Individually doing atmospheric analysis for every planet in the galaxy is probably an impossible task for a civilisation confined to a single solar system. Listening for signals is something our civilisation already does. If we discover radio signals from a primitive civilisation in the next star system over there’s a non-zero chance we’d panic and try to wipe them out.
That’s the risk that dark forest theory is talking about. Maybe the threat comes from a civilisation dedicated to wiping out intelligent life that just hasn’t found you yet, maybe it just comes from your nearest neighbor. Maybe there’s no threat at all. The risk of interplanetary war is still too great to turn on a light in the forest and risk a bullet from the dark.
And while knowing this, why do we still not choose to just observe and be as quiet/ non existant as possible?
The Dark Forest theory is something that makes for a scary sci-fi novel, but it isn’t really plausible in the real world. One of the major reasons is that individually doing atmospheric analysis for every planet in the galaxy actually is an entirely possible task, especially for a civilization that’s supposedly advanced enough and close-by enough to be able to destroy our civilization somehow. If advanced alien civilizations were present in our galaxy and had the philosophy of destroying potential competitors before they also become advanced then we should have been wiped out hundreds of millions of years ago already. We shouldn’t exist under a Dark Forest scenario.
In Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space series, the victors of a “dawn war” far in the galaxy’s past were machines and they decided to wipe out any sentient life in the galaxy for reasons that aren’t important here, but not life in general. But by the time we came around they had degraded to the point that they weren’t doing a good job anymore and a few civilizations were just starting to slip out into space. Then they get detected and destroyed.
So the combination of wanting to destroy civilizations, but not all life and breaking down over time would allow it.
This is another example of a scary sci-fi novel needing a very specific set of circumstances to arise in order for the scary sci-fi novel’s story to work. It isn’t a plausible case to be basing any real-world decisions or science on.
It’s like trying to have a serious discussion of vigilantism and the death penalty and someone brings up Freddy Krueger as the basis for their argument.
I know this is all hypothetical, but remember they may have the ability, but haven’t reached the cultural moment, where they have the interest. That could be any random moment now or in the future too
If this is to be a Fermi paradox solution (which the Dark Forest is usually presented as) then it has to be universal. “Sometimes a civilization somewhere decides to kill a few potential rivals” isn’t enough to explain why the universe appears to be silent.
A fair point, but even though we assume time and space are massive, there is an ordering to things.
There is a day before a civilization decides to kill it’s neighbors, and a day after.
We can assume the state of things (big old space should have had that plot arc already) but we can’t know if we are still in the opening episode, or before it.
Regarding general silence, agree that is not answered by my discussion. I personally lean more towards x factors disturbing our assumptions. (I.e. long running biospheres with zero advancement to radio age) but I increasingly wonder if we are just early to the party, as egotistical as that sounds. Imagine that the civilization that will one day rule the galaxy / universe is just now figuring out how to make a basic tool?
Either they think they are the baddest guy around, which will eventually be wrong, or they worry about what others will do. Destroying a biosphere is not a quiet event. Anyone with the ability to do so also has the ability to monitor for that. So if you take out someone else you make yourself a target.
Not if you redirect a few comets. Depending on what their travel to and from looks like, we might not even notice an alien ship setting our destruction into motion.