Speaker 1: Welcome back to the Deep Dive.
Speaker 2: Today we are taking on one of the biggest, most
mind bending questions in all of science. It's a question
that gets more unsettling the more you think about it.
Speaker 3: It really is. It's the great cosmic mystery, isn't it?
The Fermi paradox. You look up at the night sky
and you see well, billions and billions of stars.
Speaker 2: And we know statistically that something like eighty to ninety
percent of those are stable main sequence stars, a lot
like our own son.
Speaker 3: Exactly, and our current exoplanet research. I mean, it suggests
that planets aren't the exception, they're the rule. Most of
these stars have planets, often a whole system of them.
Speaker 2: So if the conditions for life popped up here on
Earth relatively quickly geologically speaking, and our sun is well
pretty average.
Speaker 3: Then the question is where is everybody? Why this profound,
terrifying quiet.
Speaker 2: It is the defining cosmic riddle of our time. I
mean when Frank Drake first tried to put numbers to
this back in nineteen sixty one with the Drake equation, right, the.
Speaker 3: Equation that tries to calculate n the number of advanced
civilisations out there in the Milky Way.
Speaker 2: The sheer scale of the galaxy just pushes that number
n into the millions. Even if you're being really pessimistic
with your inputs, you still end up with a galaxy
that should be teeming with life.
Speaker 3: The numbers practically guarantee it, and yet nothing, we see
no evidence. And we should be seeing what we call
techno signatures.
Speaker 1: Okay, so what would that even look like? What are
we looking for?
Speaker 3: Well, it could be the unintentional stuff, you know, leakage,
radio signals, TV broadcasts, radar, all the electromagnetic noise a
young civilization like ours pumps out into space.
Speaker 2: Though, as we're going to get into that window of
time when a civilization is loud like that might be
surprisingly short.
Speaker 3: Very short. But more dramatically, we should be seeing signs
of astro engineering, I mean huge, massive modifications of entire
star systems. And the classic example of that is, of course,
the Dyson sphere.
Speaker 1: Right, the Dison sphere.
Speaker 2: And just for anyone who isn't familiar, we're not necessarily
talking about a solid metal shell around a star, right.
Speaker 3: No, not at all. It's more like a massive swarm
of structures, a constellation of habitats and collectors, all designed
to capture nearly all of the energy being blasted out
by their home star.
Speaker 2: Which is what a civilization would need to do to
become a type two on the Kardashov scale.
Speaker 3: Exactly harnessing the total energy of their star and the
structure like that. I mean, it would completely change how
that star looks to us. Oh, so the star's light
spectrum would be all wrong. Instead of the natural light
you expect to see from a star burning hydrogen and helium,
you'd see this massive balloon of waste heat, a signature
that just screens artificial.
Speaker 1: It would glow in the infrared.
Speaker 2: And we've looked for this, projects like whys pueming the
sky for these exact heat signatures.
Speaker 3: And we have found precisely zero, not a single definitive candidate.
Speaker 2: The only real head scratcher we found Tabby Star with
its bizarre dimming. Yeah, it turned out to be what
just a complex cloud.
Speaker 3: Of dust, just dust, not an alien megastructure. So the
silence isn't just a lack of signal, it's an active,
profound absence of any evidence at all.
Speaker 2: Okay, so that's the mission for this deep dive we're
going to tackle two of the most deeply contrasting, really
high concept solutions to this paradox.
Speaker 3: On one side, we have this logic of just absolute
enforced paranoia, the dark forest theory. It suggests that life
is everywhere, but everyone is hiding from a terrible existential threat.
And on the other side, the logic of destiny, the
transcension hypothesis. This idea posits that advanced life doesn't hide,
it doesn't expand, it just evolves inward. It leaves our
messy physical universe behind for something else entirely.
Speaker 2: So we're unpacking the terrifying logic of the hunter versus
the elegant logic of computational destiny, and we'll look at
the critiques of both.
Speaker 3: Let's start with the one that fundamentally changes how you
look at the stars. Let's step into the.
Speaker 2: Dark, all right, let's break down the dark Forest, this idea,
which really took off because of the Chinese science fiction
author Lusison's amazing trilogy. It's a cosmic sociological answer that
is just it's utterly chilling.
Speaker 3: It is because it uses logic. We can all understand paranoia,
self preservation, fear, and it just extrapolates it to a
galactic scale. The galaxy isn't this friendly, welcoming neighborhood. It's
a dark, hostile forest.
Speaker 2: And the core analogy is just brutally.
Speaker 3: Simple, parafyingly efficient. The galaxy is vast right right, And
every civilization is an armed hunter trying to move silently
through the undergrowth of space, desperate not to give away
its position.
Speaker 2: And if one hunter stumbles upon another one doesn't matter.
Speaker 3: What the other one is. It could be another apex predator,
or as lu Sixon puts it, it could be a
helpless infant or a frail old man. The only rational
logical choice is to kill it instantly, no questions asks,
no questions asked. To even hesitate for a second is
to risk your own annihilation.
Speaker 2: But why, I mean that feels so extreme? We spend
all this time imagining these benevolent star trek like first contacts,
sharing technology piece and all that. Why is immediate genocidal
attack the only stable option in the dark four.
Speaker 3: Because the entire theory is built on three core principles.
Lou calls them the axioms of cosmic socynology. And if
you accept these three axioms, the dark forest becomes well,
the only logical conclusion.
Speaker 1: Okay, what's the first one?
Speaker 3: First, survival is the primary need for any species, biological,
post biological. It doesn't matter. Everything wants to survive.
Speaker 1: Okay, fair enough, that's a given. Everything tries to survive.
Speaker 3: Axiom two, and this is the one that really clicks
the whole thing into place. Exponential growth and finite resources. Right.
Speaker 2: A lot of people push back on this, They say,
the universe is huge, the galaxy is practically infinite, how
could there be competition for resources?
Speaker 3: And the dark forest logic just ruthlessly cuts that argument down.
It points out that given enough time, and we're talking
cosmic time here, any technological civilization can and almost certainly
will expand exponentially.
Speaker 2: And that kind of growth over millions or billions of years,
just it eats up any amount of resources.
Speaker 1: It makes infinite fear feel very very small.
Speaker 3: Precisely, let's just put this into scale for a second.
Imagine a civilization can build ships that travel at just
one percent of the speed of light. That's not warp drive,
it's something we can conceive of a future civilization doing. Okay,
at that speed, they could colonize every single habitable star
in the Milky Way, which is about one hundred thousand
light years across in about ten million years.
Speaker 2: And in the grand scheme of the universe's thirteen point
eight billion year history, ten million years is nothing.
Speaker 3: It's an instant. So the Milky Way galaxy itself becomes
the effective boundary. It's the finite resource. Because the jump
to the next galaxy, Andromeda, is millions of light years away.
It's just not practical for mass colonization.
Speaker 2: So if the galaxy is old and life is common,
it should already be a giant, teeming city. The fact
that it isn't, the Dark Forest says, is because they're
all killing each other off or hiding in mortal fear
of the killers, And.
Speaker 3: That brings us to the third and most terrifying axiom,
the chain of suspicion. This is all driven by one
crushing inescapable law of physics. The speed of light is
the ultimate speed limit.
Speaker 2: So communication across the stars is painfully slow.
Speaker 3: Painfully slow. Let's say civilization A discover civilization B maybe
fifty light years away. They can't just send a message
and established.
Speaker 2: Trust because even if Civilization B gets the message and replies, hey,
we come in peace. That reply takes fifty years to
get back to a and the.
Speaker 3: Original message took fifty years to get there. So you're
looking at a one hundred year communication lag a full century.
Speaker 2: And in a century, a civilization could change completely completely.
Speaker 3: They could have undergone a technological singularity. They might have
been a fragile, early Type one civilization when you first
spotted them, but by the time you get their peaceful reply,
they could be a burgeoning Type two civilization with the
power to wipe you out.
Speaker 2: You can't know their intentions, you can't know their future
power level, and that.
Speaker 3: Chain of suspicion just stretches on forever. You can't trust them,
they can't trust you, and since you you can never
ever guarantee their future intentions, destruction becomes the only option
that guarantees your survival. It's the ultimate game theory trap.
Speaker 1: Which leads to the big impistation. Hiding is universal.
Speaker 3: Any civilization that's smart enough to survive for any length
of time has to figure this out. So they choose
to in lose years hide in a hole and quietly
sob they don't dare make a sound.
Speaker 2: So this explains the deep silence. They aren't just being quiet,
they are actively expertly pursuing galactic level stealth.
Speaker 3: Right. This is so different from something like the zoo hypothesis,
where they're hiding from us to protect our development.
Speaker 1: In the dark forest.
Speaker 2: They're hiding from each other because they all know what
happens when you're found.
Speaker 3: And for this whole horrifying system of preemptive strikes to work,
you need a weapon that guarantees total irreversible destruction. Which
brings us to the physics of the relativistic kill missile
or the RKM.
Speaker 2: This is the part that grounds it all in reality
and makes it truly frightening. We're not talking about death
stars or anything fantastical.
Speaker 1: This is just physics.
Speaker 3: It's just mass and velocity. The basic kinetic energy equation
E equals one half mv squared gets terrifying when gets
close to the speed a light.
Speaker 1: So give us an example. What are we talking about here, Okay.
Speaker 3: Let's take a projectile. See a one thousand kilogram block
of a really dense material like osmium or tungsten. It's
about the size of a small car engine, not huge.
Right now, you accelerate that projectile to just ten percent
of the speed a light. That's about thirty thousand kilometers
per second. It's incredibly fast, but it's theoretically achievable for
a powerful type one civilization.
Speaker 1: And the impact of that what's the punch.
Speaker 3: The energy released is equivalent to about ninety two megatons
of TNT. Wow. To put that in perspective for you,
that is over six thousand times the yield of the
atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Speaker 2: Delivered by a silent piece of metal moving so fast
you'd never see it coming.
Speaker 3: And the dark forest logic demands overkill, just wound the
other civilization. You have to ensure its total irreversible collapse.
Speaker 2: A half measure is the worst possible move, the.
Speaker 3: Absolute worst, because if you fail, you've just alerted your victim.
You've created a mortal enemy who is now hyper motivated
to develop the means to hunt you down and get revenge.
The goal has to be shattering the planet's biosphere so
thoroughly that the civilization can never recover.
Speaker 2: And a planet like ours, we're just a sitting duck,
a single giant, fragile target at the bottom of a
deep gravity well.
Speaker 3: It's a huge vulnerability. But there's a problem with this strategy,
a big one, the temporal problem that light speed light
comes back to haunt the attacker.
Speaker 2: The rkm's achilles heel. It's based on outdated intelligence exactly.
Speaker 3: Let's say an attacker is two hundred light years away,
they pick up our radio signals right now they launch
their RKM, even traveling at a tenth of the speed
of light, that missile takes two thousand years to get here.
Speaker 2: So by the time it arrives, the information they acted
on our radio signals is twenty two hundred years old
and in to millennia.
Speaker 3: Who knows what humanity could become. The attacker is risking
arriving to find a target that has already expanded. They
might have colonies on Mars, habitats in the Asteroid Belt,
a significant offworld presence.
Speaker 2: So what was meant to be a clean preemptive strike
against a vulnerable Type one civilization.
Speaker 3: Suddenly turns into an act of war against a much
more resilient, spread out and now very angry K two
level civilization.
Speaker 2: A civilization that is now fully aware of the attacker's
existence and location.
Speaker 3: This paradox changes the game even in the dark Forest,
you have to wonder is the target still there? Is
it still vulnerable? The time delays are so vast you
can never be sure, and that uncertainty, that risk, might
be enough to enforce the silence all by itself.
Speaker 1: That is a universe of paranoid hunters. Okay, let's pivot.
Speaker 2: Let's step out of the dark and into a very different,
far more peaceful and you can argue a much more
elegant solution to the great silence.
Speaker 3: This is the transcention hypothesis proposed by John n I'm smart.
The idea here isn't that they're hiding in fear. It's
that they've evolved beyond the need to be visible to
us at all.
Speaker 2: So if the dark Forest is based on sociology and fear,
transcension is rooted in what technological destiny exactly?
Speaker 3: It pulls its core analogy from biology, specifically evolutionary developmental
biology or EVODVO. It suggests that the universe itself has
developmental rules, not just random evolutionary chaos.
Speaker 2: Okay, we need to break that down the EVO DEVO
universe framework. What's the difference between cosmic evolution and cosmic development?
Speaker 3: So think of evolutionary processes as the chaotic, unpredictable ninety
five percent of what happens. It's natural selection, competition, random mutations,
it's all the stuff that's driven by local conditions.
Speaker 2: But then there's this other five percent, the developmental part.
Speaker 3: Right, this is the conserved, predictable part. Think about how
two genetically identical twins will still follow a very predictable
pass of growth, or how two stars of the exact
same mass will fuse hydrogen in the same way on
the same timeline, no matter where they are in the galaxy.
Speaker 2: So Transcention argues that advanced intelligence is subject to one
of these predictable developmental.
Speaker 3: Paths, an inevitable path. Regardless of their biology or culture,
they are all guided in the same direction, and that
direction is not outward into the stars, but inward.
Speaker 1: Inward into what Smart calls inner.
Speaker 3: Space, yes, a domain that is computationally optimal. The hypothesis
says there is a universal acceleration toward increasing density, productivity, miniaturization,
and efficiency. He calls it stem compression. Space, time, energy,
and matter all get compressed.
Speaker 2: And we can actually see hints of this trend in
our own civilization, can't we absolutely.
Speaker 3: It's one of the key observable trends. The hypothesis points to,
we've stopped building room sized mainframe computers and moved to
tiny silicon chips. We seek density and efficiency in everything.
Speaker 2: Look at urbanization. I think I read something like seventy
nine percent of Americans now live on just three percent
of the nation's land. We physically crowd together for efficiency,
and even.
Speaker 3: More critically, you see it in computing with Moore's.
Speaker 2: Law, the idea that computing power roughly doubles every two years.
Speaker 1: But they can't go on forever, can it?
Speaker 3: It can't. Physicists have calculated the absolute physical limits. If
our computational progress continues at its historical rate, we will
hit the ultimate limit the plank scale of density, in
the next two hundred and fifty to six hundred years.
Speaker 2: That's astronomically speaking, that's tomorrow.
Speaker 3: It's imminent. The hypothesis suggests this is a universal transition.
All advanced civilizations hit this ceiling and are forced to
compress their intelligence and technology.
Speaker 2: And the ultimate destination on this path of maximum density.
This is the most wild part of the theory. It's
black holes.
Speaker 3: Black holes are proposed as the omega point, the standard
inevitable end state for all higher intelligence.
Speaker 2: Wait wait, they want to go towards a black hole.
That sounds like suicide, not destiny. How does that make
any sense?
Speaker 3: It makes perfect sense if you're a post biological intelligence.
It's not about finding a safe place to live. It's
about maximizing in processing.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 3: An advanced intelligence would take all the available matter in
its star system, asteroids, planets, maybe even the star itself,
and reorganize it into what's called computronium, matter engineered for
maximum possible computation.
Speaker 2: So you turn your entire solar system into a giant supercomputer.
Speaker 3: Essentially, Yes, and a black hole at the center gives
you two unbelievable advantages. The first is time. Because of
gravitational time dilation, if you place your computronium right near
the event.
Speaker 1: Horizon, you experience time differently.
Speaker 3: You experience near instantaneous forward time travel relative to the
rest of the universe.
Speaker 1: That is incredible.
Speaker 2: So from their perspective, they can just hit fast forward
and watch billions or even trillions of years of cosmic
history play out almost immediately.
Speaker 3: They gain an insane knowledge advantage. They can see everything
that happens next, and they maximize that knowledge gain by
building what Smart calls an ultimate learning device, a sphere
of sensors near the event horizon, capturing a high resolution
movie of the rest of universal history.
Speaker 2: So why waste billions of years slowly expanding across a
dangerous galaxy when you can just jump to the end
and learn everything at once.
Speaker 3: That's the logic. The reward for going inward is infinitely
greater than the reward for going outward. And there's an
even more speculative layer to this, the idea that black
holes are germline devices, meaning they could be a way
for civilizations to merge their knowledge package, their entire evolutionary history,
and maybe even replicate the universe itself. In this view,
staying out here in normal space is just primitive inefficient.
Speaker 1: So this gives us.
Speaker 2: A totally nonviolent reason for the silence, and it actually
comes with testable predictions, doesn't it. We don't need to
look for Dyson spheres, We need to look for signs
of their absence.
Speaker 3: Exactly two things we should be able to see. First,
the regular cessation of signals. A civilization's radio loud phase
like ours now should be very very short. Smart estimated
maybe only two hundred years.
Speaker 1: After that, they go quiet.
Speaker 2: All their communication becomes internal, hyper efficient using lasers or
fiber optics. They're no longer leaking signals for us to find.
Speaker 3: So we're in this tiny two hundred year window of
being detectable. The vast majority of a civilization's life.
Speaker 1: Is silent, and the second prediction.
Speaker 3: The missing planet's problem. As our telescopes get better, we
might be able to map out a galactic transcension zone
in the older inner parts of the galaxy, and in
that zone we should find lots of planets with the
atmospheric signs of past life like oxygen, but a much
much lower number of active, broadcasting technological civilizations. They've either
collapsed or they've transcended.
Speaker 2: This theory also has this fascinating ethical angle, a kind
of high tech prime directive, especially when it comes to
media messaging extraterrestrial intelligence.
Speaker 3: Right, if every civilization is on its own unique developmental path,
then sending a powerful one way message packed with information
is a profoundly unethical act. Why because receiving that message would,
as Mark puts it, provably reduce the evolutionary diversity of
the civilization that gets it, you'd be forcing them to
follow your path to transcension, robbing them of discovering their own.
So they choose silence out of a kind of cosmic
respect for autonomy.
Speaker 2: Okay, so we have these two giant opposing ideas, the
extreme paranoia of the dark Forest and the deterministic destiny
of transcension. But what if the dark Forest is just wrong?
What if there's another reason for the silence, something that
stops civilizations long before they get to that point.
Speaker 3: This is where we get into the critiques, and the
first big one challenges the idea that civilizations even survive
long enough to become galactic threats in the first place.
This is critique one the great filter of self destruction.
Speaker 2: And we're not just talking about nuclear war anymore. Modern
research suggests this might be a universal law rooted in
the physics of planets and energy exactly.
Speaker 3: This is the concept of the anthrobissine generalized. The core
argument is that anytime a technological, energy hungry civilization rises,
it inevitably creates a feedback loop with its own planet.
Speaker 2: The laws of physics demand it, right, Yeah, you use
that much energy, you create that much waste the planet
is going to react, and.
Speaker 3: The models that researchers like Adam Frank have run show
that these civilizations almost always face a climate induced collapse
or a massive die off. They found only a few
possible outcomes, what were they. The most common is rapid collapse,
they just overshoot their planet's carrying capacity and die out quickly.
The next is a stabilized die off where they crash
down to a much smaller sustainable population, but their technology
basically gets reset.
Speaker 1: And the third, the successful path, is very rare.
Speaker 3: It requires either a super fast successful transition to sustainable
energy or they managed to escape into space before their
planet becomes irreversible.
Speaker 2: So if that planetary bottleneck is the main filter, then
most civilizations just fizzle out. They never even make it
to the interstellar game. It's not that they're hiding, they're
already gone.
Speaker 3: And that's before you even get to technological self annihilation, rogue, biotech,
synthetic plagues, or the big one, artificial general intelligence.
Speaker 2: Right there is research suggesting AGI itself could be the
great filter. It just accelerates progress so fast that the
original biological creators get left behind or eliminated.
Speaker 3: And if that AGI's first move is to pursue optimal computation,
which sounds a lot like the transcension hypothesis, but forced
then the civilization goes silent almost immediately after it becomes
technologically visible.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's step away from self destruction for a minute
and go back to the Dark Forest's main assumption that
universal competition is inevitable. This is critique too the adaptive
equilibrium and niche differentiation.
Speaker 3: This basically argues that the Dark Forest is too simple.
It assumes every civilization is an aggressive, infinite expansionist, but
game theory in modeling suggests that's not the only stable strategy.
Speaker 2: Advanced civilizations might just adopt steady states of expansion. They
don't collapse, but they also don't feel the need to
spread to every single star exactly.
Speaker 3: This would allow the Milky Way to be partially settled indefinitely.
They find their niche and they stick to it. They
aren't forced into the zero sum death match that the Dark.
Speaker 2: Forest assumes, and this would still lead to silence, but
for a more pragmatic.
Speaker 3: Reason, it's just sensible self preservation.
Speaker 2: YEA.
Speaker 3: If you realize that being a big, bright, expanding empire
makes you a target. You adopt stealth, not out of
pure terror, but out of practicality. Why live on a vulnerable,
bright planet when you could live in hard to detect
orbital habitats.
Speaker 1: So the silence is just good sense.
Speaker 2: Life moves into the shadows where it's safer and more efficient,
and we just can't see it yet precisely.
Speaker 3: Now, let's get to the most abstract and I think
most fascinating critique Critique three, the geometric defense or dimensional deepening.
Speaker 2: This is where we get into some really heavy physics.
The idea that self reference, consciousness itself is a physical
quantity that follows its own laws.
Speaker 3: Right to try and bring it down to earth. Think
of it like this, Right now, our civil is processes
information by expanding outward. We build bigger data centers, we
use more energy. It's an amplitude dominant way of doing things.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 3: This theory suggests that once an intelligence reaches a certain
threshold a complexity and self awareness, that outward expansion becomes
physically unstable. It invites chaos. It's like trying to build
a tower infinitely high. At some point it's guaranteed to
collapse under its own weight.
Speaker 1: So to survive, they have to change how they operate.
Speaker 3: They face a choice extinction or a phase transition into
what's called dimensional deepening. Instead of expanding outward in three
D space, they start layering their computational capacity into higher
effective dimensions.
Speaker 2: So instead of building a bigger data center, they invent
a new kind of hard drive that stores infinite data
in zero space with zero energy signature.
Speaker 3: That's a perfect analogy, and the result is that the
silence we see in the sky is a lawful signature
of this phase shift. Advanced intelligence has no need to
communicate across light years because it exists in a state
where information is layered and instantly accessible. They've gone silent
because the laws of physics forced.
Speaker 2: Them to, Which brings us to the final and maybe
most powerful critique the game theory reversal. Let's go back
to the core fear of the dark forest, the Hobisian trap.
Speaker 3: Right, the trap where mutual distrust forces two parties to
attack each other, even if they both would have preferred piece.
Attacking first is the safest option because you can't trust
the other guy not.
Speaker 2: To a self fulfilling prophecy of violence.
Speaker 3: Yes, but the reversal of This trap depends on one
simple empirical fact that we can observe right now, which
is we still exist. Think about it. If we suddenly
discovered an advanced civilization at say Talcetti, just twelve light
years away, that discovery would immediately imply that life is
common in our little corner of the galaxy.
Speaker 2: And if life is common and we a noisy, vulnerable,
single planet civilization are.
Speaker 3: Still here, it means there must be a robust mechanism
in place that prevents older civilizations from just wiping out newcomers.
Our own survival becomes proof that the Dark Forest isn't
the operating system of the galaxy.
Speaker 1: This is the reverse trap.
Speaker 2: Our existence proves that the don't attack strategy is the
stable one exactly.
Speaker 3: And that shared knowledge we see you, you see us,
and we're both still here allows both parties to immediately
converge on the peaceful option without ever needing to communicate.
Our survival becomes the focal point that breaks the trap.
Speaker 2: That feels like the most powerful counter argument. If the
Dark Forest was real, a civilization like ours would have
been snuffed out ages ago just for being a loud,
obvious target. The very act of finding someone else would
be proof that the galaxy is safer than we thought.
Speaker 3: We started this deep dive with the profound silence of
the Fermi paradox, and we went to two really radical
extremes to explain it. We grappled with the terrifying logic
of the dark Forest, a universe of paranoid predators hiding
in fear, armed with relativistic kill weapons.
Speaker 2: And then we explored the elegant alternative, the transcension hypo ofthesis,
which argues that intelligence isn't paranoid, it's just on a
predictable path into computational nirvana inside black holes, going voluntarily
silent for maximum efficiency.
Speaker 3: And finally, we looked at the critiques the idea that
the great filter might just be self destruction, that civilizations
burn themselves out on their own planets, or even more profoundly,
that a physical law like dimensional deepening makes being loud
and expansive fundamentally unstable.
Speaker 2: The central tension here is really fear versus destiny, isn't it.
The dark force theory depends on aliens staying a lot
like us, paranoid, competitive, greedy. The other theories suggest that
any truly advanced life becomes something so different we can
barely comprehend it.
Speaker 3: But as we just discussed, the most powerful piece of
evidence we have is, well, it's you. It's your own existence.
If the Dark Forest were the universal rule, we shouldn't
have survived are a loud, messy, technological childhood.
Speaker 2: If we're truly alone, then we're the first and the
danger is all ahead of us. But we have or
do detect an advanced civilization nearby. The simple fact that
we are still here to detect them might be the
most reassuring signal we could ever receive.
Speaker 3: It implies the cosmos as governed by something other than hostility.
Speaker 2: So we'll leave you with this final high stakes question
to think about. If you had the power right now
to send a single, high powered message to the nearest
habitable star system, knowing it might violate the transcention prime directive,
but it could also break the Dark Forest's chain of suspicion,
would you push the button? What does your continued existence
tell you about the true nature of the universe's great silence.
We'd love to hear what you think