vendredi 10 novembre 2017

Dark Forest Theory

Briefly, dark forest theory is a theory that the universe is a dark forest where it's kill or be killed. The optimum strategy is to hide and hunt, silently taking out anything that might be a threat to you, gobbling up anything that might increase your chances of survival. There's no avoiding infinite chains of suspicion, so the wisest choice, if you meet someone, is to assume hostility on their part. Infant civs like us, who leak like a sieve in the EM spectrum are quickly gobbled up, which is one reason that explains the fermi paradox: most civs hide, suspicious of every other possible civ. The ones that don't hide already got poached.

The problem with this line of thought is that we're not like that. We haven't cloaked ourselves. We broadcast welcome signals. And even if we're a rarity, if there's a lot of civs in the galaxy, there are a bound to be a few more like us. Given enough civs, two friendly ones will eventually find themselves near each other and make contact and cooperate. Wouldn't cooperation lead to faster tech progress than mutual distrust? And if, by some fluky chance, there are a cluster of friendly naive cooperative civs all right next to each other, might they become extremely powerful? Powerful enough to swat down the lone hunter-killers and establish some rules to live by in the forest?

Thoughts?


via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/2zAlJGe

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