The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
onezero.medium.com
onezero.medium.com
What makes Cixin's dark forest so awful is that new intelligent species are going out into a Universe with other species millions of years more advanced than they are, species that can easily exterminate entire solar systems - or worse (the weapons in Cixin's dark forest make the Death Star look like a drawing of a BB gun). Is that really what we have here, on the internet? When we find our autonomous zones (to steal an anarchist phrase), do Google and Facebook actively exterminate them? No. Not yet, anyway.
I think other analogies might be in order for the very real phenomenon of retreating from the corporate internet.
Before: good opsec, ad blockers, minimal social media under my own name, anonymous and pseudonymous accounts, etc.
Now:
Between 5 and 10 spam, scam or phishing voice calls every day to mobile phone, home phone and office phone.
So now I never answer any phone unless I'm expecting your call and all ringers are always off.
Political operatives of every persuasion are knocking on my door at home several times a week, and there's not even an election on right now. They all have mobile apps, logging every interaction in a central database.
So now I don't answer my own door at home.
Used to enjoy discussing current events, economics, geopolitics, tech policy with family and work friends. We usually disagreed, but it was fun to talk and often I learned a new perspective.
But now these discussions are amped up to 11, emotionally charged in every direction, so these conversations only happen with intimate friends now.
I'm either living in a dark forest or I'm a turtle withdrawing into its shell.
Meanwhile, others in my neighborhood are emerging from their shells, flying confederate flags and more obscure but hateful symbols, and advocating neighborhood militias on Nextdoor.
Violence exists on the internet.
Recent example: at least one politician being milkshaked after the first incident. And even though I find fascist views abhorrent, I can see the fear they feel about the possibility of being clocked post-Spencer as a sort of violence.
Oddly, these same people would reject the notion of violence as something beyond immediate and physical...
And then LGBTQ+ people experience economic violence all the time. There are no protections in most places, and plenty of people are happy to fire them/kick them out of apartments based entirely on stereotypes.
Because you say so? That exact phrase appears to be in common usage globally. Given that, who's actually out of step with reality here?
The word discrimination describes what an discriminator does. Violence usually applied to what a victim experiences. Surely we can imagine a scenario where someone experiences violence without discrimination occuring.
here is the dictionary definition of violence for your reference.
Thank you for helping my argument, but we can all check the dictionary on our own time.
"It refers to a form of violence wherein some social structure or social institution may harm people by preventing them from meeting their basic needs. Institutionalized adultism, ageism, classism, elitism, ethnocentrism, nationalism, speciesism, racism, and sexism are some examples of structural violence as proposed by Galtung.
According to Galtung, rather than conveying a physical image, structural violence is an "avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs"."
These kinds of conversations would be less touchy if people defined their terms in advance so everyone is on the same page. It's okay though. It's all cleared up now.
What you are referring to here has been, in the past, considered a call to violence (or perhaps an implied call to violence). People, rightly or wrongly, object to the conflation of speech and violence.
I happen to think the normalization of speech as violence is dangerous doublespeak. What is gained by classifying speech as violence rather than simply vilifying the type of speech without the violence label? What is lost?
Gained: the ability to identify how words and actions can eventually lead to physical (or other kinds of) violence rather than be surprised when it happens. Maybe it could even lead to intervention!
Lost: awe and mystery at how physical violence happens? I'm at a loss. Having language and concepts to understand stuff is pretty handy.
>> "What you are referring to here has been, in the past, considered a call to violence (or perhaps an implied call to violence)."
Call to violence is more direct. "Go murder that asshole!" The many faces of non-physical violence are rarely so direct.
Economic violence, for example, can set the conditions for physical violence. If prejudice as manifested through poverty (economic violence) makes it impossible for someone to live a good life, they may go out and rob someone or join a gang. They're more vulnerable to radicalization in general.
In my experience, people who get hung up on the "violence" part don't really care what you call it. They reject the idea of words mattering wholesale. Using gay as an insult, calling black people thugs, and the many worse kinds of awful never go anywhere, so it doesn't matter to them. To them, there's no point in caring in the first place.
You don't even get to discussing what to call harmful words and systems with them because they don't see that words can lead to harm and they reject the notion of human systems. We might as well call it violence and be done with it. You weren't going to find a palatable alternative.
It's a philosophical difference between "...and words can never hurt me" and "...words precede the sticks and stones." The former is fun to say before a bully kicks your ass. The latter is more reasonable once you've seen what words can do.
Or more simply: If words don't matter, who cares if I call non-physical violence violence? They're just words...
In fact there's no area where people are trying to equate words with the actions they might lead to. People oppose words on the grounds of what they might lead to, but that's very different from saying the words are what they might lead to.
But why, then, do some people hold onto this absurdity tooth and nail, refusing to give it up even when it's clearly causing miscommunication? It gives some benefit to them.
The benefit is: People with weak ideas recognize that they won't win a neutral exchange of ideas. So they want to avoid the frame where the interaction is just a neutral exchange of ideas. Instead, they try to change the contest to something they can win - a violent power struggle.
They want a contest of power: Who can stigmatize, harass, and physically intimidate the other side into submission?
Because they sense they can win a contest of power, but they might not win a neutral exchange of ideas. There's nothing else to it - it's pure bad-faith power games straight out of 1920's Russia.
Of course, it's poisonous to civilization, since it weakens the discussion norms we need to find truth and good paths forward.
Interesting take. We'll get back to this in a moment.
> They want a contest of power: Who can stigmatize, harass, and physically intimidate the other side into submission?
And yet weirdly you're part of a group hear arguing that we should not call this violence? If this isn't violence, then why shouldn't I stigmatize you? What do you care? So long as no punch is thrown, you've been arguing no foul has been committed!
If speech, association and the implication of violence are so trivial that it cannot constitute violence, then why are you arguing that you don't want it used against you?
Perhaps we should ask our resident 13-dimensional chess player who saw this question coming, jlawson.
> But why, then, do some people hold onto this absurdity tooth and nail, refusing to give it up even when it's clearly causing miscommunication? It gives some benefit to them.
> They want a contest of power: Who can stigmatize, harass, and physically intimidate the other side into submission?
And that's why you're simultaneously arguing that speech cannot be violence but also arguing that it is a violence used against you and thus granting you a moral right to invoke those very same mechanics.
No matter how many times you elide the modifiers before the word violence (before, "a call to", now "movitated by a desire for" or some variant thereof), jlawson's point remains.
Maybe we could get together and talk about it over a nice frosty milkshake?
Speaking of talking it out, I'm curious how you found this thread. Given it's age and moderation status I doubt it's organically.
Add? Put them back where you took them from, rather. You can claim that until the cows come home and it will still be true that jlawson hasn't accused you of violence.
> Maybe we could get together and talk about it over a nice frosty milkshake?
Cute, but no deal.
> Speaking of talking it out, I'm curious how you found this thread. Given it's age and moderation status I doubt it's organically.
The article was on the front page when I clicked it. You last comment was about three hours old when I commented.
You seem to have the idea that any act/speech which isn't literally violence must thus be trivial/acceptable/unobjectionable.
Do I even need to explain why this is wrong? Obviously there are many acts which are unacceptable and objectionable, which are not violent. E.g. If you called my boss and made up lies about me being a pedophile to try to get me fired.
I can kind of sense that you're trapped in your own definitional games here. Since you've so long equated "any objectionable thing" with "violence", you are now having trouble following a text that depends on the difference. By erasing these language distinctions, you've actually been conditioned to be unable to follow the reasoning that would make you understand why they're wrong. I just have to ask you to step back for a moment, consider my example above about the pedophilia lies, and try to remember the distinctions that you were surely once familiar with. Violence is an objectionable thing; not every objectionable thing is violence.
I haven't put that forth, but thank you for your concern. What I'm noting is that you're essentially decrying the labeling of some types of speech-as-violence as a tactic that according to you is being espoused by people to somehow cover the idea that they want to use speech tactics against you.
You claim this is to their benefit, but that is absurd on it's face. Why would folks ostensibly wanting to use the sharper sides of self-expression go and label their own actions as violence?
What conclusions are we supposed to draw from such an obviously wrong point?
> I can kind of sense that you're trapped in your own definitional games here. Since you've so long equated "any objectionable thing" with "violence"
Quite the opposite. I'm willing to be very flexible and contextual with the application of words because that's what words are. You might want to have this conversation with other folks in the thread suggesting with dictionary-based semantic rigidity.
> consider my example above about the pedophilia lies,
I ask you to step back and ask yourself if you're really going to commit to the general conversation here. Because the point you're jumping into is a conversation about if forms of violence besides a fist and a gun exist, with your opinion arising from within a group who denies that.
I'll give you a counter example: is the act of lawmakers to criminalize all abortion in Alabama despite the will of their electorate is clearly an act of speech. It is an act that radically reduces the freedoms and rights of it's citizens and provokes other parties into action (such as law enforcement) which may include physical violence. It seems strange to suggest that a declaration stripping you of many of your rights and property is not a violent act simply because the lawmaker themselves is a flaccid old man.
Laws are speech, and in some cultures that speech holds enormous power. Under your refusal to recognize causality, I could set up a bomb to explode outside your car when the door opens and then claim I didn't open the door. If I undertake actions that are certain to lead to physical harm towards another how am I not in some way morally responsible? How is the speech act itself not part of the violence?
It seems to me like the one hoping to split definitions to hair-fine levels via semantic games here is you.
But perhaps we'd find a more fruitful conversation in person. Perhaps we could meet for milkshakes some time and talk it out?
Nobody labels their own actions as violence. They label others' actions as violence, and either don't notice or hope to avoid the logical conclusion. People are not good at consistency.
People label others' words as violence in order to justify their own actual violence in return. E.g.:
"That speaker is racist and his words are violence, so we're justified in forcing open the doors and screaming and stomping to stop the speech."
>It seems strange to suggest that a declaration stripping you of many of your rights and property is not a violent act simply because the lawmaker themselves is a flaccid old man.
It really doesn't, any more than a restaurant recommendation is not an act of eating. Words have meanings.
A law to reduce pollution standards is not climate change, it is a law that will cause climate change. A law to increase government spending isn't a budget deficit, it's a law that will cause a budget deficit.
>I could set up a bomb to explode outside your car when the door opens and then claim I didn't open the door. If I undertake actions that are certain to lead to physical harm towards another how am I not in some way morally responsible?
You are morally responsible, because you're responsible for the outcomes of your acts.
This is so bizarrely simple, and I know you understand it, because you can't function in the world if you literally don't understand the difference between a cause and an outcome.
An act that leads to a result is not the same as that result. The initial act makes the actor responsible for the result. It doesn't mean that the initial act _is_ the result. This is a simple distinction present in all human languages for a reason.
E.g. If I recommend you eat at a restaurant, and you do, and enjoy it, I get some credit for that enjoyment, even though I didn't eat at the restaurant, I caused you to do it.
This is not a hair-fine semantic game, it's basic language understood by children.
Your final veiled threat is childish.
Ultimately, if I enable violence by sharing information then surely I have some blame in the equation. For example, if I listed off your address and your posts and offered a bounty of one million dollars for your ears?Under your stated view it'd be "dangerous doublespeak" to suggest this act is dangerous or violent.
OP clearly sees a threat of violence as a threat of violence. OP is calling it a "call to violence" but that's hardly grounds for a substantive argument about the bounds of the concept of violence.
> Under your stated view it'd be "dangerous doublespeak" to suggest this act is dangerous or violent.
Note that you inserted the branch "dangerous or" with no explanation, increasing the likelihood of an irrelevant counterargument.
Then why is the OP drawing the line there? I'm not making these examples up to be cute. I'm pushing within the boundaries they've drawn to point out how radical the position as stated is.
> Note that you inserted the branch "dangerous or" with no explanation, increasing the likelihood of an irrelevant counterargument.
Given the fact that it didn't substantially change or anchor any of my arguments, what does it matter. Oh, unless... Perhaps ... Speech can effect people and maybe constitutes action upon them? Is that what your suggesting? Huh.
It doesn't really matter though, "violence" does not need to be physical as per the dictionary definition. nor in common usage is it uncommon to talk about violence in many senses.
You're free to define it as you like, but this is not what most people mean when they say, "violence" so I'm afraid a lot of miscommunication is in your Future if you choose to persist.
There is a reason that dictionary define it the way it is, its because enough people use it that way.
> There is a reason that dictionary define it the way it is, its because enough people use it that way.
I just want to press down firmly on this since I doubt you've thought it through. If you held to this standard of words having meaning, then you'd believe that language can't evolve. The Dictionary reflects usage so broadly common it ought to be universally recognized. It's a lagging indicator.
So if folks can't use words in recognizable senses, They're just universally better.what criterion do dictionaries use to recognize "enough people use it that way?"
Ultimately, "The dictionary says otherwise" is a circular argument. It's like witnessing a breaking news event and saying, "Well the newspaper didn't say so, so it isn't true!" Of course they haven't written about it... yet. The recognition for a dictionary is in response to the meaning that folks are already, not the source. The dictionary derives its authority from our usage.
Therefore, if millions of people use the term "economic violence" then it is a valid use of that term, even if you do find it challenging. It's a waste of everyone's time to argue otherwise, because the fact that you recognized what the term meant and therefore could object was evidence itself that it exists.
What's more, you and are the ones derailing MY point about harassment online. So if you care about derailing a conversation I started with Jerf, please don't simply restate what we've already been over.
There still million of people that use the term violence like mine, it is still a valid use, even if you do find it challenging.
And like them, you're the one seeking to erase senses from the dictionary by pretending they aren't there to begin with.
And like them, you're the one who contribute the support to replace the current definition.
That the internet is their delivery medium is not particularly important to the outcome, but it is the subject of the conversation here.
When there was no central big service, there was no ground for these massive centralized pushes to exist. Bad stuff happened, but bad stuff happens in real life, too; as long as the scales are roughly comparable I'm not inclined to go too ballistic trading freedom for safety. The risk of all those things exists today in such an outsized way because it benefits Facebook and Twitter to centralize everything.
But even there we see coordinated acts of harassment on folks cross instance. Ironically many of these are coordinated via a centralized service like Gab or Reddit.
I am not sure that it makes sense to mandate from a government standpoint that organizing harassment is violence. It's difficult to imagine a world where this is not abused to quash any substantial reformist movement. But I do think from the standpoint of individuals and community norms it is not going too "ballistic" to recognize them as such.
Google Tools, Social Networks like FB and Tinder are like Odysseus' Sirens - they lure the sailors in with some promises for free to shipwreck them and drive them into addiction so they control the mindset of people (your being influences your state of mind and vice versa).
And then there is really bad alien predators who have set up a shitload of nets to get you when you are not carefully enough. When they have you you are probed (think of the Borg) and if you're a "valuable target", whatever the goals of this predator are, you'll be assimilated (taken into a bot net), milked like a cow (assets/data is stolen) or abused and thrown away (they use you to get to a higher valued target).
A vein almost explodes in my forehead everytime someone points to Cixin Liu as the originator of DFT.
The idea's been around since the early to mid-80s, and people could at least do diligence to properly cite.
It's almost as insulting as if I said "When George Lucas started science fiction films with Star Wars..."
At minimum, Revelation Space features it as a major plot-point and was published in 2000, significantly predating Dark Forest.
It's been one possible answer for as long as sci-fi has debated the Drake equation and Fermi paradox. Arguably, it is a critical part of the thesis of War of the Worlds as far back as the late 19th Century.
Cixin Liu's vision is purely game-theoretic, where anyone who makes noise is likely to be preemptively sniped by someone else, out of pure sense of self-preservation. I don't recall seeing this concept anywhere else.
(Not to say I think this theory about the Fermi paradox is a very good one.)
Imho Dune is still scifi despite the fantasy overtones because the author deliberately tells us it is set in our future. The author of star wars tells us the opposite.
Though, I agree Star Wars is not very sci fi, it's a fantasy epic with sci-fi stuffs in it.
SF is typically futuristic, but that bears jack all as to whether it takes place in the past, present, future, or even anything relative to our planet.
Science, in that it pledges greater allegiance to, extrapolates, or invents in an internally consistent way. But not time.
Scifi is fiction about where science might take us, how modern tech might impact society. It is foreshadowing a potential future. So stuff set in the past, generally, isnt considered scifi unless it somehow describes a potential future. This separates scifi from technothrillers (tom clancy et al) that are tech-heavy but set today rather than in the future.
This makes literally no sense to me. Any definition of the future that doesn't include the past is just fiction, and consequently, any past is a potential future.
What you're saying sounds more like "If it doesn't have greater than present levels of 'technology', then it's not science fiction."
Which seems incredibly limiting and ignoring of the central genesis of the genre, as you've pointed out -- science.
Science is a verb, not a noun.
The idea of pointing at something in a book and saying "That's science" (and correspondingly, pointing at something in other fiction and saying "That's not science") is odd.
Where do Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, or H.G. Wells fit in your definition?
Battlestar Galactica - the Christian allegory with angels and gods and literal miracles reskinned with robots and spaceships?
Everyone is entitled to their opinion but that's all anyone has here, including myself: opinions. There is no objective and universally accepted definition of science fiction which requires rigid conformity to scientific principles, or a lack of mythological or religious themes. The lines people draw between "science fiction" "science fantasy" and even "fantasy" are based on marketing and personal taste.
Star Wars is sci-fi, no less so than Galactica or even Star Trek, and all of it is also science fantasy. These aren't separate categories, but poles on a spectrum of speculative fiction.
"In his sci-fi trilogy The Three Body Problem, author Liu Cixin presents the dark forest theory of the universe."
"Liu invites us to think about this a different way."
Worse: they co-opt and integrate them.
We're already seeing that start to happen with Mastodon as well, the gravity is real. There are a lot of instances that flat out refuse to pair with corporate or government funded servers as a result. I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook started launching a scuttlebutt system and tried to monetize it. It is, as they say, 2019.
- Social media harassment
- Review bombs
- Doxxing
- Swatting
I think the author was rather describing Liu's concept of a "black domain," namely "a region of spacetime in which the speed of light is lowered artificially to completely seal it off (and protect it) from the rest of the Universe." (Wikipedia)
Apart from that, really appreciated the author's ideas and using the phrase "...depressurized conversation is possible because of their non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments." Spot on.
What I find so myopic is the insistence that the 2016 election was somehow a milestone in this. The precedent was already there, and the playbook already written. But it was mainly used by the dominant left wing cultural elite to enforce their favored view, so it was seen as justified. It was only when the counter culture on the right started making use of it that the moral panic took off.
Before Milo there was Shanley, combining reasonable sounding intersectional medium pieces with an ascerbic Twitter persona to create a one-woman motte and bailey. Who directed witch hunts to industry figures and got rewarded with paying subscribers for it.
Before Trump there was DongleGate and ElevatorGate, showing the power of a narcissist who rewrites history to be the underdog, and whose audience doesn't listen to opposing views and experiences.
Before Cambridge Analytica, there was the Obama campaign, hoovering up all the same data, except with Facebook's full knowledge and approval, and the progressive media's admiration and blessing for leaving those Stone age Republicans in the dust.
In many ways, the big tech companies are just the scapegoat. Nobody was forced to move into Facebook, they did so voluntarily. Nobody was forced to push out buzzfeed level content, they just stared themselves blind on pageviews while losing their core audience. Nobody was forced to abandon critical thinking, they just succumbed to wishful thinking and tribalism.
Now amplify it. Imagine if different countries were isolated from each other for millions of years, evolving into different species, and advancing technology the whole time, lost track of any commonalities between each other, and were then exposed to each other.
This is a great conceit for a sci-fi novel (two, actually) but I wouldn't take it too seriously as a real-life argument. To begin with, it's a theory about essentially evolutionary imperatives. It says that every civilisation, regardless of species, location, or any other condition, will eventually reach the same conclusion about the nature of the universe and the rules defining the co-existence of civilisations inside it.
To put it lightly, that is a very long stretch. We have no way to know anything about how a non-human civilisation will think, or even if it will "think" in the same sense that we do (they may be space-faring social insects without a real capacity for conscious thought, say- a classic sci-fi trope). We have no way to know what are the goals and rules that such a civilisation might choose for itself. Some may see it as their duty to protect and help life in the universe, as something unique and irreplaceable. Some might indeed see it as a survival imperative to go out and destroy or conquer other civilisations. Some might choose to develop along a sustainable path that will not end up in them exhausting their local systems' resources (eliminating the second axiom of cosmic sociology).
It's a huge universe. There's space for any number of different outlooks on life, the universe and everything. I don't doubt that the Dark Forest theory is one thing that may well have arisen somewhere, somewhen, but to assume that everything that is conscious in the universe will have "developed the hiding gene and the cleansing gene", that's just assuming way, way too much (and first of all- about the way genetic information is transferred).
We don't know anything about other technological civilisations. Cautiousness is well advised, but part of that is not assuming that we understand how they will necessarily think.
But those who don't reach it are exterminated.
There are about 100 other parameters whose relative balance determine game theoretical solutions to the problem. And as with many things, Cixin Liu handwaves away all that complexity in service of narrative.
Don't confuse fiction with reality.
Look at the Drake Equation as a much simpler example. Even given its simplicity, small tweaks in assumptions produce wildly different projections.
I don't object to anyone handwaving away complexity in service of narrative. Virtually all authors do that. (Two exceptions that come to mind are Tolstoy's War and Peace, and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.)
Name three.
I'm by no means an expert on game theory, but accepting the two axioms that are quite explicitly stated in the story, "dark forest" seems to follow quite naturally.
2. The rarity of habital planetoids.
3. How quickly civilizations spread within their local area.
Multiple actors can independently arrive at compatible cooperative solutions to the survival-and-utility game (which is not zero-sum).
Wikipedia says it assumes all other players are also superrational, but I think in practice a successful variant of this strategy is to identify whether other players are superrational and avoid them if not.
There is sometimes the option of converting existing self-interested rational players into superrational ones, but that is another subject entirely.
I believe it’s possible for the superrational players in a game to become the majority by expressing the superrational strategy in terms that will appeal to rationally self-interested players and demonstrating a superrational strategy working at some non-trivial scale.
(for the sake of argument, it looks like we're both assuming a n>2 group of prisoners.)
Also, the point of the dillemma is that only one prisoner has to act selfishly. If a subset of the group does cooperate, it doesn't matter because the one left out will take advantage of them all...and that risk increases exponentially as the size of the group increases, and makes the decision to trust even a subset of the group irrational.
One limitation of that thought experiment is that it assumes defection is guaranteed to achieve a certain outcome.
I think it’s reasonable to assume that any cooperative strategy has some computable “defection tolerance” and a variant on the prisoners’ dilemma that accounts for this could have very different outcomes than the classical formulation.
Furthermore, once you start playing multiple times with the same players, you establish an algebra of trust that also drastically changes the game. The ability to influence other players between rounds also changes the game.
That's a premise, and it's what creates the dillema in the first place.
> Furthermore, once you start playing multiple times with the same players, you establish an algebra of trust that also drastically changes the game. The ability to influence other players between rounds also changes the game.
Actually, the wikipedia article on the dilemma discusses this. The nash equilibrium is actually for all players to defect. There is no engendered trust. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#The_itera...
Only in games where players know the number of rounds (e.g. a suicide bomber defects because they’ve decided to cap the number of rounds they’re going to play).
The same Wikipedia article describes that in studies where the number of rounds is unknown to players, superrational strategies are sustainable and that the “always defect” strategy becomes only one of several paths to Nash equilibrium.
And yet we have no way to know that for sure. We have no idea what the average lifespan of an intelligent species is. It may just be that humans are particularly short-lived, among all the species in the galaxy, or the entire universe. If a species has a lifetime of a couple thousand years then interstellar travel, even at sub-light speeds, would be a lot more manageable than it is for us.
Which to me, means we can relax a little about the risk of being destroyed by hostile aliens. We don't know what we don't know. Chances are, if they were going to destroy us, they would have already done so in the last million years or so. We're probably a lot less appealing, as a world, than we think we are. Perhaps the universe really hates salt water or oxygen atmospheres? Who's to say?
And yes, lifespans are important. Perhaps not in the books, but in the real world our science and technology advances at least some in every generation, as new scientists and technologists continue the work of their forebears.
If human generations lasted a thousand years, it would perhaps take us a lot longer to make the same technological progress that it now only takes us a few years- if nothing else because the urgency of making progress would be reduced accordingly.
Lifespans may also influence the actualy speed by which species form thoughts and communicate. Remember the Ents in The Lord of the Rings? A species that lived ten thousand years may take an Earth day to form a meaningful utterance. Technological advancement would take considerably longer for them than for us.
Yup. Reading the implication that the universe has only 3 dimensions because dimensionality reduction weapons were used in past wars triggered a small existential crisis in me.
Dimensinoality reduction? I never thought of those weapons as akin to universal PCA before. Thanks for the image.
... the primary weapon of the Trisolans in the first book are subatomic ansible faeries.
I thought it was kind of funny, because the whole point behind the Dark Forest theory is that it emerges because aliens are so unknowable, there can never be proper trust between them. Yet a relatively young and slowly-developing race is literally more sure of what humanity is doing than we are of our neighbouring countries.
"Hard sci-fi", pfft :P
Eh, they had inside information (the Earth-Trisolaran Organisation was in contact with them).
And it's hard sci-fi because they were AIs made of protons, not actual fairies found in the magical forest of Elthrolien that had to be seduced with promises of space mead.
That's how it goes with sci-fi, innit. You can come up with anything you like as long as it's obvious that it's just advanced technology, not magic. Cixin Liu usually manages to weave in a couple of natural laws to every impossible thing so he passes.
I was more annoyed by the lightspeed contrails to be honest. That really comes out of nowhere and is a total literary device that has no basis on anything we know of. Makes the whole endeavour space opera if you ask me - which is not bad in and of itself. But in that case, where's the nuclear energy-sword wielding hero who saves humanity? Disappoint.
Does mentioning your faeries are made out of atoms stop them being fantasy?
> That's how it goes with sci-fi, innit. You can come up with anything you like as long as it's obvious that it's just advanced technology, not magic.
Sure, I mean, even Star Wars is still considered within the genre despite it all being completely made-up - but the point of hard sci-fi is you're not just making it up and rubbing science-words on your endless stream of arbitrary plot contrivances.
Then again, if one starts to stretch the definition of "scientifically plausible" there's all sorts of things that are classic sci-fi tropes like Einsten-Rosen bridges and Alcubierre drives, etc. So it's just my opinion. But, I note that the best Sci-Fi stories I've read always took lots of liberties with the laws of nature.
I'll even come up with a few examples if I really think about it.
Are we living in the same world? Quantum mechanics, relativistic effects, mathematics ( game theory anyone? ) are blowing my mind. The world is more phantastic than anything one could imagine and we know that we don't know everything. The constraint to stay in this world is the least limiting for an interesting and compelling story.
There is a trade-off between speculation and realism, that leaves a very, very narrow space for an interesting story.
Part of it is due to the fact that most of modern science has been mined mercilessly for "hard" sci-fi subjects, that have now become tropes that can't form the basis for an interesting new story anymore. For example, try to write a story where the entire premise is that someone manages to construct an Alcubierre drive. You'd get ...Star Trek: First Contact. Nice movie, hey. But nothing new, there.
> But those are not science fiction.
Stories based on physics and maths are not science fiction? Are you feeling OK?
> If you tell a story that is within the limits of what we know to be possible with the knowledge that we have right now, you will end up with a very boring story.
Um. Most stories in general stay within reasonable limits of what we know to be possible - are most stories very boring? You basically seem to be arguing that all stories that aren't fantasy are boring, which is clearly untrue.
> Interstellar, which makes for a nice story
Interstellar is tediously boring rubbish :P
> For example, try to write a story where the entire premise is that someone manages to construct an Alcubierre drive. You'd get ...Star Trek: First Contact.
What... no? The phase-space of all possible Alcubierre-drive fiction is not "Vulcans come to visit", any more so than the phase-space of all possible stargate fiction is "Ra gets quite angry".
A big point in TDF is that the speed of light limits our ability to communicate and understand other civilizations. But, by extension, weapons are also limited by that limit. Of course, maybe its possible to break the speed of light, but then communication could also break this limit.
So, if you're a technologically advanced alien civilization and you become aware of humanity, you can send an Envoy or you can send some Nukes (or, of course, you can do nothing and watch). Just within the context of The Dark Forest Theory, there's practically no reason to send Nukes; at worst, you discover that humanity sucks and then you go ahead and nuke us. But life is probably special; maybe humanity would make great trading partners, maybe our brains function differently and can solve problems differently, maybe our natural proclivity for war would make us great allies, or maybe we'd make great slaves for the mines on the Vartoth 12 colony. All of these are options for a civilization a thousand years ahead of us; they can pick what they'd like, but none of them would classify as a result of The Dark Forest theory.
There's also a possibility that maybe this hypothetical alien civilization tried that course of action in the past with another civilization, and they were friends for a while, helped each other, then fought in a bloody war, and now that civilization is distrustful so they destroy any young civilizations while they still easily can instead of even trying to come to terms. But that's not a Dark Forest theory situation; the Dark Forest Theory suggests that its natural for civilizations to want to kill each other off.
Slight digression, and I know your half joking but: I always find the believability lacking in sci-fi that suggest a civilisation capable of faster than light travel could possibly be interested in trading commodities or manual labour of another. Such a feat provides unlimited access to the universe, all materials and energy you could ever need, such a civilisation would likely have basically achieved alchemy transmutation (but for real).
Then, the only thing we posses of possible interest, would be our (and our planet's / ecosystem's) uniqueness, our information, our culture and likely very different perspective of the universe... as you put it "our brains function differently", and they most definitely would, even if only at a cultural level rather than fundamental level. That is something that cannot be obtained anywhere else in the universe, even with FTL, because it's endemic.
I think the Stargate universe solved this well; the civilizations capable of building FTL drives (including the one that built stargates themselves) didn't need to trade much with anyone (one of them did use slave labor from other worlds, but for somewhat plot-justifiable reasons). Humanity used increasing amount of FTL tech over the series, but those were either stargates, borrowed, stolen or donated tech, not something humans built themselves - and thus humanity did interplanetary trade.
> the only thing we posses of possible interest, would be our (and our planet's / ecosystem's) uniqueness
That's the core point in David Brin's Uplift saga - ecosystems were the most interesting things a species would own (or rather, lease).
It's a bit ironic considering Liu is Chinese- wasn't China's Ming Dynasty the first to land on America in the early 1400s and historically demonstrate that exploration and discovery weren't necessarily accompanied by colonization/enslavement/destruction?
That example gets held up a lot when mainstream historians spin the narrative that Colombus et al enslaved/raped/pillaged because that's just what societies do (while ignoring that it was the debt that the explorers owed to their financiers that drove most of that bad behavior).
Would you mind extrapolating on that a bit? In my totally 'unbiased' and 'truthful' American public school they never mentioned a word of this. I've always wanted to learn more about the real origins of this broken country.
A hypothetical Earth scenario would be an early industrial empire contacting an age-of-sail empire across the ocean via letters sent on whales, only to have the latter suddenly respond with an ICBM.
1. Any species that develops a civilization capable of space travel must necessarily have evolved a strong cooperative spirit, and so is more unlikely to exercise homicide as a first resort.
2. If Dark Forest were true, and there was a murderous civilization that wanted to kill every other, we would all be dead already. You can make an entire galaxy's worth of relativistic kill missiles with the mass of a medium size asteroid.
Sterilizing an entire galaxy to make sure that there is never a challenge to your rule can be accomplished in a few thousand years. Without needing any interstellar transit.
It's more accurate to say that HUMANITY would need a cooperative spirit in order to reach interstellar travel. I don't think it's accurate to assume that every species would need this.
And, beyond that, TDF addresses this through the assertion that humanity, at multiple turns, didn't want to partake in this Dark Forest ideology; we wanted to make peace and friends, but the other more advanced civilizations weren't having it. So even if they had a cooperative spirit in the past, that doesn't preclude that the spirit sticks around when the destruction of your species is at stake.
> If Dark Forest were true, and there was a murderous civilization that wanted to kill every other, we would all be dead already. You can make an entire galaxy's worth of relativistic kill missiles with the mass of a medium size asteroid.
That's being awfully presumptive.
Constructing even a galaxy's worth of kill missiles and launching them wildly like a shotgun isn't a strategy that any logical civilization would do. They'd end up destroying tons of empty planets that could have rich resource deposits or be habitable for future colonies, and they'd know that. Maybe there are illogical interstellar civilizations, but it stands to reason that they'd be More Rare than Logical ones, given it takes some form of logic to even accomplish space travel.
Targeted strikes make more sense. So you have to have a Target. Humanity has been broadcasting RF for about 100 years. The milky way is 105,000 light years across; at best we're detectable by 0.095% of just our own galaxy. Maybe we haven't gotten one of these kill missiles because they haven't heard us yet. Or it's on its way.
But all this requires life to common; the dark forest theory asserts that the reason life seems rare is because its common and everyone is just being quiet, but the other possibility is that life is, well, rare, and that's probably more likely. If life is rare, then the dark forest theory kinda goes out the window because the novelty of finding new life would invariably overwhelm a hypothetical risk that your species has never encountered before.
IMO space contact & travel will have one of three outcomes. (1) The light speed limit can be worked around and none of this matters. (2) Life is Common, and the Dark Forest Theory is valid between species. (3) Life is Rare, humanity will colonize the stars, but a version of the Dark Forest Theory will begin to apply between human colonies separated by hundreds of lightyears. If its been 150 years since anyone in your colony has ever talked to Earth, then you're not really a colony anymore, but it's obvious to you that Earth won't see it that way. Your colony creates other colonies, and it takes earth hundreds of years to find out about them, if you decide to even tell them (because what do you owe earth?). So a thousand years pass and we've got dozens/hundreds of Tribes of humans who can't really talk to each other, most of whom don't even know of each other's existence, all developing culture, science, and weapons at independent rates. Really starts to look Dark Forest-esque, doesn't it?
How do you build a spaceship without working together with others?
> Constructing even a galaxy's worth of kill missiles and launching them wildly like a shotgun isn't a strategy that any logical civilization would do.
Who said the missles are dumb rocks? If each one has a camera on it and a few adjustment rockets, it can choose which planets to target as it approaches the star. It's gonna take you a hundred thousand years to get there anyway, so who cares if you wreck the local ecosystem a little bit now? You're probably going to have to make changes to the planet to suit your species' needs anyway, so why be coy about it to save yourself a minivan's worth of raw material?
Ants don't build colonies because they consciously choose to participate in the greater good as individuals. It's pure instinct for them to work together. Imagine if some were more intelligent and could shape or direct that instinct. A "hive mind" if you will.
'''Calls out the internet for becoming a 'dark forest' bc of indexed, optimized, and gamified nature...posts on Medium'''
The NYT has a different business model, and is still partly supported by advertising in the print edition.
The digital content pricing race-to-the-bottom is really unfortunate. It's why we have shitty free-to-play mobile games, for example: people won't pay more than a few dollars for a phone game anymore, so a lot of devs have to find other business models to support development.
First: In the USA, a cup of coffee might cost 5$; in other countries, it is much cheaper.
Second: Every payment you do in the internet leaves a huge data track since there exists no analogue for cash for paying anonymously in the internet. So in particular if you are skeptical of data krakens like Facebook etc., you should be very cautious to pay in the internet. In particular, for each payment in the internet, you do not only pay with money, but also with lots of sensitive data.
But if you still don't like the coffee analogy, that's fine. The point is that $5 a month is not a lot of money for the average American. That's much less than the cost of a monthly newspaper subscription, and 20 years ago those were extremely popular.
imagine if other hobbyists could so easily duct tape a virtual point-of-sale to their display cases. imagine if a gearhead could put a card reader on their front door, try to get the public to wander in for 5 bucks and watch, ask questions. if she could do that as easily as us web geeks could, she'd try it too.
but we're the ones with the free access to try it, so we're pioneering this model of a hobbyist product that few will pay for.
I have yet to encounter a "premium" medium article that really made me think or change my views. Their auto-Google login, paywall, and other dark patterns are annoying at best. Given their actions and how I value their content, I think Medium is the worst kind of walled garden.
The Medium model is hot garbage, and I hope it dies.
Most of those things were and are maintained by unpaid volunteers, some of them spending their own money every month to keep the servers on.
Which is awesome. I applaud anyone who's willing and able to give to the community like that. But a lot of people now act like it's inherently repugnant to want to be paid for your work, like digital content shouldn't exist unless it's a self-funded hobby. I don't think that's reasonable or realistic.
Just to be clear, is it just Medium you don't like, or the entire concept of paying for content? I'm seeing both.
Similarly I post here out of obligations I have to folks, not because I like it or feel comfortable, welcome, or part of the community. I have smaller, private venues where I feel like I can be myself. And I'm aware sometimes I am a contributor to that attitude of "we are here to pick fights", but there isn't much I can do about it, that's what a lot of tech forums aspire to be.
I'd personally term those burrows or something. Something that is hidden from external observers walking through the dark forest.