this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
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The Dark Forest Hypothesis. A very compelling answer to the Fermi paradox: If the universe is this vast and life surely must have developed over and over all around us, how come we never found anyone?
If two civilizations ever met, chances are incredibly slim that they were comparably or even similarly developed at this exact moment in time. Think about a modern army traveling back in time 400 years and fighting a group of swordmen with horses; the medieval people would be so overwhelmed it would barely classify as a fight, and that's just with a few hundred years of difference in technological progress. The random difference between species from different planets and systems would be far, far greater. So if two of them would meet, one of them would very likely be to the other as a god to an ant.
The universe might be brimming with life, but everyone who gets this far must be aware that half of them could wipe you out like ants, the other half could be as indomitable as a god. Cue the dark forest metaphor: There's prey and there's predators. We don't know which one we are in each instance, or how many of each are out there. But how could a first contact protocoll look like in such a competetive (and very likely deadly unfair) environment?
In the dark forest only two types of species can survive: Those that attack. And those who hide.
I never understood why Fermi should be a paradox.
Space is mind-bogglingly big. Insanely huge. And almost everything is empty. Primitive life (bacteria, fungus,...) might evolve on every other planet, but even mammal like life is probably not that common. Maybe 1 in 10k solar systems has them?
And now my sad hypothesis: FTL drives are simply not possible.
Also, did I mention space is huge? Sending radio signals to a planet 10k ly away is very non trivial. Unless they point a huge dish exactly at us and we point a huce dish exactly to them, we won't hear each other.
The idea that extraterrestials will watch our TV in 100k years is absurd. (Sorry Lrrrr)
Well obviously our reality isn't actually paradoxical. We call it that way because it seems like our estimates and conclusions don't fit our observed reality:
Based on mathematical estimations (e.g. the Drake equation) it's pretty unlikely that we're the only intelligent species in our galaxy. So where is everyone?
Every answer to that question tries to resolve the seeming paradox. And your answer specifically isn't unheard of either, it's called the economic explanation. Throwing satellites out is obviously possible, we've done it and Voyager 1 will reach another solar system in roughly 30,000 years. So it's technically possible, just very uneconomic.