[dgregd]

What do you think about the dark forest hypothesis from The Three-Body Problem book? It seems reasonable to me. Are there any sociologist or math papers that describe the game theory behind the dark forest strategy and prove it?

[Enginerrrd]

I'm not very impressed. In general, I think that the people who have hypothesized about the fermi paradox and the natural paths of civilizations have tended to dramatically overestimated the actual detectability of other civilizations, and the feasible growth ceiling of other civilizations by several orders of magnitude.

We could not detect ourselves even in a nearby solar system. And as we've gotten more developed, we tend to be MORE frugal with our energy usage.

[ahazred8ta]

One major weakness of the Dark Forest hypothesis is that it presumes the bad guys have had interstellar travel for a long long time ... and yet in all that time they have never come to our system and left any traces behind. They didn't do anything bad to us for 4 billion years, but now they're going to do bad things because we have radio?

[pavel_lishin]

But we're also not a threat - even if we did detect another civilization, we'd have no way to attack them.

I don't buy the Dark Forest hypothesis at all, but it's also just not particularly a factor for us at our current stage of technological development, any more than a stone-age tribe has to worry about Mutually Assured Destruction via nuclear ICMBs.

[api]

The last point is critical. Maybe super advanced civilizations actually become so efficient that they use less energy than we do now.

[HybridCurve]

It seems to me that any technologically advanced civilization that is capable of completely annihilating another at such distances would likely be equally capable of avoiding detection, thereby reducing the potential threat level posed by the less advanced civilization. Avoidance would seem to be the best strategy unless the civilization posed a direct and imminent threat. Otherwise, the more advanced beings risk exposing themselves (by deploying a weapon) and declaring to the universe that they are both hostile and aggressive to others.