The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

https://onezero.medium.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet-7dc3e68a7cb1

by razin • 7 years ago

179 168 7 years ago

onezero.medium.com

Jun8• 7 years ago

On an irrelevant point: do bloggers who use Medium honestly expect people to pay $5/mo to see their content? By comparison NY Times is $1/mo for unlimited articles.

PhasmaFelis3• 7 years ago

If you believe content is worth paying for at all, the price of a cup of coffee every month seems perfectly reasonable.

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.

digitalsushi2• 7 years ago

or if not advertising inside products, then it rewards walled gardens to grow - the games, blogs, et al end up inside a subsidiary that collects payment for access to all of it together. and the walls grow.

wolfgke• 7 years ago

If you believe content is worth paying for at all, the price of a cup of coffee every month seems perfectly reasonable.

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.

nextlevelwizard• 7 years ago

With SV salaries that is easy to justify. Normal people wouldn't pay even $3 for a cup of coffee.

digitalsushi2• 7 years ago

we make things. we make fullstack websites, we make payment processing widgets. we hook them together. a product no one wants, so it doesn't get purchased.

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.

echelon• 7 years ago

The internet I grew up on didn't charge money for IRC, Blogspot, forums, mailing lists, Stack Overflow, etc. I'm now in the 1% due to the skills I've learned from free sources, and I pay it forward as much as I can.

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.

knolax2• 7 years ago

IMO the NYT deserves $0. Even blogspam is better than the narrative pushing they do.

rmsaksida• 7 years ago

I have nothing against paying for content (and I do so regularly) but there's no way I'm ever paying for something hosted on Medium. The persistent sharing dickbars, the annoying attempts at getting me to sign up, the ridiculously over-sized header, it all really ticks me off. It's funny how a website that portrays itself as a home for great content consistently displays the utmost disregard for content.

yuy910616• 7 years ago

Is this a meme?

'''Calls out the internet for becoming a 'dark forest' bc of indexed, optimized, and gamified nature...posts on Medium'''

knolax2• 7 years ago

You can criticize a system and still participate in it. The author also stated that they only posted on Medium after vetting their ideas with a more private group.

joeax• 7 years ago

The article is paywalled so they are also profiting from it as well.

Barrin92• 7 years ago

the point of the post is that there's also a danger in withdrawing from participating in the public and that there's a significant downside to the public and oneself when we withdraw from discourse, so I don't think there's a contradiction here at all.

DesiLurker• 7 years ago

I've posted criticisms of FB on FB. What else are you gonna do when there really is no choice. this kind of criticisms really are ad-homenian attacks with little to contribute.

beat8• 7 years ago

As much as I love Cixin Liu's "Dark Forest" concept (I've sung my praises of his novels quite a bit here), I'm not sure this post fully fleshes out the analogy. I think it could be developed further, though.

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.

asplake• 7 years ago

Actually that’s a good point. One thing I won’t tolerate in a community I host is its use to conspire against others (or even to attack them behind their backs). I would guess that happens quite a bit even in communities not set up for that purpose.

ystrickler2• 7 years ago

I cut some of this out before hitting publish, but I had originally included more about the emotional and status anxiety of posting publicly, reputation management, and the risks to self posed by the way these platforms work. I ultimately cut those things because I thought they distracted from the overall idea and it's something we already hear so much of. I definitely wouldn't say this analogy is 1:1 with Liu Cixin's original, but I do think there is a real fear to poking your head out online that isn't that far from the original dark forest concept.

soulofmischief• 7 years ago

I was interested in reading your article, but Medium has it behind a paywall.

panarky• 7 years ago

I identified with this post immediately -- both because of the Cixin Liu reference and my own behavior recently.

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.

jerf2• 7 years ago

If the Internet is a dark forest, it's not populated by evil aliens out to kill you, but a witch in a beautiful gingerbread house inviting you to eat your fill. Don't ask about why the oven seems so dirty.

KirinDave17• 7 years ago

Spoken like someone who has never pissed off fascists and found death threats in their PO box. Or lost their job because of a tweet about men being sexisg. Or (to flip the political spectrum), been carefully outed from your hidden fascist leanings by undercover agents and machine learning, instantly losing your job and being evicted from your home.

Violence exists on the internet.

VvR-Ox2• 7 years ago

There's both of them.

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).

ethbro7• 7 years ago

grinds teeth

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..."

F_r_k• 7 years ago

Could you cite some books that covered DFT ? I'm eager to read them

sandworm1013• 7 years ago

Star wars isn't science fiction. Lucas tells us so in the first frame: a long time ago in a galaxy far far away: it isnt about us or where science may take us in the future. It is a samurai movie with lasers.

mac01021• 7 years ago

So who are the originators?

beat8• 7 years ago

Sure, there's some prior art. But it's not necessary or relevant to cite the prior art when talking about a specific work. If you read carefully, you'll find I didn't claim he was the originator, because duh.

anigbrowl• 7 years ago

This is n-gate worthy

KirinDave17• 7 years ago

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

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.

morley• 7 years ago

There are some forms of internet "weapons" that I think reach the same scale as the ones in Cixin's series:

  - Social media harassment
  - Review bombs 
  - Doxxing
  - Swatting

Luckily, the internet is not at a point where any individual who reveals their contact information is subject to these problems.

beat8• 7 years ago

That's a good point. I think it's subject to some of the same flaws as the original article, but you're right - the Dark Forest of the internet already has ways of driving people off.

jasaloo3• 7 years ago

yes- I hate to nitpick with these sort of things since I really enjoyed the essay, but as a lover of Liu's series I took issue with the dark forest analogy.

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.

xosys• 7 years ago

What about the lives that were ruined in the past and even today because of keeping the antiquated belief alive? Nobody supporting the church/belief seems to do anything for those misfortunate people. It would be nice if people just accepted relativity/determinism and gathered around discussing how their life is special; what they expect in the future with their goals & how they're getting there. Except a giant nope because people are narcissists that don't care about the abused.

cotelletta• 7 years ago

In a world where some people have a reach millions or even hundreds of millions larger than others, the analogy may be much more apt than you give it credit for.

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.

lostconfused• 7 years ago

There are plenty of exclusive communities on the internet because it's just as useful of a tool for any illegal activity as it is for corporations trying to drive more profits.

LiquidSky• 7 years ago

I'd say the Internet is more like Dante's "dark wood" in that it leads to Hell, but without a Virgil and no road to Paradise (or even Purgatory) waiting at the end.

davesque2• 7 years ago

A bit off-topic, but I've kind of struggled mentally since finishing The Dark Forest. Even though it's science fiction, it actually seems hard to argue with the theory in the book -- that civilizations must act to eliminate each other or they are overwhelmingly likely to be eliminated themselves. I'd like to believe it's not true, but so long as any two civilizations are likely to have dramatically different rates of technological advancement and so long as crossing the gaps in space between civilizations takes sufficiently long due to the laws of physics, it seems hard to deny that there might be strong reasons for civilizations to fear each other.

empath75• 7 years ago

People don’t always or even normally act at the level of civilizations. Why would this apply at the civilization and not the town or the state or country or corporate level.

AgentME2• 7 years ago

Different groups of people get along because we're all still human and very similarly culturally and understand each other's desires and goals. Things start going badly when there's major social and technological differences. Think of how things went for the natives when America was discovered.

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.

simion314• 7 years ago

I also had a similar feeling after finishing the book, this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmCTmgavkrQ made some good points, mainly finding problems with the axioms so it convinced me that the conclusion in the book is probably wrong since the axioms are probably not true.

YeGoblynQueenne8• 7 years ago

> Even though it's science fiction, it actually seems hard to argue with the theory in the book -- that civilizations must act to eliminate each other or they are overwhelmingly likely to be eliminated themselves.

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.

beat8• 7 years ago

Not everyone reaches the conclusions of the Dark Forest.

But those who don't reach it are exterminated.

ColanR4• 7 years ago

Sadly, game theory bears out that observation. [1] Trust is difficult to cultivate.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

notduncansmith4• 7 years ago

True, but I think there’s more hope when you take superrationality[1] into account.

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.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superrationality

YeGoblynQueenne8• 7 years ago

Regarding how long it takes to travel between habitable systems- Cixin Liu, like most other hard sci-fi authors, and everybody else who thinks about those things, seems to assume that lightspeed is just as problematic for everyone else as it is for us humans.

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?

dmitrygr• 7 years ago

Not really, since DFT covers how fast information travels, not biological bodies. Lifespans aren't really part of the equation.

beat8• 7 years ago

He makes a lot of interesting hash from the speed of light (like the Dark Domain defense). But he more or less handwaves away the speed of light as a limitation, introducing viable FTL travel in Death's End. (As an aside, one of the things I like about the books is how terror scales... from the understandable, relativistic terror of the Trisolarans to the much more threatening terror of the Dark Forest, to the sheer hopelessness of some species altering the very laws of physics as a weapon.)

Freaky4• 7 years ago

Cixin Liu, like most other hard sci-fi authors, and everybody else who thinks about those things, seems to assume that lightspeed is just as problematic for everyone else as it is for us humans.

... 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

jbattle• 7 years ago

If you are in the market for a good story touching similar topics, I thought Pandora's Star (first of a two-book series) was a great read (I bounced hard off the dark forest)

AgentME2• 7 years ago

Personally, I think it's possible that abiogenesis is so rare that we are the only life within the observable universe. I don't know if that's more or less depressing.

mlcrypto• 7 years ago

I think with the rate of technological growth an intelligent species can improve to match another quicker than they can travel across space. Or perhaps even surpass an isolated travelling group.

013a2• 7 years ago

Its an interesting theory. IMO: the difficulty of destroying a civilization is probably harder than communicating with them, and the advantages of keeping one around probably outweigh the advantages of killing them if you're already more technically advanced.

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.

shmed• 7 years ago

Cixin book covers those aspect pretty well. One of the main element behind his version of the Dark Forest theory is something he calls the "Chain of suspicion". He argues that in a world were communication is limited by the speed of light, there's no way to establish a coherent dialog during first contact between two civilizations that would allow you to completely trust the other party. If you cannot trust that the other party will not destroy you given the chance, then the only way for you to be guaranteed not to be destroyed is to destroy them first. Even if both parties want peace, there's no way for you to convince the other party that you want peace without also giving them the time to destroy you. It's basically a game theory situation where trying to go for peaceful communication is way too risky, and the stake in play are the survival of your civilization. It's also implied that civilization that played the "peace" card will simply get eliminated the moment they encounter someone playing the "destroy" card, making you much less likely to actually encounter a peaceful civilization.

tomxor• 7 years ago

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.

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.

asark• 7 years ago

Oh boy, read Blindsight by Peter Watts. Kinda similar idea but more deeply dreadful. Messed me up for days. Now added to the pile labeled "Existentially Horrifying Crap I have to Not Think About to Make It Through Another Day".

davesque2• 7 years ago

I've read Blindsight. It's a good one. Actually, the premise didn't bother me as much as the Three Body trilogy.

Freaky4• 7 years ago

Link, along with much of his other work: https://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm

jasaloo3• 7 years ago

I hear you. Liu's outlook is deeply pessimistic. His obvious scientific background knowledge seems to be infused with a dash of western, neoliberal ideology-- that it's just dog-eat-dog out there, and we're all in it for our own self-interest.

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).

westmeal2• 7 years ago

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.

underwater• 7 years ago

I figure that the age of global discovery and colonialism that happened here on Earth is a case study. Fixed resources, different cultures, huge differences in technology. It wasn't great, but also, many distinct cultures and peoples survived.

TeMPOraL8• 7 years ago

Age of colonization meets zero of the two axioms underpinning "dark forest" - there was a possibility of establishing trust, and there was no possibility of sudden and unexpected technological leaps of the weaker side.

TeMPOraL8• 7 years ago

Keep in mind that the dark forest theory hinges on two axioms that will likely be true for interstellar relations, while remain false for terrestrial ones. The two axioms are clearly stated in the books: 1) large communication delay, and 2) unpredictable technological jumps. The idea of the dark forest is that communication delay makes it difficult to build trust, and even if you start in superior position, it's possible for the other side to leap ahead of you technologically in the middle of those very long talks.

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.

hannasanarion2• 7 years ago

There are several reasons not to fear Dark Forest, chief among them,

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.

013a2• 7 years ago

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.

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?

knowaveragejoe2• 7 years ago

Regarding number 2, wouldn't this potentially risk your discovery as well? An entire galaxy having its habitable planets destroyed would surely be detectable in some fashion.

inflatableDodo• 7 years ago

Is more a mass of jungle with some old boggy wastelands and an escalating series of slash and burn plantation forestry monocultures all intertwined with unruly canopy vines and invasive fungi.

sylens• 7 years ago

Wouldn't the "Black Domain" concept introduced in Death's End be a better metaphor here? Communities are choosing to seal themselves off from the greater Internet, even if that means they cannot collaborate/engage with as many other people.

beat8• 7 years ago

Only if you actively hide the community from the rest of the internet, rather than passively hide (by not advertising its existence).

loteck• 7 years ago

So what you're saying is that black domains end in .onion?

jasaloo3• 7 years ago

yes precisely my thought

r00fus• 7 years ago

Aka Balkanization. This is what I predicted about 5 years ago: every country will get its own version of the Great Firewall.

X6S1x6Okd1st• 7 years ago

I feel like there are some really nice ideas in here, but I felt like the metaphor of the dark forest really took a turn when the author started using it to describe the communication channels they felt like were still safe.

I'd personally term those burrows or something. Something that is hidden from external observers walking through the dark forest.

nyolfen• 7 years ago

warrens: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-the...

xxandroxygen2• 7 years ago

I agree, I was pretty confused when dark forests went from "things hiding from predators" to "safe, separate spaces to communicate"

KirinDave17• 7 years ago

I'm not a fan of this metaphor but I definitely feel the phenomenon it's alluding to in my life. I've increasingly enjoyed a relatively obscure social media existence on a small, focused Mastodon community as opposed to the general warfare of Twitter.

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.

apotatopot• 7 years ago

dude's obviously never been to a dark forest.

HNLurker2• 7 years ago

https://outline.com/AMgCJV

The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

Related Stories