this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
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Here's a list of tons of leftist movies.
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Don't worry, Dark Forest Theory is probably total bullshit since it just assumes alien civilizations will be monolithic in nature or coordinated enough to have a singular response to the presence of any rival civilization
But if it is true we're literally already dead since we've been blasting radio waves into the aether for over a century
That's the thing that annoys me most whenever I talk to someone who can't shut the fuck about the dark forest and wants to frantically shut down all attempts to communicate with possible aliens.
And it's not even just the radio waves. Apparently they become too diffuse and garbled to detect easily after a few hundred light years anyway. The real problem is the fact that any alien civilization with both the will and resources to take us out from thousands to millions of light years away would have already known about life on Earth for the past billion years. It's no secret. Whenever the Earth passes in front of the Sun, anyone within that line of sight observing with a sufficiently powerful telescope will clearly see spectroscopic evidence of both methane and oxygen in the atmosphere. That sort of atmosphere just doesn't exist naturally in equilibrium without life constantly replenishing it. It's what astronomers call a bio-signature. So these potential omnicidal aliens have had more than enough time to throw a rock at Earth at 99% the speed of light, and that rock has had plenty of time to get here.
Maybe they only want to kill technological civilizations? Well, in that case they'd be monitoring planets known to support life, waiting for something they consider a threat to evolve. Clearly Earth would have been one of those planets on their watch list for a very long time, and by now their spectroscopy data is showing them all of the weird shit we're extremely suddenly dumping into the atmosphere, an obvious techno-signature.
So hiding from them is very clearly not a productive use of our resources. If the dark forest really is the solution to the Fermi paradox, then we have a near light speed rock with our name on it no matter what we do or don't do. Stealth does not exist in space. So we might as well just try to be friendly and open to any other alien civilizations that might be out there.
I've gone through like three different periods of trying to understand why everyone is so jazzed with tbp and my opinion of the story drops each time i try to figure it out. I have now arrived at the conclusion that it's science fiction for people who lurk on next door and call the cops on kids wearing hoodies.
No, it assumes that at least one in many has a destructive response. I think the assumption is that most will hide, but the risk of a single civilisation being aggressive forces everyone to assume that anyone they meet is aggressive.
If you start shooting brown dwarfs at your neighbors everyone is going to gang up on you and you're going to have a bad time. The idea that communication between critters that have all built rocket ships is so impossible that we'd never be able to communicate strikes me as more of a "STEM people don't read" problem, I odn't think Anthropologists or sociologists or linguists would ever have come up with this idea.
Dark Forest doesn't say communication is impossible, it says communication is dangerous. Dark Forest doesn't imply that every civilization is evil and genocidal, just that the risk of exposing yourself to a potentially dangerous civilization is too great when the cost is existential.
Anthropologists and sociologists and linguists study humans on earth, not unknowable aliens in the vastness of space, I don't see how their expertise is relevant. Again, Dark Forest rests heavily on (a) existential threats, and (b) acting effectively blind. These aren't situations we face often or really ever in human history.
Uh Dark Forest Theory makes no assumption on coordination between alien species? At least the one in the book. In fact it argues the opposite, no coordination happens at all, civilizations just act the way they do because they have no other choice
Not between rival alien civs, within them. The most implausible bit is the one where there's no factions among the aliens who all agree to immediately kill everyone they detect just to be safe, and are capable of the global coordination needed to do just that
In the book there are factions within the Trisolarans; pacifists warn Ye not to reply buy she does anyways which allows the imperialist Trisolarans to invade.