[piskov]

All the quotes miss the simplicity of 3 rules of Cosmology or whatever it was called in the trilogy.

—

The essence of the Dark Forest theory:

1. Survival is the primary goal of any civilization.

2. Life expands to fill all available space, but resources are finite. Roughly speaking, like humans cutting down forests to expand cities without caring what happens to the ants living there — if expansion is needed, it’s done.

3. Progress is unstoppable. If one group hasn’t mastered fusion yet, they will say in a thousand years — and then they’ll come for the others because of points 1 and 2.

—

The author builds the novel on the idea that we shouldn’t be sending signals into space, but rather stay quiet and avoid drawing attention. Because in his view, once one civilization detects a signal from another, the safest move is to eliminate it immediately — without taking the risk of finding out whether it’s friendly (for now) or already not.

[gmuslera]

Another factor that as far I remember was present in the novel was technological acceleration, by the time you detected the first tries of "turning on the lights" of an emerging civilization many light years away, that civilization is not an emerging one anymore, and even more by the time you can get there, and they may eventually be able to do something to harm or destroy your own civilization, so it is not something that should be left unchecked.

And technological acceleration is a constant in that universe, the attackers were just a bit ahead of us in technological advancement, lets say a few hundred years, not the millions or billions of years ahead of the very bad ones.

[squigz]

#2 doesn't seem to consider how much stuff there is out there. Why bother harvesting resources from a gravity-laden planet when you can almost certainly get them from asteroids or other places?

Furthermore, while we may not care about "ants", we do - at least to some degree - care about the impact on wildlife and the environment. Probably not as much as we should, but our concern has only grown over time, so I'm not sure I buy the suggestion that a super-advanced civilization would go the extreme opposite way and not care about the impact it has on "lesser" life forms.

[Towaway69]

> Why bother harvesting resources from a gravity-laden planet when you can almost certainly get them from asteroids or other places?

Why bother digging up a carbon laden energy source from the depths of a gravity laden planet instead of using solar energy or wind or any other energy source that is less harmful?

Seems really illogical … oh wait, thats just an intelligent life-form.

[winterbloom]

I mean we could be just like rodents to them, I won't think people care about uprooting rodents