This Week, I Learned; About the Dark Forest theory and the Fermi paradox

 This Week, I Learned;

If you have read The Three-Body Problem trilogy (sometimes called the Remembrance of Earth’s Past series), then you will be familiar with a lot of scientific theories. This is something the author, Liu Cixin, does really well. Liu makes himself familiar with current theories and twists their application to a science-fiction setting. One of the running themes of the series is the Dark Forest, which is also the title of the second book in the series.

The Dark Forest is a theory that aims to answer the Fermi Paradox.

While working at Los Alamos, Enrico Fermi - during a discussion with his colleagues - announced, “Where is everybody?”. This was in response to the topic of conversation, aliens and UFOs. Fermi reasoned that if there are billions of stars in the Galaxy, there is a high probability of an Earth-like planet in the habitable zone of that star. Surely, after 4.5 billion years (the age of our solar system), the Galaxy should be teaming with extraterrestrial life?

This brief summary is the basis for the Fermi Paradox, and there are numerous answers to it. Great Filters and Dark Forest are some of the solutions that have been talked about more.

“The universe is a dark forest. Every civilisation is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life—another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod—there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out. This is the picture of cosmic civilisation. It’s the explanation for the Fermi Paradox.” - Liu Cixin, The Dark Forest

 Above is the explanation of The Dark Forest solution from the Dark Forest book. I find this passage chilling, and it’s no wonder that this theory has inspired many stories. While this second book of the Three-Body Trilogy gives a horrifying depiction of the fate of the Human race, the third book, Death’s End, puts an optimistic spin on this idea.

In Death’s End, we see millennia into the future, and even though the above quote stays true, the accord that is reached is that the most valuable thing a civilisation holds is the information of where their home is. With this secret comes the possibility of trade since if the other party tries to kill you, the rest of your civilisation is safe.

Another possible solution, Great Filters, can be seen as less damning for our future. I state that there are certain blocks that have stopped life from reaching our point; maybe the components of life are rarer than we thought, and this leaves us as possibly the sole survivors of these filters. On the other hand, a filter could be ahead of us, something that every civilisation has failed to pass before and has resulted in the obliteration of their species. One thought for this future filter has been, what if, during the development of technology, we are bound to make something that causes this destruction? Something that backs this up is that while developing nuclear bombs at Los Alamos, they weren’t a hundred per cent sure that something catastrophic would occur.

I find this a really interesting paradox that my mind keeps coming back to. I hope you have learnt something today and come back next week to see what else I have learned about the things around me.