Having read The Three Body Problem, I am no longer nearly so excited for our first encounter with an alien civilization...
I'm not going to spoil anything, suffice to say that the object that is encountered in space is nothing like anything portrayed in science fiction before. The exploration narrative goes far beyond Clarke's Rama, and Watts poses some very interesting philosophical questions along the way.
The book has some minor narrative issues that annoyed me, but still a great read.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Blindsight-Peter-Watts/dp/0765319640
I think cultural differences play into the read a lot, too. It's an intensely Chinese novel, and I'm pretty sure a lot of Americans find his perspectives on history jarring, and want something more "entertaining" and personal.
I've read subsequently that this is how a lot of Chinese fiction is written, so maybe that's just how it is.
Sounds like it might be worth reading the rest for the ideas, but there's so much else out there I want to read.
In Ball Lightning, humans are doing experiments with quantum phenomena. They're doing it deep underground in the most isolated environment on the planet. Yet for some unknown reason the wave function keeps collapsing even though there are no observers present.
That's when they realize, there are observers present, just not human. Alien intelligence is spying on their experiment. But shortly after they realize this, the quantum experiments begin functioning as expected, no wave function collapse. The alien observers realize they've exposed themselves, and stop spying on the quantum experiments.
That was pretty mind-blowing, especially after learning about the Sophons in Three Body, which were clearly the alien observers in Ball Lightning.
What is the point in stopping after you've already been noticed?
I like the follow up novel Redemption of Time for this reason, it has some passages about maybe there are other galaxies where the dark forest isn't at all the case, and I find that concept about the same level of plausibility.
How advanced of a civilization you would need to have so that "shooting" into a different solar system is cheap and inconsequential? And you can detect transmissions telling you about one civilization but not where this is being sent from? Doubt
The dark forest theory was the underwhelming part of the 3BP series to me.
The Dark Forest state depends on the resources of the universe being scarce relative to their need/demand by all the sentient species in the universe. In the novels, survival of your species requires killing any other species that would compete with you for those resources.
But given the extraordinary abundance of resources in the universe, it's not a given that demand would overwhelm supply so much as to necessitate such an extreme survival strategy. There is a massive amount of matter and energy in the universe.
Further it's likely that super-advanced species with the technology to manipulate the Strong Force of matter, as even the relatively less advanced Tri-Solarans could in the novels, will have developed the ability to recycle and reuse resources far more effectively than we have today.
The ability to build things using the Strong Force implies the ability to disassemble and reassemble them at the subatomic scale. That pretty much solves all known problems with recycling. Think Star Trek replicators on a massive scale.
Now that resource starvation is no longer such a problem for species, participating in continuous mutual destruction of other species is far less optimal. It needlessly increases your own species' danger value to all other species, and the likelihood of being pre-emptively attacked and destroyed, for no good reason.
Rather I suspect the optimal strategy is similar to what evolved on earth - develop effective technological deterrents, be they nukes, photoids, or dimensional collapse attacks or whatever, and then don't use them. Their highest value is in your enemies knowing you have them, but that you will not use them unless attacked first. Keep your own threat level relatively low, but without leaving you completely helpless and vulnerable.
And you don't need every species to play Dark Forest, either. As long as one species is playing Dark Forest, all the others learn to hide, or play themselves, or get exterminated. That's the fate of those who want to be nice.
Me too, and the evidence against is pretty much all of human history. Yes, there have been some genocides, but on the whole even though humans compete for resources we trade and work together more often than not. One might argue that humans have always been on roughly the same level technologically but that's a) wrong, and b) irrelevant to the philosophical concept that one should murder anything that competes with one's own genetic lineage [0].
[0] which, according to all known physics, is ultimately futile anyway since even the universe will eventually die.
Now, I don't think genetic lineages should be the prime determinant of whether you should murder another life form, but if you are considering that question, you can't use interactions between close genetic relatives to explain what should occur between non-relatives.
Now we could consider other earthly life to be a "close genetic relative" I suppose, but if we're capable of making that extension of our concept of self, then why not also extend it to other intelligent life?
Us humans, we've eliminated or learned to protect most of the fauna that poses any danger to us. But if we would be realistically worried, that tomorrow the bears or wolves might start carrying firearms or beam weapons, we'd wipe them out to the last, out of justified sense of self-preservation.
More importantly I guess is this question: Why is our conception of "self" in the meaning of "self-preservation" exactly the size of our species for the purposes of Dark Forest? Why is it not narrower or broader?
P.S.: I further disagree that your sense of self-preservation would be justification. We do not consider pre-emptive strikes to be justified for a reason.
Except when we do. See e.g. historical killing of enemies and their families, to preempt retaliation.
> Intelligent beings can be reasoned with.
Except when they can't. As the orthogonality thesis states, intelligence is orthogonal to values. You could imagine smart bears whose values and ways of thinking could be completely alien to us (though evolving in the same environment would probably make us and them more alike than us and aliens). There's a term for that coined by Orson Scott Card[0] - varelse. "They may or may not be sentient beings, but are so foreign that no meaningful communication is possible with the subject." Except perhaps math. Which, in this case, mostly means game theory.
> Why is our conception of "self" in the meaning of "self-preservation" exactly the size of our species for the purposes of Dark Forest? Why is it not narrower or broader?
I'd argue, because of the first axiom: inability to establish trust due to communication delays. The clustering of "sameness" is determined by the speed of light[1]. And in the case of armed bears, "sameness" would too be determined by inability to establish mutual trust, this time given by communication problems caused by differences of minds.
> We do not consider pre-emptive strikes to be justified for a reason.
Except when we do.
--
[0] - https://enderverse.fandom.com/wiki/Hierarchy_of_Foreignness
[1] - if we kindly ignore the existence of whatever quantum shenanigan communications Sophons were using, as apparently the author did. IMO, Sophons ruin the self-consistency of the rules of book's universe.
> Except when we do.
Strike out "when", at least for the U.S.
The U.S. lawmakers obviously believe in importance of the U.S. being able to do no-notice preemptive nuclear strike and the proof is that the bills to "prohibit the President from using the Armed Forces to conduct a first-use nuclear strike" are "read" but then nothing happens afterwards:
Read Jan 2017:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/669
Read Jan 2019:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/669
Coverage Jan 2019:
https://homelandprepnews.com/stories/32314-sen-markey-rep-li...
"because of our deeply flawed and dangerous system, if the president decides to launch a nuclear weapon, no one can stop him. It is high time for Congress to add a check on this or any future president’s ability to start a nuclear war."
September 2019:
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/09/10/donald-tr...
"Trump also has absolute authority to order the first use of nuclear weapons with no checks or balances from anyone: not his advisors, and not the Congress."
Yes, sometimes. Dark Forest seems predicated on the idea that it is mathematically impossible to ever not be committing genocide because it is the one and only correct answer. Yet here we are existing in a world where genocide is not the goal of every living being.
> As the orthogonality thesis states, intelligence is orthogonal to values. You could imagine smart bears whose values and ways of thinking could be completely alien to us
Irrelevant to their ability to reason. They will undoubtedly value something, else they will not have motivation to take up arms in the first place. Sure, it is possible that they value our extinction as their highest priority, but that seems incredibly unlikely because it would mean that their own survival is less important. If they at least value their own survival higher than our demise, then there is basis for reason.
> I'd argue, because of the first axiom: inability to establish trust due to communication delays.
What does that have to do with trust? Communication delays are equivalent to distance, and being far away from potential dangers has a way of making them less threatening, not more. At interstellar distances you can afford to be patient.
The biggest problem with the Dark Forest concept is that it is predicated on this insane notion that the most important thing in the entire universe to anyone is the continuation of self -- and where mentioned before that self is defined to encompass exactly your own species and no more or less --, which is directly contradicted by both the long history of human and animal behavior and by the fact that everything dies including the universe. In other words, if continuation of self is your highest priority, and you're forward thinking enough to see other species lightyears away as a potential threat, then you're also forward thinking enough to see quite plainly that you have a 100% chance of failure in the long run.
No, Dark Forest is predicated on the idea that those who don't commit genocide against potential threats first eventually have someone commit genocide against them.
> Yet here we are existing in a world where genocide is not the goal of every living being.
Dark Forest doesn't hold that that calculus applies between all living beings, just to beings in the specific circumstance that physical law appears to dictate must exist between intelligent species arising on different worlds.
There's a very brief historical window where killing all men of military age plus the infirm, making younger men menial slaves, and forcing women into reproductive servitude hasn't been the overtly accepted norm of warfare, and where preventive (as well as even outright aggressive) warfare hasn't been seen as legitimate. But even if overt norms have changed, actual behavior in war has changed less than the overt norms has on all those grounds. Ethnic cleansing remains a common practice in war.
Moreover, much of that is a acheived in the wake of war, and quite arguably deliberately so, through factors like political subjugation and economic coercion even when the overt norms are adhered to in direct terms during the conflict.
And aliens aren't likely to be logistically compatible enough to make good menial slaves, or reproductively compatible enough for that form of servitude.
> We do not consider pre-emptive strikes to be justified for a reason.
Pre-emption is generally considered justified in just war theory, preventive war is not. OTOH, all actual war is at least preventive if not nakedly aggressive on at least one side, and war still happens not infrequently, so the overt norms are not the same as actual behavior.
The way I see it, it's similar to efficient market hypothesis. That is, as long as the axioms are reasonably met, you'd expect the system to reach and stay in the determined state over time. Incidentally, in the books both humans and Trisolarians are examples of local, temporary deviation from rules of Dark Forest. Spoiler alert: it ends up badly for both, and the Dark Forest asserts itself over time.
The idea isn't that they all come to the conclusion, but that the ones that it is game-theoretically optimal and those that fail to do so (as well as some that do not) are destroyed by the ones that do.
Most of them are extinct.
Or look at the rat. A pest animal known to have been involved in spreading diseases that killed significant numbers of humans, yet we do not seek to eradicate the species as a whole. Even mosquitoes, whom we have a similar relationship with, are not the target of some massive effort to eradicate them from existence.
Hell, even smallpox gets to continue to exist.
Read the Lewis and Clark diaries sometime, see how many grizzly bears they encountered, and how much they feared grizzlys. Now look and see how many are left. That's what happens to species we consider a threat.