FaceDeer

FaceDeer, 1 year ago

The "Dark Forest" hypothesis is riddled with holes, it only works as the premise for a scary science fiction series and not as a real-world Fermi Paradox solution. The main problem with it is that life on Earth has been readily detectable for two billion years and there's no reason a paranoid xenocidal alien species wouldn't want to wipe that out preemptively, so we'd already be long dead if it were actually the case.

I don't see why it's scary to be the first. To the contrary, that means that our descendants will get to colonize the reachable volume of the cosmos without risk of running into a more advanced species that squashes them like bugs (whether deliberately or simply by having already occupied all the useful resources).

FaceDeer, 1 year ago

It depends on why they're being quiet. In this scenario I think it'd be likely that they're being quiet for some reason that's literally incomprehensible to human-level minds, since they're likely millions or billions of years more advanced than we are. So it's impossible to predict what, if anything, might provoke them to break that silence.

I guess sending a probe there and having it physically poke them might get some kind of reaction, at least.