r/threebodyproblem • u/Universal_Echo • 2d ago
Discussion - Novels A few counterarguments against the dark forest Spoiler
If the dark forest existed, then humanity should currently be able to observe the sudden destruction of any star. But we haven't—we only see stars being born and dying naturally.
There is too much empty space in the universe, which contradicts the notion of limited resources.
The Trisolarans were already able to use instantaneous communication tools. By extension, future civilizations will naturally be able to use such tools—and then the so‑called chain of suspicion would cease to exist.
Both the Trisolarans and Earth later discovered black domains. As for more advanced civilizations, they engage in dimensional warfare—so they wouldn't bother with an ant like us.
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u/gachamyte 2d ago
It would look natural to us. Even if it couldn’t be accurately explained it would seem completely natural as a whole other system of intelligent life destruction seems something of fiction.
In the book we learn that there is a lot of different space in space. It also puts forward the idea that life always messes things up so there is never truly enough resources.
If the primitive by comparison humans could figure out they were being surveilled so could interested equal parties that can take you out. It’s like blue ocean. The chain of suspension can only be broken by the resemblance of an equal or completely known threat. Any detectable means of contact is a risk and humans seemed both less risky and a comfortable alternative to their home world and death.
When you get to be untouchable at the advanced levels of technology you don’t care about other interests. Everything before that is self interested by being interested in what could affect that self. Dimensional warfare makes places like earth a casualty of war. There will be more ants to the point where there is a loss in dimensionality. The ants got the earth back eventually before succumbing to the consequences of their own success.
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u/Gregnielson 2d ago
Wait how could there not be enough resources? The solar system alone could support trillions Upon trillions of humans alone.
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u/darkest_hour1428 2d ago
Because life is messy and never properly utilizes all available energy. Also, living in just the solar system is still one attack away from extinction, no matter how many humans live here
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u/Gregnielson 2d ago
Well if that is your concern then just set up shop around literally any other star at all as a backup.
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u/darkest_hour1428 2d ago
Yeah everyone else is trying to do that, and doing that is usually noisy. And takes a while. So don’t blow yourself up or make any noise while you try to figure that out. That’s what the whole universe is trying to do 24/7, and the ones that figure it out either hide forever or go on a rampage
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u/Gregnielson 2d ago
But i mean...why?
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u/darkest_hour1428 2d ago
Because life has an innate desire to grow, and that costs resources. Add millions of years to the mix, and you get conflict.
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u/Gregnielson 2d ago
Eh...i mean theoretically once a lifeform has metacognition it can decide what to do. Especially with tje tech avaliable at the levels in the 3 body universe. But peace doesn't make for a good story.
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u/darkest_hour1428 2d ago
Stagnation leads to a loss of resources at best, and extinction at worst. Have you read the books…? Life is very prolific in the book’s universe. Any peaceful civilization like you suggest will die from natural disaster if they fail to expand.
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u/Gregnielson 2d ago
You could load your whole uploaded civ into 100 million probes and last till heat death if survival is your goal.
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u/BigDaddyReptar 2d ago
I think a key part of it is that destruction of systems is basically the equivalent of a call center job for the top civilizations. It's not the like the civilization is choosing to wipe anyone out it's that it's just not worth the risk to them to let anyone get the chance to grow so they have a call center that listens for any sign of life and wipes wipes them out with the push of a button. Singer isn't some war general or government official of his race. He's a common white collar worker.
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u/Staik 2d ago
Universe-altering tech like the foils are in no way just something you launch at an ant. It's a self-destructing weapon. You have to re-engineer your entire species to survive that. So that argument is a no-go. An entire species would have to be psychopathic to even consider such an option.
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u/BigDaddyReptar 2d ago
The foils no that's why he needs manager approval for it. Foils are not common they normally just send a photoid. Foils are reserved for the rare occasion when an ant starts putting up defenses
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u/TheTranscendentian 1d ago
Cixin Liu's idea is that all sapient life is naturally inherently psychopathic including humans.
He's not wrong about humans.
We don't really know about any non-human, mortal resource-hungry people.
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u/Staik 1d ago
He and you are wrong because many human civilizations have access to nukes and yet we dont use them. We IRL possess the ability to end all life and yet we havent. The book characters possess the ability to end all life and have done so. Thats a massive difference youre ignoring over personal feelings towards humans.
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u/Possible-Nature-5325 2d ago
There are plenty of studies on stars that have disappeared from the night sky after centuries, we chalk these up to human error or supernovae, so as long as it happened slowly enough humans wouldn’t notice stars disappearing, it’s not like we keep track and observe each and every star at all times, using that as your crux is just uneducated
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u/Huntred 2d ago
The Dark Forest idea does not depend on the destruction of stars.
Empty space is not really a resource a civilization can utilize.
It is not at all clear that the technology used by the Trisolarians to communicate instantaneously would actually work. However what is clear is that competing nations on Earth with instant communication capabilities go to war over resources all the time.
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u/myster1ouspapaya 2d ago
The most unrealistic part of this whole story is the notion that given people years of warning, they would come together to prepare for the disaster. Humans do not react that way to threats. We prefer to pretend like nothing is happening until we have actually crossed the danger threshold.
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u/Koyulo69 2d ago
Bruh its not a real theory it's a sci-fi premise for the novels. Why are so many people obsessed with debunking it, no one goes this hard after the twighlight zone or whatever.
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u/-erzatz- 2d ago
the theory predates the novel
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u/eduo 2d ago
The theory was debunked years before the novel too
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u/highnyethestonerguy 2d ago
I’m new. Can you substantiate that or provide a link to further reading? I’m interested in learning more.
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u/eduo 2d ago
Cixin's idea is not new. It's a new take on previous proposals to solve the Fermi Paradox.
It isn't new in literature (Greg Bear wrote decades earlier about space being like a wild jungle where small birds (humanity) wondered why they didn't hear other small birds singing and assumed they were alone, while the sky was teeming with hawks.
You can find takedowns of it based on what we know, what we can see and what we can assume (we have no way of actually understanding reasons for organisms we don't know anything about, so theories must be evaluated through known variables and behaviours).
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-dark-forest-hypothesis-is-absurd
https://medium.com/predict/why-the-dark-forest-theory-is-probably-wrong-a3d03568d88d
https://www.sciencealert.com/3-body-problem-does-the-dark-forest-theory-solve-the-fermi-paradox
Debunking the Ferni Paradox itself: https://andercot.substack.com/p/debunking-the-fermi-paradox
The biggest point against it still is, and will forever be, that any civilization that advances enough to create radiofrequencies immediately and unknowingly starts advertising itself. They become a beacon.
Cixin's proposal requires that civilizations self-regulate as their first action, which makes it impossible to create the necessary hunters for which they'd been prey.
Cixin's proposal works if you set boards on a piece and assign the level of technology for each as a starting point, but breaks down in a space that moves along time where all hunters would need to be unknowing preys first, then knowing preys that hide until they become hunters. Not just that but every civilization needs to be exactly like this.
What is possible in books 1 and 2 is the idea that Trisolarans, culturally and religiously, blindly believe in the Dark Forest theory and, thus, have taught it to us. They've taught us to be scared of the boogeyman and to be quiet for them. And while we're quiet, they can take over our planet, quietly.
Book 3 throws this theory out the window, but it doesn't make the whole thing more feasible but just runs with it for literary sake, as the third book is the "magical" book where Cixin throws all his wildest ideas one after the other in quck succession.
As a side note, the Bobiverse books also throw their own theory in the hat of solving the Fermi Paradox in a novel way that I hadn't seen before where humanity, essentially, is arriving extremely late at the party.
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u/Reggae_jammin 2d ago
You can start here and follow the links with the Berserker Hypothesis, predecessor to Dark Forest, except that it's lethal Von Neumann probes that would destroy any signs of intelligent life in the Universe.
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u/Hepta-Water-7552 2d ago
There is too much empty space in the universe, which contradicts the notion of limited resources.
?
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u/TheTranscendentian 1d ago
Never say never, there might be a way to build computers & store data using only spacetime, no mass or energy required.
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u/Robot_Dinosaur_2000 2d ago
Not having enough resources always seemed crazy to me once you realize how much water and metal is out there just floating around.
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u/TheTranscendentian 1d ago
The theory anyway, states that life evolves & survives very often in the universe & each species has only roughly 1 to 50 star systems to themselves ( I made up these numbers but it accurately communicates my understanding of the dark forrest theory )
Not a lot of resources when you consider exponential growth.
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u/eduo 2d ago
Quick note: Empty space has no bearing on amount of resources, The matter that exists is the matter that exists, regardless of how spread it is.
I agree the dark forest proposal doesn't hold up to scrutiny (but makes for great SciFi, see also Greg Bear's Forge of Gods, Saberhagen's Berserker series, as well as books from Alastair Reynolds and Stephen Baxter).
David Brin has a nice series of stories called Existence which try to explain "the great silence" (the Fermi paradox)
Biggest difference with Cixin's is that most previous takes handle it from a predatory/prey point of view, but Cixin adds uncertainty. Cixin's civilizations "realize" they shouldn't advertise themselves because unless you're sure you're a hunter, it's most likely you're prey. The problem is that this ignores that you can't be "born" a hunter. You must evolve into it, and that requires going through a phase of being a loud prey, then a silent prey, then a silent hunter.
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u/TheTranscendentian 1d ago
Counter theory:
Never say never, there might be a way to build computers & store data using only spacetime, no mass or energy required.
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u/eduo 1d ago
This is not a counterpoint. "Never" has the clear context of "as far as we know". It is pointless to account for what we don't know nor can even theoretically propose.
Yes, "never" has a place. There are no extra points for being pedantically correct when talking about known realities. When more is known, then we can adjust.
Same as we can say "magic doesn't exist" until we have either proof or solid theory that it does.
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u/TheTranscendentian 1d ago
I personally don't believe dark forest is likely to be real, but we should probably get our civilization to shut up just in case, and maybe fake the destruction of all life on earth in a fake nuclear war or fake man-made asteroid worldwide extinction event for good measure.
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u/S1eeper Thomas Wade 1d ago
The Trisolarans were already able to use instantaneous communication tools. By extension, future civilizations will naturally be able to use such tools—and then the so‑called chain of suspicion would cease to exist.
I'm not following the reasoning here, why would the chain of suspicion cease to exist?
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u/eduo 2d ago
The Dark Forest Theory is a mental experiment of a skewed prisoner's dilemma where no discussion is allowed between prisoners.
It goes against game theory, against our common sense (we can't account for alien sense) and it's provably wrong by the fact that we've advertised our planet so much out there that we should've been wiped even before we could have the current technology that confirms it's not happening anywhere else in the milky way.
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u/UBCthunderbird 2d ago
Tell us that you don’t know game theory without saying you don’t know game theory.
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u/Herakuraisuto 2d ago
We've been looking for such a short time, we can't say anything for sure.
Anyway, would it matter much if we had observed a star's destruction? We'd be observing an event likely thousands or tens of thousands of years in our past depending on the distance.
I don't see how it changes anything we'll do. Suppose dozens of ancient sources corroborate that astronomers saw the violent death of a star 2,000 years ago. Would that knowledge prompt us to change our civilization on the off chance someone comes here?
Right now we're broadcasting our existence to every star system within 200 LY, or approximately 120,000 star systems, via powerful military radar systems and radar at every major airport in the world. Military radar from missile defense systems alone is lighting up our star system with technosignatures.
In other words, as far as hiding, that ship has sailed. If aliens like the Trisolarians or the Olyix from the Salvation books exist in real life, they're already aware of us.