"The Dark Forest" by Liu Cixin is sci-fi, but I don't think it's too hand-wavy. It presents a pretty logical answer to the Fermi Paradox, based on a couple obvious axioms.
- Attacking a planet that may or may not be a threat eventually is a much more expensive, noisy and slow endeavor than a shot in the dark in a forest.
(you can also think about all the technical hurdles such a thing would take, also remember that the fast something goes the harder it is to maneuver and to stop at the destination), don't underestimate all the kinds of noise that such thing will create and can be traced back to its origin.
- No species on Earth do that kind of unprovoked attack, unless it is very cheap and quick (and riskless)
So no, I think there are many better explanations than simply the dark forest one
I think that's where you're wrong. For a sufficiently advanced civilization, destroying another that's around our level would only entail destroying our planet. Hell, destroy the whole solar system to be sure. A "simple" way to do that would be to make the sun go supernova, or destroy it somehow.
How would you do that? There's a tremendous amount of energy already in it, it's releasing it gradually for now but what if there were ways to make it release all at once? One potential approach would be to throw something at it at relativistic speeds (you'd imagine accelerating things to near-lightspeed would be a pretty obvious milestone in the tech tree).
For an advanced civilization, this is pretty easy; they'd probably be able to do it routinely from a mobile spaceship so they don't have to give away their home star's position.
It's a reasonably logical answer but it's not the simplest answer. The Dark Forest hypothesis assumes that life is so common in the universe that encountering and being existentially threatened by other life is a serious threat. But what reason is there to believe that life is that common? For Liu Cixin's books this assumption makes sense because it makes the story possible, but in real life there's simply no evidence to justify such an assumption.
Well we have no idea of the values for most variables in the Drake equation, so of course there will be some assumptions. Dark Forest is an answer to the Fermi Paradox in the case where intelligent life isn't rare.
If you read the books, you'll notice that they talk about "hiding gene" and "cleansing gene"; these are traits that civilizations acquire as they evolve.
I think that this has real-world implications in terms of how we conduct our SETI (search for extra-terrestrial intelligence); we should be careful of our radio emissions and things like sending a powerful signal / message to another star should probably be avoided.
Shit entertainment channel masquerading as educational content. If you think you learned something from that video then why haven't you explained it yourself?
The simple fact of the matter is that there is no empirical evidence for life outside of Earth. My guess is that it exists out there somewhere, but there's no good basis for believing that life is as common as the Dark Forest hypothesis requires.
Dark forest is way down at the bottom of "plausible explanations"
It just sounds like it makes sense for 3 min then it really, really doesn't
Taking the (original) dark forest problem and applying it to civilizations in space sounds like a Strawman problem