There is nothing I enjoy more than pondering on life on other worlds. I have been fascinated by alien life ever since I grew up watching E.T. And Star Wars as a kid. And I like many dream of joining an Interstellar Alliance and seeing the varieties of alien life out there. So it should come as no surprise that one of my most recent endeavors is proving that The Dark Forest Theory doesn’t work.
The Dark Forest Hypothesis in a Nutshell
The dark forest hypothesis is the idea that many alien civilizations exist throughout the universe, but are both silent and paranoid. In this framing, it is presumed that any space-faring civilization would view any other intelligent life as an inevitable threat, and thus destroy any nascent life which makes its presence known. As a result, the electromagnetic spectrum would be relatively silent, without evidence of any intelligent alien life, as in a "dark forest"...filled with "armed hunter(s) stalking through the trees like a ghost". The hypothesis was described by astronomer and author David Brin in his 1983 summary of the arguments for and against the Fermi paradox, for which this hypothesis is one potential solution. (Source)
Kurzgesagt made a video that deftly explains The Dark Forest Hypothesis.
For those of you more familiar with the topic let’s begin. As it stands their are two major problems that poke massive holes in the theory.
Problem I: You Can Run, But You Can’t Hide
Now a lot of the Dark Forest Theory depends on the assumption that the universe is a dark place where eldritch predators can lay in ambush and wait for the perfect moment to strike. But there is a simple rule that everyone I’ve had this debate with seems to either not understand or just outright ignore. There is NO stealth in space. Any technological species can make a telescope, take a look and say, “Oh look, Jupiter has four moons. What’s that big black rectangle doing there?” Now everybody keeps pointing out the radio signals we are blasting into the eternal night are letting everyone know where we are, like a baby crying out attracting the predators lurking in the shadows. But here’s the thing, any predator any good at hunting doesn’t need the baby to cry to know it’s there. They can hear the baby breathing.
See, about a billion years ago, this brand new life form called Cyanobacteria first evolved and became Earths first photosynthesizers. They utilized the light of the sun for energy, and produced a fascinating byproduct that would prove useful in the further development of Earths biosphere. Oxygen. Now because of how sunlight interacts with various gases and molecules on our planet, anyone with a telescope can see that we have an atmosphere that can only be produced by a thriving biosphere. And because of the funny way light lag works, anyone with a big enough telescope within 1 billion light years can look towards our planet and go, “hmm, plentiful water, high concentration of oxygen, large quantities of organic compounds, all right we have a planet with a functioning biosphere. Singer, launch the strike, leave no survivors, I’m going on a coffee break.” So even if all our world leaders decided no more radio signals, it’s already too late, because our own planet has been shouting, “Biosphere! Living thriving biosphere, right here! Come quick and wipe it out before it develops space travel!” Into the void for a billion years before we even started banging rocks together.
Now this sounds like bad news and I suppose in this context, it is. But the good news is that anyone advanced enough to build weapons that can wipe out civilizations with the push of a button, face the exact same problem. In fact, you can say they might have it worse then we do, since they can’t hide all the industrialization of their solar system needed to support their society and their interstellar war effort.
And even if you are sufficiently advanced to completely hide from someone less technologically savvy than you, anyone above your weight class will still be able to find you. The Amun-Ra class stealth frigate is a technological marvel of stealth tech, but I sincerely doubt that it could hide from the sensors of the USS Enterprise.
Now this leads nicely into the next point.
Problem II: We’re Still Here
As I said, Earth has been broadcasting its life-bearing status into the void for a billion years. That means any civilization in the Laniakea Supercluster, all 150,000 GALAXIES, have had plenty of time to check Earth out, and if the mood strikes them, blow it up. And yet, our planet hasn’t been wiped clean of life, torn apart and stripped of everything worthwhile. We are still here having this debate. And so we can confidently say that there is no one within a billion light years participating in the Dark Forest Theory.
Now this sounds fairly conclusive, but recently I was lost in thought and found something that might end the whole debate once and for all. Suicide Pact Technology.
I was going through my audible recently and I remembered a rather poignant passage in the Novel Year Zero that I think sums up this thought experiment perfectly.
“Most society’s destroy themselves with nuclear, biological or nanoweapons long before achieving Refined status. And when this happens, Refined observers do nothing to stop the annihilation. This may sound heartless but it’s actually a prudent form of self-defense-since any society that’s violent and stupid enough to self destruct on H-bombs might easily destroy the entire universe if it survives long enough to invent something with real firepower.” - Year Zero by Rob Reid, Chapter Zero.
Now while Year Zero is meant as a farcical comedy on humans making the best music in the universe, they do bring up a pretty valid point. The Dark Forest theory requires EVERY sentient species to be xenophobic, expansionistic and fanatically dedicated to the elimination of any threat or competition. Except any species that would see the use of WMDs as the only logical conclusion, would naturally wipe themselves out long before they could leave their homeworld or develop the tech necessary to destroy civilizations beyond their Star systems. This isn’t even a new argument, Carl Sagan made the exact same arguments when fears of Nuclear War were at their height. And as for us blowing ourselves up there were plenty of close calls, like a bear tripping the wrong alarm, a flock of geese, a malfunctioning Soviet early warning system showing a full blown attack, a US B-52 bomber breaking in half and dropping two armed nukes over North Carolina,(I’m not kidding, Goldsboro Incident, 1961) and despite all of that, we reframed from pushing the big red button and ending our species. But this restraint is not looked on as the virtue it is in the Dark Forest Theory. So we are faced with a logical problem. The exact thought process necessary for the Dark Forest Theory to work, is also the thought process telling you to push the big red button to blow your own planet straight to hell.
So is the nature of Suicide Pact Technology and Overly Aggressive Species tendency to destroy themselves the final nail in the coffin for the Dark Forest Theory?
Notes: there might be a debate on weather or not nuclear power or weapons count as a Suicide Pact Technology, but I hope that my arguments here will grant me an “eh, close enough” in this case.