The Dark Forest

Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Decoding the Unknown.

As always, I'm your host Simon, and today we're looking at the Dark Forest Theory.

I like this one.

You might already know what it is.

And when the wrong civilization suddenly decides to reveal itself, well...

Yeah, we're going to know about that.

Today, this is the dark forest hypothesis.

The theory that basically states that our planet and species exist within a big, dark, scary forest.

yeah

okay that wraps up our okay that wraps up our journey with the dog stars but there's still so many more books to read in fact there's like nearly an infinite number of sci-fi books to cover this next one I'm particularly excited about and is one that many of our listeners since we started this show have been begging us to cover and god damn it we're finally gonna do it next up folks here's your homework make sure that you've read the opening prologue of she shouldn't lose the dark forest this is the second book in the three body problem trilogy So I guess I'll make sure you've read Three-Body Problem, the first book also.

That would be good.

Like Dark Forest is going to be hella confusing if you just dive in without knowing what Three-Body Problem is about.

And you're in luck because if you scroll all the way back to the beginning of this podcast, we launched this podcast.

with a six-episode deep dive on the three-body problem.

So check out the first book, listen to our six episodes on it, then you're all caught up, and then you're ready to join us for The Dark Forest, which we will be covering in the coming weeks and months.

And if you're wondering what the Dark Forest reading schedule exactly is and when you have to have your chapters read by, as always, check out the link in the show notes below to our website.

And we'll get back to that one.

There's the dark forest hypothesis, which I love, although I don't think it's true, from Liu Xixin, proposed in the book, The Dark Forest, which is the second of the, I'll just call it the three body problem trilogy, which is worth reading, which says that Nobody knows who out there is friendly and who is not and how powerful everybody else is, which means that everybody out there is a threat, which means that if you hear a signal that a civilization is alive, if you hear something from a star system that suggests there is a civilization there, the incentive is to blow it up.

They could become... very powerful very quickly if they discover some technology that you don't have etc and so everybody's a threat and so given the first strike incentive it means that game theory says you should hide and shoot first yourself and so civilizations live in the galaxy like hunters stalking through a dark forest There's the Ace of Asian hypothesis by Sandberg, Armstrong, and Cherkovich, 2017, suggesting that advanced civilizations actually go dormant, waiting for a colder, computationally cheaper universe to come about.

So over time, as the universe spreads, it gets colder, and it actually becomes cheaper to compute.

it would seem likely that some number of these civilizations, because if it's more than one, it's likely more than two, right? Which means that there's a reasonable number of them out there that have been around for a long time, tens, hundreds of millions of years.

If they're out there, they've definitely sent probes to every star in the galaxy.

I don't think there's compelling reason a hypothesis that says well here's why they wouldn't bother because sending out a von neumann probe is cheap and then it goes and it replicates itself right it's very very resource cheap to send out these probes and i don't think there's a compelling reason not to there is the dark forest hypothesis sure i think that doesn't apply and i'll tell you why in my other branch But if there are interstellar civilizations, at some point, some of them have sent out von Neumann probes.

And those probes at some point will have reached our little star system here out at the edge of the galaxy.

A theory constructed entirely from game theory, the physics of cosmic distance and the cold algebra of survival in a universe where trust is impossible and ignorance is lethal.

It is called the Dark Forest Theory.

and what it says about the meaning of cosmic silence will fundamentally change how you interpret every signal humanity has ever sent into the sky.

The theory did not originate in a scientific journal or a university lecture hall.

It emerged from a work of fiction, which is part of what makes it so easy to dismiss and so difficult to forget.

In 2008, Chinese science fiction author Liu Chixin published a novel called The Dark Forest, the second volume of his Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy.

The book introduced a concept that escaped its fictional context almost immediately and entered serious scientific and philosophical discourse, where it has remained ever since.

The concept was framed as a discovery made by a character named Luo Ji, who derives the logic of cosmic survival from a handful of axioms the way a mathematician might derive theorems from first principles.

Mm-hmm.

The dark forest argues that the same silence works as a survival trick every civilization in the galaxy eventually learns to use.

This theory became famous through a science fiction book called The Dark Forest, written by the Chinese author named Liu Xuxin.

Nailed it.

The book...

Really, really lucky.

So out of those theories, the Great Filter, zoo, dark forest theory, which idea feels most believable to you? What are you zoning in on?

Well, I don't like the dark forest theory because that tells me that we're all looking at everything as a threat.

talk at all about why we shouldn't answer?

The Dark Forest, yeah.

That's the name of the second book in this series.

Oh my

You should send us the one that coined that phrase.

Yeah.

We should explain the dark forest.

So the Fermi paradox is basically any like the universe is infinite and therefore there's got to be life.