3-Body-Problem once again vindicated as the scariest possible explanation for the Fermi Paradox
This might be a better one.
https://medium.com/predict/why-the-dark-forest-theory-is-pro...
This video is pretty good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0SvgT9Lc2M
This post attempts a formal refutation.
I don't remember any other of his books that might apply, but I haven't read all of them. (I probably should. What I have read was great.)
The optimal strategy in this case is to expand as quickly as possible, before others can grab or destroy resources.
Still makes no sense.
So yeah, a lot of prime real state but no way to reach it.
This subplot in the book is at least reasonable. Somehow aliens capable of pico-scale engineering can't make a telescope to observe the nearby solar systems, but OK, whatever. Cultural blindness and all that.
It's the later plot with the "dark forest" that makes no sense. There are ships capable of moving at relativistic velocities and spacetime-altering weapons.
seems like an odd thing to claim, given that we have no idea what's going on on any planet outside of our solar system
Barring some magical woo-woo technology that someone will probably insist must exist because we foolish humans are simply too stupid to understand anything, this isn't something you can just cheat. There ain't no stealth in space[0].
https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect...
The first book is Off Armageddon Reef - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off_Armageddon_Reef
In the 24th century, 8 million people flee to distant Safehold after barely escaping from the destruction of civilization by a genocidal alien foe, the Gbaba. Because the enemy tracked signs of advanced technology to hunt down other emergency colonies, the plan is to enforce a pre-industrial society until the danger passes. Administrator Eric Langhorne, a megalomaniac and neo-Luddite, instead has the colonists' memories erased and replaced with the belief they are the first humans, "Adams" and "Eves," the creations of God upon Safehold with "Archangel Langhorne" anointed as prophet and leader of the Church of God Awaiting.
Otherwise though? Sophons destroy the entire premise of the "Dark Forest"! Still as I said the series is far more concerned with overt allegories (West vs East, Collectivism vs Individualism, etc), and more covert allegories that allegedly criticize the CCP's way of doing things.
I don't read Mandarin, but I suspect the ability to do so and the high context nature of the language, helps a lot in getting that across.
Instead of a superintelligence killing any emerging intelligence, superintelligence is so smart that it can perturb spacetime in ways that easily kill itself.
Kind of like the idea that LLMs will give anyone with a garage the ability to create killer viruses (wild claim), a superintelligence might trivially create black holes that engulf it. If the intelligence is distributed across many agents (or nations), someone will try something stupid that kills the entire population.
It'd be even scarier if they could accidentally collapse the supposed vacuum state. Universal annihilation at the speed of light just because you got too smart.
Fragile world / fragile universe meets "too smart for your own good".
It's at least not something you'll do by accident.
We are primitive apes. We are all uniformly dumb.
There's a lot we don't know, but the fact that the universe is consistent means it has to be consistent with what we do know already. Don't be so openminded your brain falls out.
We don't know this either.
We are very limited in detection. Our energies are small.
How "standard" are standard candles and other references? Are the facts that stand as the basis for our theories even correct?
We are too primitive to be dealing in absolutes.
> We don't know this either.
See this is what I'm talking about as far as being too open-minded. Consider what it would mean for the universe to be inconsistent, particularly in relation to the astronomical observations that are the basis of this conversation.
We update our model(s) so that it keeps being consistent and predictable to us (that’s human nature), but no model can be probably correct and complete.
The only thing we can say with confidence is that the base laws of physics appear to be mostly consistent everywhere we've looked in the last hundred or two years. But also only across relatively recent history. The laws of physics were very different early on. The electic and magnetic field used to be separate things and now they aren't.
None of this is incompatible with science as a concept.
"It Really Brings the Room Together" https://m.xkcd.com/1680/
M87 Size Comparison https://m.xkcd.com/2135/
Black Hole Moon https://what-if.xkcd.com/129/
Hypothesis - a proposed explanation for something (such as a phenomenon of unknown cause) that is tentatively assumed in order to test whether it agrees with facts that are known or can be determined.
Theory - a scientifically acceptable or plausible general principle or body of principles based on data and offered to explain phenomena
Just because those outside of scientific fields use them interchangeably doesn't change the fact that they carry different meanings in scientific contexts.
Even more because the confidence changes all the time, but people do go around renaming well known ideas