Name: Why We Should NOT Look For Aliens - The Dark Forest
Uploaded: 2022-01-23T17:52:15.000Z
Duration: 12 min 12 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

The Universe is incredibly big and seems full of potential for life, with billions of habitable

The second conditional

If an advanced civilization had the technology to travel between the stars, at just 0.1%

of the speed of light, It could colonize our galaxy in roughly 100 million years.

Which is not that long given the billions of years the milky way has existed – so

in principle any spacefaring civilization should be able to spread rapidly over huge

And yet we see nothing, hear nothing, the universe seems empty.

This is the Fermi Paradox, which we have discussed in more detail in other videos.

Confronted with the seemingly empty universe, humanity faces a dilemma.

We desperately want to know if we are alone in the Milky Way.

We want to call out and reveal ourselves to anyone watching but that could be the last

Maybe it's full of civilizations but they are hiding from each other.

Maybe the civilizations that attracted attention in the past were wiped away by invisible arrows.

This is the Dark Forest solution to the Fermi paradox.

The hunter awakes in his hiding place and carefully listens for suspicious noises from

Another night has passed without incident.

He considers calling out to others to end his loneliness but stops himself at the last

All living things seek to survive, secure resources and multiply.

Their greatest obstacle are other living things that share the same objective.

Competition between species favored the survival of beings with advantageous traits.

Our ancestors were inventive, competitive, expansionist and greedy for resources, which

led to them winning the competition for our planet.

Today, most other animals are so utterly at our mercy that we wipe out about a dozen species

a day, just as an unintentional byproduct of how we like to run things.

From us cultures emerge, that also compete with each other.

Competitive and expansionary cultures spread faster and further and merge with, subdue

If we look at our history it becomes clear: We are dangerous.

Not just to others but also to ourselves.

Our human nature has driven us to take over every corner of our planet and soon we will

look to the stars, both to expand our domain and ensure access to ever more resources.

And then we might stumble upon others trying to do the same thing.

It is likely that the competition of life also takes place on far away planets, so it

is logical to assume that an alien civilization that came to dominate their planet would be

But if they are similar to us, they, too, may be dangerous.

As the hunter sneaks through the dark forest all alone he knows that there might be others

He can't know their intentions, if they are aggressive or not.

The hunter knows he would kill to ensure his own survival, so he has to assume that they

And it might be that if he stumbles upon another hunter, the one that shoots first survives.

None of this means that conflict is unavoidable.

So far the progress of the modern world seems to have made us more peaceful, not more violent.

Maybe this is true for other civilizations too, that eventually progress means less conflict,

Different alien civilizations also should vary from the mild and peaceful to the malevolent

The existential problem we are facing is that when we meet others between the stars, we

have no way of telling who is peaceful or aggressive and what their true intentions

Similarly, they might not understand or trust our intentions even if we tell them that we

On top of that, if we did discover another civilization, and they discovered us, the

light years between us would mean years of communication delay.

Both sides would be in a state of uncertainty, wondering if the wisest move is to just attack,

because there's another serious issue: technological explosions and first strike advantage.

We do not know where the limits of technology are, but we do know how much technological

A few hundred or thousand years can turn conflict with uncertain results into a one sided massacre.

Caesar's legions would stand no chance against Napoleon's army with their cannons and muskets.

Which would be eradicated by artillery from the first world war.

Which would not stand a chance against today's drones and guided missiles.

So the power level of different civilizations may vary massively and even if not, between

the time it takes us to detect another civilization and us saying “hi” we might already be

Which is bad enough, but the nature of interstellar conflict makes this worse.

If your opponent is light years away, sending an invasion fleet takes so long that by the

time it arrives it might be hopelessly obsolete.

So, war between civilizations might be just about eliminating the other to remove an existential

Someone else who might be so scared of you that they attack the first chance they get.

In this environment, the only way to guarantee a win is to strike with such force and speed

that the target has no chance of survival or time to counter-attack or escape to seek

The stakes are the highest possible with no room for error.

If we assume that the majority of civilizations live on planets that leaves them pretty vulnerable

– all you need to do is throw something massive at a planet to make it uninhabitable.

So the ultimate interplanetary annihilation weapon is probably something like a Relativistic

Kill Vehicle – a missile shot at a planet at a significant fraction of the speed of

For example, a missile the size of a person going 95% the speed of light has as much energy

If you shot a few dozen at the civilization you wanted to wipe out, success would be fairly

certain – even a single hit would suffice.

This is not that absurd of an idea – a civilization only slightly above us on the Kardashev scale

would have enough energy to send multiple strikes against every planet it suspects of

What makes these weapons so sinister is how much they favor a first strike, since they

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Why We Should NOT Look For Aliens - The Dark Forest

assume

significant

eliminate

reveal