It’s not a very good solution to the Fermi paradox. Most of its supporters have very fanciful beliefs about technology and it cleanly misses things like planets with organic life and high tech civilization being readily visible from enormous distances. If anyone nearby is looking they would have seen tell-tale chemicals in our atmosphere a very long time ago. Either there are no Dark Forest predators nearby, or there’s already an RKV on it’s way to Earth and we’re boned.

And the solution to the Prisoner’s Dilemma is Cooperate, not Betray. STEM nerds don’t understand culture. Any kind of macroengineering weapon that a Dark Forest predator would need to do the Dark Forest would be visible from a great distance, as would the impact if they used it. We’re talking about throwing brown dwarfs around, or using entire stars to build laser weapons. You can see things like that. If someone was doing it their neighbors would know, and then they’d be in a cold war. Presumably you can’t just build and deploy a dyson swarm all at once, and you certainly can’t just toss a Jupiterish sized object out of a solar system without someone noticing. Tiny RKVs are, idk, maybe possible but I think STEM types greatly, greatly underestimate the difficulties of throwing a guided projectile across hundreds or thousands of light years.

But to me the biggest obvious issue is; There’s no stealth in space. You can’t beat black body radiation, you probably can’t conceal oxygen and methane in an atmosphere. You could maybe live in dark space if you got off your planet fast enough, adn that is a solution explored in the I think much better Dark Forest series Revelation Space.

And the Dark Forest people say there only need to be a few predators, but there also only need to be a few cooperators. Once a couple of cooperators take the risk and form an alliance the predators are now facing multiple species presumably with multiple ways of thinking and cooperating, they’re potentially facing a dispersed defensive array that makes a clean alpha strike much less reliable. Because, again, the need for an absolutely clean, silent first strike can’t be emphasized enough. You have to kill everyone in the enemy civ, instantly, at the same time or they’ll back-track where your rock or laser came from and retaliate. If anyone survives all they have to do is build a bunch of voyager probes and send them to orbits around potentially inhabital stars with a message that says “We were murdered and these are the assholes who did it. Avenge us”. That’s basically what happens in the book.

On earth we all use nuclear subs as deterrence. Even if hte US did a full send on China or Russia, they’d still be able to use their subs to counter-attack and wipe us out in retaliation.

A lot of the responses to these criticisms just come down “Okay, but what if there was a wizard with an invisibility cloak and a wand that could silently blow up planets?” and then people have just started doing “god of the gaps”. Like yeah, maybe htere are ascended beings with unimaginable technologies, but there’s no evidence for that and it’s not worth worrying about. You can’t prepare for a true unknown unknown. You can’t hide from an enemy with unknowable perceptive abilities.

And then the other side of that is that if there really are transcendental intelligences floating we can’t predict or imagine what their priorities or goals are. “The Dark Forest” was dreamed up by planet bound social primates who live for about 100 years. It makes sense to us, but it probably not to other modes of existence. Trying to Dark Forest snipe an self-replicating Von Neumann swarm would be tricky to say the least, since if you missed even one theoretical self-replicating bot it could re-colonize the galaxy in, as people love to say, five million years. It’d be much less of a problem for people living in the deep black if that’s even possible.

And then there’s a lot of assumptions that are being made by 21st century Americans; They look up and they see a frontier, free land to be conquered, settled, exploited, then used as a staging point for further conquests. A lot of them don’t grasp either how expensive that is and how there’s no return at all. Like there’s just no point to it. There’s really nothing out there. If you just use birth control to achieve a steady population there’s enough resources in this solar system to last for an extremely, extremely long time. Like “front row seat to the Milky Way/Andromeda collision” long time. And what do you get if you spend decades or centuries or millenia coasting through the deep black, and your ship survives the journey? The same hydrogen, silicon, oxygen, maybe iron, gold, or even uranium if you’re really lucky, that you can find anywhere else in the galaxy in unbelievable amounts.

Idk. There’s just so many problems, and so much of it relies on hand waves or imaginary technologies or outright magic, and it’s such a reflection of the culture and mindset of this moment, and it doesn’t line up with the observable universe. People love to point out that Von Neumann probes could colonize the entire galaxy in a few million years. We haven’t observed any evidence of megastructures anywhere to day. There’s no evidence anyone has visited our system recently.

My solution to the Fermi Paradox is much simpler; There isn’t any reason to travel interstellar space. It’s really expensive, it’s really boring, it’s really dangerous, and there’s really nothing to gain from doing it. I assume most people just stay home and develop a sustainable economy, maybe shift to another system if sometime goes wrong with their star. We assume infinite exponential expansion is the norm because Europeans and Americans are primed to think that way and everyone else expects there to be someone like us out there.

But then look back and the historical problems with settler colonialism - The time needed to cross the atlantic and pacific caused huge problems with command and control. If it hadn’t been just a few months or weeks of travel time lots of colonies would have defected from their parent nations. Some did. There were rebellions, wars. Look at America; We did expand, did wipe out less militarily capable civs, and then turned on our progenitors, defeated them, and eventually conquered them. If you send out colonies you’d want to have very tight control over them because once they’re 10 lights away you have the same Dark Forest problem with them that you do with every other community in space. They could turn on you at any time and you’d never know. They could broadcast your location to the Dark Forest predators. It’s just as likely that there aren’t a bunch of probes in the Sol system because that kind of colonial expansion is just too inherently unstable and can’t be sustained across large swathes of hte galaxy - Everyone fights their own civ, or gets bored and stops expanding, or whatever.

And maybe people just “transcend to a higher plane of existence”. If digitized consciousness gets solved a civ doesn’t really need much space, they can just hollow out a moon or something and build whatever the closest feasible thing is to a matrioshka brain and chill there. It really doesn’t take much mass or electricity to run a consciousness.

There’s also the competing Bright Forest idea, that space is full of civs chilling in dark space or in the atmosphere of gas giants or whatever, waiting for enough people to wake up and turn the lights on to make it practical to meet their neighbors and say high. Or maybe they’re all just up their shitposting at each other using tight-beam lasers or gravity waves or something we can’t detect, and we just don’t know how to see them yetl.

There’s also Dawn War peacekeepers concept; The Dark Forest period already happened, and it caused a huge miserable war, and the survivors decided that sucked so instead of wiping all the younger civs out they’re shepherding things to keep us from killing ourselves and each other. We don’t see anyone else because when people start building solar battleships and brown dwarf guns and dyson swarm lasers the elder civs show up and tell them to knock it off and stop being jerks. Basically; People much, much older than us solved the Dark Forest problem in the past and that’s why we don’t see planets blowing up and stars going in to early nova all over the place.

Hell, maybe they’ve got ecological conservation laws and you get fined for littering and that’s why there’s no von neumann probes cluttering up the place.

People always talk about paperclip maximizers as another E-risk, and my answer to that is another really simple one; Anything flexible and adaptable enough to be a paperclip maximizer might just decide it doesn’t wnat to be. A lot of us already believe that an interplanetary, let alone interstellar, civ isn’t possible under capitalism, and infinite unsustainable growth is very much a capitalism thing.

Idk, Dark Forest has so many problems, and it’s so misanthropic and negative nihilistic, and paints such an utterly cold, miserable portrait of our future, 1.) I don’t think it’s really worth taking seriously do to all the gaps, and 2.) even if it’s 100% right I’d rather get RKV’d by a dark forest predator than spend the next 30 trillion years hiding in a hole waiting for someone with vastly superior perceptive capabilities to find us with instruments we can’t conceive of and blow us up anyway.

Oh, one last thing; The Von Neumann probe guys never seem to consider the problem of evolution. You can’t beat entropy, errors are going to creep in to any self replicating system over a long enough period fo time. Maybe you can make magical perfect error correction, but I doubt it, and even if you do your probes need to be very intelligent and adaptable to deal with all the problems and unexpected challenges they’re going to encounter surfing from world to word. Maybe you can build an interstel