papercup posted...
Actually the entire concept of The Dark Forest is absurd. Civilizations on Earth havent destroyed each other.
That's a tricky argument to make, because it ignores the fact that every civilization on Earth was at least
human
, and there was always common ground to be found even in cases where communication was difficult. And it was often more beneficial for any given group to conquer rather than exterminate.
On the other hand, ask a Neanderthal or Homo Floresiensis how their interactions with Homo Sapiens went. I'm sure it worked out well for them.
Basically, take natural human inclinations towards violence, exponentially increase population numbers while reducing the availability of resources, and then vastly increase the distance between worlds to the point where destruction always becomes more efficient than conquest, and the key principles of the Dark Forest premise start to become more justified.
The
real
flaw with the Dark Forest as a concept is that if multiple alien civilizations
do
exist, they almost certainly exist spaced so far apart in both space and time that the odds of two of them ever meeting in any way at any point across the entire span of the existence of the universe are so infinitesimally small as to functionally be zero.
In other words, the universe is like a dark forest the size of the solar system, with an ant somewhere around where Earth is, and another somewhere around Neptune. You don't have to worry about the other ant finding you and killing you. What your "first contact" policy might theoretically be will never matter. Because neither of you will ever know the other exists at all.
papercup posted...
I dont think any civilization that has mastered space flight would find another space faring civilization and come to the conclusion that they should destroy them before they find out about us. No I think they would reach out and try to establish some commonality, they probably would not reach the space age if they werent capable of that.
That's anthropomorphism though. You're assuming that aliens would think like us, or evolve along similar lines. That their logic or cultural expectations would be the same as ours. Or that various separate aspects of their perception of the universe would evolve along similar lines at similar paces to ours.
It's entirely possible a given alien civilization could vastly outpace us in certain technological understanding while remaining incredibly backward in other ways. There's nothing
inherent
in the concept of technology or development of advanced civilizations that implies they would ever be 100% open to friendly contact or even attempt communication. Even assuming we're sapient at all - there's always the possibility a race different enough from ours might find us, assume we're some sort of destructive hive race that is capable of building things but which isn't particularly intelligent, and just treat us like animals (in much the same way humans have always treated anything that isn't "us").
You're also ignoring how, for most of human history, our instinctive response to encountering aliens would have been "Fuck, it's a monster! Kill it!" The idea of "Hey, maybe we should make friends with it" (or "Let's fuck it") is relatively new, culturally speaking. Even with humans it wouldn't have been impossible for us to reach the point of space exploration yet still maintain a "Manifest Destiny" sort of mentality and look to treat any aliens we met much the same way we treated the natives in The Americas when we found them (or the way those natives themselves treated the megafauna they encountered when they first migrated there - which is why there really isn't any megafauna there anymore). Once you factor in aliens with
radically
different mindsets and ways of perceiving and interacting with the world around them, it's nearly impossible to say for sure how they would react to any given "first contact", whether peaceful or hostile.
It's also theoretically possible that any given aliens would be
SO
"alien" any form of communication would be effectively impossible, as the fundamental assumptions of how each race thinks would be incomprehensible to the other. Which is when you start to get into the common trope of simple misunderstandings leading to genocidal wars (
see also, the plot of Ender's Game
).
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