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Many physicists have pointed out several flaws in the dark forest theory, which makes for a great read but doesn’t really carry over to the real universe 1:1.

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Can you point me to more info on that or just tell me? I am curious about reasons to be more optimistic than that book lays out. I would much prefer the Carl Sagan view of the Cosmos as one where it simply makes no physical nor cultural sense at all to be aggressive toward other stellar civilizations.

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-dark-forest-hypothesis-is-...

That link is paywalled.

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.

https://www.pgmusings.ca/journal/dfh

There are loads of issues with it as hard sci-fi, but the bigger issue is that it's meant as a political allegory far more than it's meant to be hard sci-fi. Where I think it shines to some extent in the latter case is its ability to explore scale and build intuition about the vast scales involved in space.

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.

What flaws? Do they apply to variants such as Greg Bear's and related ideas such as berserkers?

Do Forge of God/Anvil of the Stars differ significantly from pretty bog-standard dark forest scenarios?

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.)

its a few years since I read Liu Cixin's books and even longer since I read Greg Bear's, but the technology was very different, and it was not as uniformly hostile. The primary technology used to destroy civilisations in Bear's books was self-replicating machines, and there was an advanced civilisation that tries to defend or rescue those attacked, and punish the aggressors - so its a bit less bleak.

"Dark forest" doesn't work from a game-theoretical standpoint. It assumes that it's cheap to destroy entire planets and solar systems. Yet no-one seems to be colonizing other systems.

The optimal strategy in this case is to expand as quickly as possible, before others can grab or destroy resources.

I think one idea is that there aren't very many habitable planets. The Trisolarians are coming to Earth because it's their only option, not because they want to destroy humanity.

Then it's even weirder. Detecting planets around stars is trivial, yet nobody is running to get that prime real estate?

Still makes no sense.

In the book, the trisolarans aren't coming to earth just because is the only habitable planet, it's because it's the closest one too. The don't have FTL and they spend the full resources of their dying civilization to build a fleet that will reach earth in ~400 years.

So yeah, a lot of prime real state but no way to reach it.

400 years is nothing. At this speed, all the Galaxy would have been colonized long ago.

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.

"no-one seems to be colonizing other systems"

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

How do we know nobody is colonizing every system we can see? How would you detect if earth was colonized?

Entropy and thermodynamics exist. It would be impossible to colonize every system we see without the tremendous heat energy expenditure needed to do so being obvious, and obviously not natural. The background temperature of space is so regular and predictable that any deviation is noticeable.

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...

Ok great, but you didn't answer the central question. How would you detect earth civilization from interstellar distances?

If you're colonizing systems so stealthily that it's not visible, then why bother doing that at all? Even a single solar system has more than enough resources.

David Webber - Safehold series. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safehold

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.

The first chapter can be read at the publisher's site: https://www.baen.com/Chapters/0765315009/0765315009.htm

Why would physicists have anything useful to say about this theory?

Because environment makes culture and physics are the environment at relativistic speeds and cosmic distances.

Culture at some level grows out of biology and physics, it's downstream of those things. The material basis of a civilization will have a tremendous long term impact on its culture.

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