[lifeformed]

"Timescales that makes sense" may be a human reasoning but not necessarily the reasoning of inconceivably advanced timeless civilizations. Sure, that planet of fish may be harmless now, but what about in a quick three billion years when they have FTL and AGI and Von Neuman probes and Dyson spheres and antimatter bombs? Easier to click the delete button now to save the trouble later.

[the_af]

The laws of physics apply to the civilization of alien fish too, it's not a human specific timescale. They have nothing to fight over with us, no reason to spend effort developing weapons to reach us, if they do have weapons they'd have a much higher probability of wiping themselves up first, and no way for their weapons to reach us within a time boundary that makes sense for any sentient race.

Dark Forest seems to be based on a scifi/fiction need to have conflict with "the other", which is thrilling but doesn't necessarily reflect the real cosmos.

[lifeformed]

That's still making assumptions based on our human understanding of the cosmos. Our "laws of physics" could be a localized understanding in our region of space, and much, much, much more powerful entities could operate outside of that, where our perception of time and scale does not meaningfully apply. It would be near-zero cost to destroy potential threats, so they might as well. It's like humans eliminating pests and pathogens. It's standard hygiene, a low cost preventative practice. Nobody is targeting a single bacterium, they're just wiping down dirty spots. It's an interesting concept in the book because of how imaginative it gets with scaling.

[the_af]

I don't think it gets the scale right, and I don't think it's low cost or even sensible for a civilization to do. I think it's mostly a scifi book's plot device, at best a non-serious thought experiment.

[red-iron-pine]

the dark forest is based on trying to answer the fermi paradox as to how the universe is so big but we haven't seen any other sign of life anywhere

answer: because they're all dead, or in hiding

the author then writes a book around that idea

[the_af]

Isn't this more or less what I just said?

Except I added in this and other comments why it's not a very convincing explanation for Fermi's paradox either.

In other words,

> answer: because they're all dead, or in hiding

I understand this is what the Dark Forest theory argues, but it works because it's meant for a scifi book; it's just not a very good explanation for the real universe.