Dark Forest Theory

Volume I: Environment

Cosmic Sociology and The Dark Forest Theory By Aaron Li Edited by Daniel Shi and Dong Li

With much help from reddit under /r/sci-fi

And Liu Cixin

For “it”, there was nothing. Nothing to do. Nothing to see. No time, no space, no matter except this tiny dot in the middle of... nowhere, yet without a where there can’t be a “no-where”, only... emptiness. Except there is no emptiness without the existence of nothing or something. No. This was something else entirely... this was a nothing to a nothing. A null to a zero. A nowhere to a nowhere. Only one infinitely small point, or better yet, a “singularity”. But wait, then something happened. Something strange, where suddenly, out of nothing came something. Out of nowhere came somewhere, and now, there was something to do, somewhere to go, something to touch... And over the eons, these somethings collided and crashed and fused into flaming balls of fire that we would now call, a star. With time these stars burst and created more things that fused into more stars who exploded and then made more different things, and then at some point in the life of the universe, “time” began to tick. Trees grew. Life began to flourish, and the universe lit up with development. This growth continued and picked up speed, with trees shooting up and shifting around, covering the entirety of Cosmic Space. And eventually, as life began to grow hands, life began learning how to kill. Life, now the opposite of death, was especially good at killing. At creating death. And as more life learned to kill, the universe quickly became a battlefield. As time ticked on and warfare became wrapped in tricks and tactics, the battleground froze over as quickly as it developed, and it turned into the coldest war imaginable. Attacks became more sudden, defenses a double-edged blade, and while life continued to grow and sprout in the dark forest, our cosmos ceased to crawl with the activity it once did. Around this time, we came along. In the middle of a thousand-party cold war, we looked up at the skies of our infant solar system, not understanding the Eons of history that formed our Universe, our Galaxy, our solar system, or even what formed the silica and carbon materials we have built our civilizations on. And as we grew, we looked up at the sky. We created stories about the Dark Forest we were so abruptly born into, and we saw beauty in the war-torn battlefield of our universe. Welcome to the Dark Forest

Behind The Dark Forest Theory: Writer’s Notes Before we start on a description of The Dark Forest theory and what it implies, it’s important that you understand a few things about space, science fiction, and what we call “Cosmic sociology”. If you haven’t already read Liu Cixin’s 三体 trilogy or Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski’s The Killing Star, I absolutely recommend you do so because it provides all the information and interest needed to understand everything we will talk about now. But of course, because I assume some of you have not, I will give a brief, spoiler-free introduction to the idea of “Cosmic Sociology”. We will also publish our own introduction and analysis of cosmic sociology later on. ---- This furious debate on how interstellar aliens act and how cosmic politics might work dates back to Enrico Fermi, whom you might know to be the creator of “Fermi’s Paradox”. The Fermi Paradox asks the question, “If there were aliens out there, how come we haven’t seen them before?” This one question has about a thousand answers, ranging in absurdity from “we are alone in the universe” to “we are a subset of human beings that have somehow in some time landed on this one planet and have since then forgotten our origins, hence the great pyramids of Egypt”. Of course, in this article, we will be focusing on The Dark Forest theory, which describes multiple “scenarios”, each on a different scale. Keep in mind, this is just one theory out of the thousands of proposed solutions to the Fermi Paradox. Come back for the next article, which actually begins to explain the Dark Forest Theory, or more specifically Scenario I: The Hunters in the Bigger Picture ----Stagger these two articles in release time maybe?--- Volume II: Scenario I Scenario #1: The Hunters in the Bigger Picture This scenario describes four types of civilizations on the largest scale factor of the entire universe: 1. One with superior technology, seeking and destroying other civilizations, often to ensure their dominance in the cosmos. They are the "hunter" civilizations. 2. Civilizations that have already been destroyed by Hunter civilizations. 3. Civilizations that mask themselves from civilizations type #1 to avoid their destruction, understanding that living to see another day is more important than expanding their presence in space (note that we don’t know how this can be achieved, but Liu Cixin proposes the idea of reduced light speed “domains” in Death’s End) 4. Civilizations that do not mask their presence in any way yet have not been destroyed by civilization type #1. In the Dark Forest theory, our Earth is an example of a Civilization type #4. We do not mask ourselves from the outside world because we don't think we need to. Coming back to the story in the introduction,

our Earth is like a child who whistles as it works, not understanding that there are multiple hunters loose in the forest. It chooses not to hide the smoke or the light coming from its campfire and is alive simply because it only has primitive tools and no weapons or matured ideas of expanding past its "designated" clearing. In this interpretation, Earth is underdeveloped and ignorant of the dangers hiding in the corners of our cosmos, and if we are to develop, we must prepare for the risk of an outsider attack. Now, you may think about this and begin to think that this idea is just stupid and doesn’t work, as /u/UlteriorSurvey points out in a humorous manner. Say you’re in a hotel, and you’re in your room, minding your own business while a masked killer stalks outside in the hallways. What UlteriorSurvey says is that here the murderer acts “...like a cartoonish movie villain, twiddling his mustache while stomping down the hallway and somehow never bothering to check any of the other rooms until someone opens the door with the light on and yells ‘IS ANYONE OUT THERE? JEFF, IS THAT YOU?’” Of course, I don’t agree with this statement, and I imagine that you understand why. In a hotel, doors are remarkably close together in comparison to the distance between stars and especially stars that hold biological life. Imagine the hallways are exceptionally long, with doors that are horribly hard to open, without any guarantee that that room will hold what you are looking for. Likely, that murderer won’t find anything if it tries searching for its prey and it would spend too much energy searching that it doesn’t have enough to kill. Instead, it waits for its prey: a door to open and someone to come out of it. If someone does come out, that means that they have the chance to enter other rooms around them to gain more resources (specifically, energy) and thus more power. If they are aware of the murderer, this becomes even riskier, and the murderer, to ensure its safety, must stop their development in its tracks. This then brings another variable into the problem. If there is development, it’s obvious that there can’t just be one murderer. The murderer we hear of must have also started as a simple inhabitant, growing into other rooms and winning the game of development. This inhabitant must have then realized the dangers the development of other inhabitants posed, and started hunting said civilizations to ensure their survival. And then yet, in such a large hotel, there can’t only be a single hunter. In the development game, others must have been far enough away to keep at a similar pace without the threat of destruction, meaning there are now MULTIPLE hunters in the forest. Due to the millions of variables in such a universe, this rebuttal to the dark forest theory isn’t completely valid. Yes, this interpretation may not provide enough information to come to this conclusion - probably due to its massive scale - but taking it into such a context does not do it any justice.

A final, more organized scenario #1: There are 4 types of civilizations. 1. A hunter civilization. The role of this is often first-come-first-serve, as this is often the fastest developing civilization. All civilizations that start developing become these, sort of like predators in the wild. 2. A civilization already destroyed by the first. Oftentimes because they expand, picking up power until eventually not stopping its progress could become the Hunter Civilization’s downfall. 3. A civilization hiding from a hunter civilization. A hunter civilization will not consider them dangerous, because, at this point, they can no longer expand past the barrier they have put up as protection. 4. A civilization that has not hidden, however, hasn’t been destroyed by a hunter civilization yet. This could be because they are too primitive for the hunter civilizations to notice, or because they themselves are a domineering hunter civilization.

At some point in every civilization’s lifecycle, they all become a predator of prey, even if they aren’t even close to the top of the food chain.

Next, we Focus on The Coldest War Imaginable, the scenario better known by most science-fiction enthusiasts