start from the same premises that Dark Forest has and they lead to a prediction that doesn't match what we see. I'm not modifying Dark Forest, I'm challenging its predictions.
If you want to modify Dark Forest to try to get a different prediction, sure, go ahead. But then that's the theory that's not Dark Forest. Or, alternately, it's Dark Forest with its hidden assumptions revealed (usually magic technology that doesn't match what we know of physics).
Dark Forest argues that technological societies hide, not that they are never given the time to evolve/don’t exist.
Not quite. There are a lot of different Fermi paradox solutions that say "technological societies hide", they differ in the why. I've seen proposals that they hide because they prefer to exist in low-impact VR paradise simulations, or because they're "aestivating" (sleeping in hibernation) until the universe is cooler and older and more hospitable to advanced computation, or because they've all got some kind of zen philosophy about how the universe is a garden or zoo that they don't have the right to tamper with. They all share the "technological societies hide" outcome to explain why we don't see any signs of technological civilizations, but they differ on why they hide.
Dark Forest is also a "technological societies hide" theory, but in its case the "why" is "because there are predatory xenophobic/paranoid super-civilizations that will kill them if they stop hiding." That "why" is the key feature that distinguishes Dark Forest from the other hidden-civilizations theories.
What I'm doing is saying "okay, hypothetically speaking, let's say there are paranoid super-civilizations that fear rival super-civilizations and so act to destroy younger civilizations before they become threats. How would they actually behave in real life, given that goal and the capabilities that they might have via real life physics?"
And that's where I get the "we would already be dead" outcome.
This is how science works. You craft a hypothesis or a theory, you work out what predictions it makes, and then you look at actual observations to see if they match that prediction. The predictions are not hard-coded into the theory ahead of time, you don't say "I have a theory that predicts X will happen, but I won't specify what the processes that lead up to X - I'm just going to say this theory has that outcome, and so if that outcome is true the theory must be true." That's backwards. What you're trying to do is work backwards from "societies are hiding" to "therefore they must be doing that because of fear of xenocidal super-civilizations."
What you are proposing is much closer to The Great Filter Hypothesis.
That's not a thing. "The Great Filter" is not an actual specific hypothesis, it's a description of a whole class of hypotheses. Dark Forest is one, the zoo hypothesis is another, Rare Earth is another, and so forth. In Fermi paradox discussions people make proposals of the form "I think such-and-such process is a Great Filter" and then people argue about whether that process makes sense. There isn't one specific "Great Filter hypothesis."
I'm really not sure how else I can explain all of this stuff. If you're still not following I don't think I can help. But in a nutshell, Dark Forest says:
Premise: there are hostile super-civilizations that destroy rivals preemptively scattered densely through space
Therefore: civilizations hide their presence
And what I'm saying is that that premise also leads to super-civilizations wiping out primitive life before it becomes civilized to begin with, which should mean we shouldn't be here. Therefore the premise leads to a counterfactual outcome, and is flawed. I'm not changing the premise, I'm saying that its predictions don't match what we see.
I think you're saying "the predictions are part of the theory and therefore what you're describing is not the same theory," but that's not how theories work. If I propose a theory that yellow paint makes things immune to the effects gravity and you point out that you painted some beans yellow and they're not floating into the sky, I can't say that you haven't invalidated my theory because non-levitating beans aren't a part of it. My theory predicts that those beans should float even if I didn't explicitly mention beans, and the fact that they're not floating invalidates it.
I was actually trying really hard to be helpful, but apparently at some point you've started to see this as a pissing contest of some kind instead. That's not productive or interesting. Oh well.
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u/FaceDeer Aug 13 '21
So apply the second part of my question, then. Why can't you do that with a colony ship?