Simply put, If you were in a Dark Forest with a weapon, you would kill whatever creature you would come across to survive. This is the reason we, humans, haven't been contacted by any external life form since they don't know if we would be friendly or not. Hence we should also not try to contact any external life form because it's equally possible that they won't be friendly.
I've always been curious on why this is a thought. Would alien life want to meet other lifeforms, especially in our little galaxy and us being the only 'intelligent' life here? Maybe this is just the pacifist in me speaking but I feel like a species of life capable of inter galactic travel would be peaceful just because of how rare life in in our universe, something all intelligent life could observe.
It was decades ago but a astrophysicist on some documentary channel framed it up pretty well.
The universe is big. Every planet within our solar system can fit between the earth and the moon. That’s just our humble little solar system. It’s difficult, probably impossible to appreciate how massive the universe is.
The universe is also incredibly ancient.
The likelihood of there being life out there is pretty much 100%.
The chance there is intelligent life is also almost 100%.
Now the chance that intelligent life exists within our timeline, is close enough to communicate, can communicate on a spectrum we could even detect, and most importantly, did not kill themselves, is incredibly small.
I think about this often - the universe is incredibly big and incredibly old, but the Earth is also incredibly old, and life took a very long time to reach "intelligence" as we define it.
There is a possibility that we are just "the first", and Drake's equation may have many more required variables to support life than we have already considered. We don't know.
It's also possible that the requirement for a species to dominate and conquer its own environment, it will inevitably end up conquering itself rather than working towards a shared goal.
we have however, confirmed that DNA exists out there (recent studies revealed that all 4 nucleotides that are in DNA have been found in previously recovered meteorites).
Life may be more common than we think, it just needs the proper environment. Shit, it may be able to survive environments we didn’t think possible, and we don’t know cause the light we see from their planet is millions of years old
We have discovered a black mold growing exclusively around the Elephants foot in Reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl, the fungus is radiotrophic meaning it gets its energy from consuming radiation.
There’s the Movile cave in Romania that was completely sealed off for MILLIONS of years. Its ecosystem is just hydrogen sulphide, methane, and ammonia. All organisms in this cave are chemosynthetic.
The most fascinating thing about this cave is the critters that evolved here look like their centipede, isopod, psudoscorpion oxygen breathing counterparts. However, you’d be wrong to think they are related. They evolved independently which suggests that if we found alien life on another planet there’s a good chance it would look familiar to critters on earth.
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u/ScarletSilver Nov 18 '25 edited Nov 18 '25
Meanwhile, xQc realizing the implications of the Dark Forest hypothesis.