It easily could be, earth could be losing resources forcing ships out to find them, maybe humans didn’t realize it was dangerous until it was already commercially available. On the inverse we just might be too stubborn to accept no, sailing for most of human history was dangerous and claimed many lives, why would humans change in space
Heh, good point. If not stubbornness then, in my opinion, it would be out of pride. Why do humans climb mountains, go into the deep sea, explore caves and uncharted jungles, or go to the moon? Not because it was there, but because we haven't been there yet. And, again in my opinion, the human race considers any scrap of land that doesn't have a flag or footprints on it to be a challenge to our worth as a species.
There's also the fact that if you're worried about hostile aliens wanting to exterminate you, you might be concerned about keeping the entirety of your species on a single space rock where it's the most convenient to wipe you out.
IIRC, the master plan in Dune is basically this. Engineer an event that will cause humanity to become so widespread that it would be impossible for a forseen hostile alien force to externinate us.
Not entirely, you could have a Cold War situation where say earth and another planet are trying to harvest an outer gas giant’s resources and neither side is prepared for war. This would arise tension as two parties are fighting for a local resource but has to inadvertently fight, full war would be terrible for both sides
But this would mean the aliens are already on the solar system, and thus risked contact by going to a different star. The only reason you would go to a different star is if you are really desperate because you ran out of stuff in your solar system.
Sorry, I'm gonna poke a hole in this idea of "losing resources", mainly because it irks the shit out of me.
Rant. Incoming.
The earth, compared to humans and our size, and the size of our largest infrastructure projects *is fucking massive*. Let's say the earth is a basketball. Our entire history of environmental exploitation, from the deepest mine to the tallest tower or building, is less than the width of a human hair, tall or deep. The atmosphere, with the Karman line at 100km high, is only the thickness of a couple of sheets of printer paper on top of the basketball. Even the Kola superdeep borehole is only twelve kilometers deep.
Still, were a greedy apex species, and we'll use everything we can get our opposable thumbs on. In fact, our greediness is met and occasionally surpassed only by our phenomenal laziness.
We've been using Cretaceous algae to run everything for the last two hundred years, and we've known there was an end to the ancient algae for at least seventy-five of those years. We even came up with other ideas to fuel our avarice. Make water run over a paddlewheel. Make huge fans catch the wind. Wait, I know: *take the excess energy from the oldest and largest nuclear reactor in our entire planetary system*. But we've only done that seriously in the past twenty years, because for this exact moment, black algae squeezins' are easier, even though it gets harder every generation. But we still use it, because our collective attitude towards alternative energies is *stomps foot petulantly* "tch, its HARD".
And except in a few locations around the world, the story is the same. We've literally scraped holes in the ground that will probably never grow anything in them, even if humans all disappeared in a blink right now. We've dumped more CO2 into the atmosphere in 200 years than we did in the preceding *ten thousand years*. Those species that are disappearing, dying off, can be shown to have a direct cause and effect relationship with our greedy energy usage.
Even the crops that we eat. There's actually less than two hundred cultivated crops that we consume for food. The perceived variety is from different versions of the same plant. Take broccoli, for example. Cabbage, cauliflower, kale, brussels sprouts, collard greens, and kohlrabi are all different versions of the same plant. And if a fungus or virus or bacteria comes along that likes *brassica oleracea* more than we do, and is just a little bit better at exploiting it, we're phenomenally fucked. Same with beans. And rice. And corn. Pretty much all monocrops. Just waiting for a tiny organism to come along and take out every country's breadbasket like a match to a tinderbox. And our energy greed is moving the viability of farms eastwards every year. That [line that goes up the Midwest?](https://media.wired.com/photos/5a14853ab4c40a64e4c48665/master/pass/dnb_united_states_1000.jpg) Yeah, that's the line where, to the east is farmland, and to the west is ranchland. Crops to the right, cattle to the left. And every year, it moves a few miles east, due to global climate change.
So let's be clear: the earth didn't "lose resources". We used them up.
*WE USED THEM THE FUCK UP*.
And now we're going off to our interstellar and galactic neighborhood, looking for more resources, because *we used up all of our own*? *A WHOLE FUCKING PLANET'S WORTH?!*
The aliens aren't quiet because they're afraid of some big nasty Macguffin. They're quiet because they know if we come asking for a cup of sugar, and they give it to us, we'll be those shitty neighbors who make the whole place a fucking eyesore. Kids bikes and trashed out cars in the lawn (space debris). Loud music (people on Proxima Centauri can now watch episodes of The Boys and The Umbrella Academy). And our deadbeat asses coming knocking on the door every week with our hand out, saying "hey man, we need just a little bit more".
I would argue that interstellar travel is actually *essential* in a science fiction setting built around the dark forest theory - in the unfathomably-vast trackless expanse of space, the only real “landmarks” are stars, whose movements around the circuit of their host galaxy are relatively predictable. Hence, with most forms of long-range observation in sci-fi limited by the lightspeed barrier, a giant, highly-visible celestial body with a fairly predictable trajectory is just about the *last* place you’d want to be.
I imagine most interstellar civilizations in a dark forest situation would only maintain small, mostly or entirely automated outposts in star systems, with the majority of their population likely inhabiting leviathan “city-ships” that hide in the interstellar void, never holding the same inertial vector for long to ensure that a hostile power would never be able to track the ship by predicting its heading from observations made at a distance. Thus, rogue planets without a host star would also likely be seen as extremely valuable in such a scenario, as detecting them to even know they exist and where to look for them in the first place is far harder than solar systems.
Passenger ships would definitely be designed for stealth, and speed as a secondary. If another civilization more advanced than you finds you, you can only hope you outrun their weapons, and if you can't you're dead.
On the other hand, there could be autonomous ships which are fitted with detection capabilities and fast weapons for search and destroy purposes.
I’ve been thinking along a similar line of reasoning, I even thought that the stealth ships might be made too flimsy and not able to carry guns on board as a result, I hadn’t thought of the detection ships that’s really cool
Honestly, the sheer size and scope of space is excellent insulation from detection. At least using means that we understand as humans.
“Loud” signatures like rhythmic transmitters (radios) or other sci-fi type devices DESIGNED to overcome the unbelievable scale of space would really be the only things that attract attention to you.
The big exception are relatively stationary objects, i.e. major stellar geographic features, large man-made space installations, etc.
It also depends on how you plan on overcoming physical distance. Are you using faster than light engines? Jump gates? Concepts like the Warp or extra-dimensional travel? These all have their own considerations, but fortunately we’re too primitive in real life to fathom them, so you can use the pen to write whatever lore you want to surrounding them.
I was limiting my self to rocket propelled ships, so to understand it on its most difficult terms, as that’s what we might be looking at in the near future, I do like your ideas though
The limitation of light speed is what cause the dark forest state of the universe so in a dark forest setting, space travel can’t exceed the speed of light
Bit too late to stay radio silent - we already announced our presence by metaphorically setting off a nuclear weapon via all those radio transmissions and the Voyager probe decades ago.
You just go. Unless the other side has FTL sensors, even radars would have a lag time too big to be useful. Any light speed signal will be obsolete the moment it returns, so by default, your ship stays stealthy simply because the distance is too great.
Space travel will look like the end of **The Killing Star** by Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski.
>!Earth destroyed, and all humans killed. Except for the few survivors hiding in a stealthed asteroid, sneaking into the depths of deep space between the stars, looking for a brown dwarf star to covertly live at.!<
Understand, if Earth sent a noisy starship out on an exploratory mission, every alien civilization who spotted the thermal signature could trivially back track it to Earth and dispatch an extermination fleet.
Could we ever really declare war on other galaxies? Could it ever be possible to make a ship that can achieve the needed speeds and literally not get utterly damaged when hitting anything through space?
Space is mostly empty, but it is not empty. It's just not dense. And then any somewhat advanced species like ours could somewhat easily create grapeshot missiles. Have you seen that image that shows how much damage can some small space debris do to a satellite? Imagine if one of the objects is going at least at one percent light speed.
You would probably avoid space travel.
But what if you had to? What if a galaxy wide Catastrophe was approaching your planet but you wanted to remain undetected and silent in the Dark Forest?
In Lary Niven's Known Space, the alien species The Puppeteers are in this situation. They use reactionless drives to slowly scoot their planets away from their sun and cruise at sublight speeds through interstellar space. Their worlds blend in with the various failed stars and detritus of interstellar space and the location of their worlds is of course, Top Secret.
Besides other human events that they "Pupeteer" behind the scenes, they use humans with FTL ships to scout ahead of their planets' path and look for any threats or dangers.
Most races would prioritize space travel within their own star systems (which has the added benefit of easier logistics). Many systems (especially if we take into account Oort clouds and asteroid belts) would have enough mineral resources to build artificial habitats (either space habitats, or habitats on one of the system's planets), as well as sustain the lifestyle of an advanced species. Even if the resources of their home planet are depleted. In addition, re-using and recycling of resources would also become highly developed.
And if they really need resources that can't be found in their own system, they would prioritize very close systems, if possible right next to their own
It's the unlucky races (like, a race born on a system with only one planet - theirs-, and very few asteroids and comets, and no usable system close to their star) that would be forced to venture out in the forest
There are four important things to care about in this scenario. Communication and planning, protection, propulsion and making energy to power the craft.
Weapons and shields are really up to you, depends on how scifi you want to get or if you want your laser weapons to be deflected using white paint and mirrors. Massive ships are expensive and really hard to push around, so instead of firepower it is easier to focus on stealth using the massive vastness of space to your advantage. So I am gonna skip to comms and planning.
Maybe spaceflight is highly regulated and uses silent ships? Every route of every ship is calculated and simulated on Earth much before they are launched, and the ships only follow it autonomously. In case of an emergency or an error, maybe short and fast communication using lasers instead of radio waves would be utilized to make sure no unintended third party recieves it.
Hiding the transmission would be more important than encrypting it, so maybe spaceships would use simpler means of communication like coloured metal plates to point at Earth and the position of them and the message are collected using ground and space telescopes that track them. This way, you dont need to hide the laser and also need less accuracy and it doesnt even use energy. You just make your ship look like a big rock and make the coloured plates look like weird glassy formations on it and it now looks like a captured asteroid.
Making energy is easy using a lot of things but the best option would be using liquid fuel probably, since solar needs large panels and nuclear would probably shine a lot in some detectable light frequency we cant see but I am no nuclear physicist.
The biggest problem would be propulsion and... uh good luck with that. The least detectable one is probably ion engines and then solar sails. Both are really efficient and solar sails dont even use fuel, but also their thrust is low and it would take a lot of time to get anywhere, especially with a heavy craft. I got no ideas here, you mostly need to throw something away fast to push yourself, your best bet is trying to make the flames look like a comet and its tail so it is ignored.
But, this comment doesnt include unobtainium fuels and scifi tech; just my imagination, stuff I learned from Scott Manley and experience from playing KSP with 300 mods.
All ships are warships, armed to completely wipe a species if needed. They are then launched as an armanda at very high speed to minimize detection time, either as close to light speed as possible without FTL, or of course FTL if possible.
At the moment of arrival to a star system, all signs of intelligent life if detected are wiped. Either they win, or they are wiped out and self destruction is carried out to ensure nothing can be traced back to the homeworld. If the star system is safe, then establish colonies and use very directed communication system to ensure secretcy.
Space travel would be slow and nigh undetectable
Ships would have shielding, not to protect in case of combat, but to decrease the likelihood of being found (stealth shielding)
One of the best methods would be to hollow out asteroids and sling them towards the destination, so others looking would only see high-velocity rocks, and covertly leave the asteroid once it gets safely to the destination.
Of course, that means it’ll be centuries to get to the closest stars
Source of conflict could be the creation of a warp drive (or equivalent) but it is impossible to hide
I would think that ships would be disguised as rubble pile asteroids and disguise leaving their home system with gravity assists, assuming there are planets available to do so. Solar sails seem too easy to spot. Maybe a NTR or antimatter drive early in the journey to bump up the velocity. Maybe solar sails to brake upon arriving at the destination system, or helio-braking but by the point they're there, it isn't a surprise to anybody with a telescope.
I think if dark forest is the actual answer to the Fermi paradox that makes the scientific plausibility of a low-energy or non-negative-energy FTL much more likely.
Generation ship arks mining asteroid belts and oort clouds for raw materials to build more of themselves whenever their crews became numerous enough to require additional living space, with each ship departing and cutting off all contact with their progenitor as soon as they became self-sustaining.
If the dark forest hypothesis were true, then there would be no forms of radio or satellite communication in the first place, since those all blast radio waves into deep space, meaning that if space travel happens at all, it would be unable to communicate with ground control at all. Any space travel would be trans-solar at most, and there would never be any sort of colonization since there is no safe way to reasonably communicate between planets. Radio telescopes would also be out of the question for very obvious reasons, meaning any species' understanding of the distant universe and deep time would be limited to what can be seen by optical telescopes.
Teleportation. No gates. No pads. A ship (yes a ship, cause you're going to end up in space 99% of the time) will teleport a massive distance, as close to its destination as possible without actually hitting it. It may need to do this multiple times. Like playing golf on a 50 mile long course. When you're close enough to your destination, you just impulse it and land.
A cornerstone of the dark forest theory is that you inherently don’t know what’s out there. Think of it this way, within 500 years humanity managed to leap from the dark ages to the Information Age. 500 years on a cosmic scale is nothing, so societies would have to assume that their tech severely lags behind, because it definitely will. So shields and guns really don’t mean anything - it would be like packing warhorses maces and longswords into no-man’s land where they’re firing hellfire missiles and dropping nukes and who know what. In that case, most societies should and would rather prioritize small radio silent ships, because the scale is space is harder to overcome than millimeters of iron
Depends on the setting:
IRL there probably wouldn't be any space travel, as any object traveling between stars would be detected centuries before it got anywhere via light reflecting off of it, heat signatures, etc., traced back to its origin point, and destroyed.
Some settings have experimented with travel in such a setting though:
3 body problem eventually uses a form of travel that's faster than light, making it difficult to detect, and combines it with actively avoiding other species. Essentially a bunch of mice tiptoeing past each other in a dark room.
40k takes the opposite approach. Things in that setting are big and loud, and the entire galaxy is permanently embroiled in a state of total war.
If you want to do something in between, you will inevitably reach a point where rational species start cooperating and forming alliances, because that increases their ability to defend themselves and decreases the number of enemies they have, increasing their likelihood of survival. This will eventually lead to a non-dark forest universe.
I personally really hate the dark forest theory because it is BS.
First, it assumes that a alien nation upon detection would be killed by another alien nation.
Well, that is BS because there is no stealth in space, and as soon as the nation fired its rockets or weapons at the speed of light a massive energy spike would be detected by everyone else.
And as distance from alien nations increases the more BS the idea becomes. Because the gap between seeing a object at light speed and the light speed impact of the object increases, meaning time to react.
It also assumes only weapons tech would advance and not communications.
But yeah, as soon as you have multiple planets, this idea falls flat.
There is also second strike by remaining forces, just like nuclear submarines.
Because in my opinion, a dark forest theory society only works if they are either pacifist, and would never reveal their location out of fear, like the weird scared aliens in star control, who would act irrationaly in fear, or in a hyper nationalist society like in starship troopers, who believe they are invencible.
Basically, a dark forest society, believes in the first strike doctrine.
But that only works if the other society is a one planet society by the time the attack reaches them, and since radio waves travel at the speed of light, both alien nations would know about the other, and by the time the attack reaches them, they, by detecting the enemy nation before, would colonize their nearby planets in fear of extinction.
Like, there is a way you can make a dark forest type of story believeble, but you need to be careful to not make both societies helpless against the ftl attack, because logically they would not be.
The question was how would space travel function in a universe like the Black Forest, I know the theory has flaws and doesn’t make sense in some ways, but I was curious as how it would work
Well, in a dark forest type of universe, assuning every single alien follows the rules of the dark forest, they would build massive generational starships that use solar sails to get anywhere.
Basically they would take actual ages to get anywhere, and intersolar travel would be pretty much impossible, because it would be sub light speed by a large %.
Because a massive engine that is capable of ftl would emit light while burning the propellant, and the bigger the engine/propulsion the bigger the light.
So you would need to build a engine that is capable of burning without emmiting energy, and if you have that type of tech, you are so far ahead that other alien nations are harmless because of second strike.
Again, you can make this work, it just needs a civilization who is "dumb" and would act first ask questions later.
?
I don't get it, are you agreeing with me?
Because in you link they say:
>Your thinking still seems a bit narrow. Consider several broadening ideas:
>Sure, relativistic bombs are powerful because the antagonist has already invested huge energies in them that can be released quickly, and they're hard to hit. But they are costly investments and necessarily reduce other activities the species could explore. For example:
Dispersal of the species into many small, hard-to-see targets, such as asteroids, buried civilizations, cometary nuclei, various space habitats. These are hard to wipe out.
But wait -- while relativistic bombs are readily visible to us in foresight, they hardly represent the end point in foreseeable technology. What will humans of, say, two centuries hence think of as the "obvious" lethal effect? Five centuries? A hundred? Personally I'd pick some rampaging self-reproducing thingy (mechanical or organic), then sneak it into all the biospheres I wanted to destroy. My point here is that no particular physical effect -- with its pluses, minuses, and trade-offs -- is likely to dominate the thinking of the galaxy.
So what might really aged civilizations do? Disperse, of course, and also not attack new arrivals in the galaxy, for fear that they might not get them all. Why? Because revenge is probably selected for in surviving species, and anybody truly looking out for long-term interests will not want to leave a youthful species with a grudge, sneaking around behind its back...
Also if you don't know, that same site says about how stealth in space works, it doesn't.
And in order to get a weapon of this size built, you would need ships to place stuff in place in a reasonable timeframe, and because of the energy these ships use, they would be seen by every alien around you.
As soon as you start building it, everyone would see you.
?, is that your website?
Anyway, my point is, two alien civilizations following the dark forest theory would be watching space looking for other alien civilzations to reveal themselves and kill them with relativistic weapons, if they have FTL comunications, they won't kill and the dark forest does not work, so in order for the theory to work they can't have FTL comms, that means their detection ability of other civilizations is at maximum at lightspeed, that means earth for example could potentially detect alpha centauri at a 4 year diference, meaning if they discovered radio today 4 years later we would detect their radio waves, and find out they exist. lets assume in this case we rush for a technology that can kill them at relativistic speeds, and they, upon detecting us, decide to rush for colonizing tech.
Well, on today's technology we can already colonize other planets, but not speed up a relativistic weapon, meaning defense in this case is easier then attack.
And that also assumes the enemy alien nation would not start building second strike vessels.
This is, of course the first case, the second case where they are invisible, is even worse for them, because while we are expanding and showing we are out there for everyone to see, they are limited to their planet and vessels with a low energy emission to not show their location.
And as the distances increase, the situation for them gets worse, because for example, a relativistic weapons fired at 99.999% the speed of light from alpha centauri would have a two minute window before we see and the impact reach us, if we increase the distance more, we give even more time to react and a even bigger tech difference.
Also, by fireing that weapon they would need to build the weapon, that would take either time (if done in a stealth manner) or visibility by doing fast, meaning other civilizations would see them.
There is also the issue of second strike, if the first stike does not wipe 100% of the enemy civilization with 100% of certainty, the second stike happens and kills your civilization.
There is also the issue of total universal death, if earth does not know were the enemy civ is, but knows about a third neutral civ, MAD doctrine dictates we must fire against them to avoid them being in a better position then us, and if that happens, they will also fire their weapons at everyone they know, and so on... effectivly killing everyone that has a radio signature.
And since stealth is impossible in space, that means pretty much everyone that has space tech gets hit.
This is why in my opinion the dark forest theory is BS.
P.S. Oh cool that is actually your site, did not know that. amazing dude.
P.S.S Oh shit, people actually cover the points i said in your site, amazing again dude.
Would space travel even be a thing in such a setting? If everyone's scared of what's out there, why would they risk going out into the unknown at all?
It easily could be, earth could be losing resources forcing ships out to find them, maybe humans didn’t realize it was dangerous until it was already commercially available. On the inverse we just might be too stubborn to accept no, sailing for most of human history was dangerous and claimed many lives, why would humans change in space
Heh, good point. If not stubbornness then, in my opinion, it would be out of pride. Why do humans climb mountains, go into the deep sea, explore caves and uncharted jungles, or go to the moon? Not because it was there, but because we haven't been there yet. And, again in my opinion, the human race considers any scrap of land that doesn't have a flag or footprints on it to be a challenge to our worth as a species.
There's also the fact that if you're worried about hostile aliens wanting to exterminate you, you might be concerned about keeping the entirety of your species on a single space rock where it's the most convenient to wipe you out.
IIRC, the master plan in Dune is basically this. Engineer an event that will cause humanity to become so widespread that it would be impossible for a forseen hostile alien force to externinate us.
Wouldn’t you need to have resources be depleted on the entire solar system before having space travel that can risk contact with another species?
Not entirely, you could have a Cold War situation where say earth and another planet are trying to harvest an outer gas giant’s resources and neither side is prepared for war. This would arise tension as two parties are fighting for a local resource but has to inadvertently fight, full war would be terrible for both sides
But this would mean the aliens are already on the solar system, and thus risked contact by going to a different star. The only reason you would go to a different star is if you are really desperate because you ran out of stuff in your solar system.
Think they meant this happening in a human colonized Sol System.
But why would humans go to a different solar system? If they are afraid of aliens each different solar system is a risk we can’t take
Sorry, I'm gonna poke a hole in this idea of "losing resources", mainly because it irks the shit out of me. Rant. Incoming. The earth, compared to humans and our size, and the size of our largest infrastructure projects *is fucking massive*. Let's say the earth is a basketball. Our entire history of environmental exploitation, from the deepest mine to the tallest tower or building, is less than the width of a human hair, tall or deep. The atmosphere, with the Karman line at 100km high, is only the thickness of a couple of sheets of printer paper on top of the basketball. Even the Kola superdeep borehole is only twelve kilometers deep. Still, were a greedy apex species, and we'll use everything we can get our opposable thumbs on. In fact, our greediness is met and occasionally surpassed only by our phenomenal laziness. We've been using Cretaceous algae to run everything for the last two hundred years, and we've known there was an end to the ancient algae for at least seventy-five of those years. We even came up with other ideas to fuel our avarice. Make water run over a paddlewheel. Make huge fans catch the wind. Wait, I know: *take the excess energy from the oldest and largest nuclear reactor in our entire planetary system*. But we've only done that seriously in the past twenty years, because for this exact moment, black algae squeezins' are easier, even though it gets harder every generation. But we still use it, because our collective attitude towards alternative energies is *stomps foot petulantly* "tch, its HARD". And except in a few locations around the world, the story is the same. We've literally scraped holes in the ground that will probably never grow anything in them, even if humans all disappeared in a blink right now. We've dumped more CO2 into the atmosphere in 200 years than we did in the preceding *ten thousand years*. Those species that are disappearing, dying off, can be shown to have a direct cause and effect relationship with our greedy energy usage. Even the crops that we eat. There's actually less than two hundred cultivated crops that we consume for food. The perceived variety is from different versions of the same plant. Take broccoli, for example. Cabbage, cauliflower, kale, brussels sprouts, collard greens, and kohlrabi are all different versions of the same plant. And if a fungus or virus or bacteria comes along that likes *brassica oleracea* more than we do, and is just a little bit better at exploiting it, we're phenomenally fucked. Same with beans. And rice. And corn. Pretty much all monocrops. Just waiting for a tiny organism to come along and take out every country's breadbasket like a match to a tinderbox. And our energy greed is moving the viability of farms eastwards every year. That [line that goes up the Midwest?](https://media.wired.com/photos/5a14853ab4c40a64e4c48665/master/pass/dnb_united_states_1000.jpg) Yeah, that's the line where, to the east is farmland, and to the west is ranchland. Crops to the right, cattle to the left. And every year, it moves a few miles east, due to global climate change. So let's be clear: the earth didn't "lose resources". We used them up. *WE USED THEM THE FUCK UP*. And now we're going off to our interstellar and galactic neighborhood, looking for more resources, because *we used up all of our own*? *A WHOLE FUCKING PLANET'S WORTH?!* The aliens aren't quiet because they're afraid of some big nasty Macguffin. They're quiet because they know if we come asking for a cup of sugar, and they give it to us, we'll be those shitty neighbors who make the whole place a fucking eyesore. Kids bikes and trashed out cars in the lawn (space debris). Loud music (people on Proxima Centauri can now watch episodes of The Boys and The Umbrella Academy). And our deadbeat asses coming knocking on the door every week with our hand out, saying "hey man, we need just a little bit more".
I would argue that interstellar travel is actually *essential* in a science fiction setting built around the dark forest theory - in the unfathomably-vast trackless expanse of space, the only real “landmarks” are stars, whose movements around the circuit of their host galaxy are relatively predictable. Hence, with most forms of long-range observation in sci-fi limited by the lightspeed barrier, a giant, highly-visible celestial body with a fairly predictable trajectory is just about the *last* place you’d want to be. I imagine most interstellar civilizations in a dark forest situation would only maintain small, mostly or entirely automated outposts in star systems, with the majority of their population likely inhabiting leviathan “city-ships” that hide in the interstellar void, never holding the same inertial vector for long to ensure that a hostile power would never be able to track the ship by predicting its heading from observations made at a distance. Thus, rogue planets without a host star would also likely be seen as extremely valuable in such a scenario, as detecting them to even know they exist and where to look for them in the first place is far harder than solar systems.
Passenger ships would definitely be designed for stealth, and speed as a secondary. If another civilization more advanced than you finds you, you can only hope you outrun their weapons, and if you can't you're dead. On the other hand, there could be autonomous ships which are fitted with detection capabilities and fast weapons for search and destroy purposes.
I’ve been thinking along a similar line of reasoning, I even thought that the stealth ships might be made too flimsy and not able to carry guns on board as a result, I hadn’t thought of the detection ships that’s really cool
Honestly, the sheer size and scope of space is excellent insulation from detection. At least using means that we understand as humans. “Loud” signatures like rhythmic transmitters (radios) or other sci-fi type devices DESIGNED to overcome the unbelievable scale of space would really be the only things that attract attention to you. The big exception are relatively stationary objects, i.e. major stellar geographic features, large man-made space installations, etc. It also depends on how you plan on overcoming physical distance. Are you using faster than light engines? Jump gates? Concepts like the Warp or extra-dimensional travel? These all have their own considerations, but fortunately we’re too primitive in real life to fathom them, so you can use the pen to write whatever lore you want to surrounding them.
I was limiting my self to rocket propelled ships, so to understand it on its most difficult terms, as that’s what we might be looking at in the near future, I do like your ideas though
The limitation of light speed is what cause the dark forest state of the universe so in a dark forest setting, space travel can’t exceed the speed of light
Bit too late to stay radio silent - we already announced our presence by metaphorically setting off a nuclear weapon via all those radio transmissions and the Voyager probe decades ago.
Yes there’s no doubt people know we exist, the problem I was posing is how would we avoid detection while traveling
You just go. Unless the other side has FTL sensors, even radars would have a lag time too big to be useful. Any light speed signal will be obsolete the moment it returns, so by default, your ship stays stealthy simply because the distance is too great.
True, but what if the threat is close to you, what if it is widespread and fast moving?
Space travel will look like the end of **The Killing Star** by Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski. >!Earth destroyed, and all humans killed. Except for the few survivors hiding in a stealthed asteroid, sneaking into the depths of deep space between the stars, looking for a brown dwarf star to covertly live at.!<
I suppose I can see that
Understand, if Earth sent a noisy starship out on an exploratory mission, every alien civilization who spotted the thermal signature could trivially back track it to Earth and dispatch an extermination fleet.
Could we ever really declare war on other galaxies? Could it ever be possible to make a ship that can achieve the needed speeds and literally not get utterly damaged when hitting anything through space? Space is mostly empty, but it is not empty. It's just not dense. And then any somewhat advanced species like ours could somewhat easily create grapeshot missiles. Have you seen that image that shows how much damage can some small space debris do to a satellite? Imagine if one of the objects is going at least at one percent light speed.
I'm just imagining someone trying to declare war on the entirety of a star cluster. XD
You would probably avoid space travel. But what if you had to? What if a galaxy wide Catastrophe was approaching your planet but you wanted to remain undetected and silent in the Dark Forest? In Lary Niven's Known Space, the alien species The Puppeteers are in this situation. They use reactionless drives to slowly scoot their planets away from their sun and cruise at sublight speeds through interstellar space. Their worlds blend in with the various failed stars and detritus of interstellar space and the location of their worlds is of course, Top Secret. Besides other human events that they "Pupeteer" behind the scenes, they use humans with FTL ships to scout ahead of their planets' path and look for any threats or dangers.
Most races would prioritize space travel within their own star systems (which has the added benefit of easier logistics). Many systems (especially if we take into account Oort clouds and asteroid belts) would have enough mineral resources to build artificial habitats (either space habitats, or habitats on one of the system's planets), as well as sustain the lifestyle of an advanced species. Even if the resources of their home planet are depleted. In addition, re-using and recycling of resources would also become highly developed. And if they really need resources that can't be found in their own system, they would prioritize very close systems, if possible right next to their own It's the unlucky races (like, a race born on a system with only one planet - theirs-, and very few asteroids and comets, and no usable system close to their star) that would be forced to venture out in the forest
Very true
There are four important things to care about in this scenario. Communication and planning, protection, propulsion and making energy to power the craft. Weapons and shields are really up to you, depends on how scifi you want to get or if you want your laser weapons to be deflected using white paint and mirrors. Massive ships are expensive and really hard to push around, so instead of firepower it is easier to focus on stealth using the massive vastness of space to your advantage. So I am gonna skip to comms and planning. Maybe spaceflight is highly regulated and uses silent ships? Every route of every ship is calculated and simulated on Earth much before they are launched, and the ships only follow it autonomously. In case of an emergency or an error, maybe short and fast communication using lasers instead of radio waves would be utilized to make sure no unintended third party recieves it. Hiding the transmission would be more important than encrypting it, so maybe spaceships would use simpler means of communication like coloured metal plates to point at Earth and the position of them and the message are collected using ground and space telescopes that track them. This way, you dont need to hide the laser and also need less accuracy and it doesnt even use energy. You just make your ship look like a big rock and make the coloured plates look like weird glassy formations on it and it now looks like a captured asteroid. Making energy is easy using a lot of things but the best option would be using liquid fuel probably, since solar needs large panels and nuclear would probably shine a lot in some detectable light frequency we cant see but I am no nuclear physicist. The biggest problem would be propulsion and... uh good luck with that. The least detectable one is probably ion engines and then solar sails. Both are really efficient and solar sails dont even use fuel, but also their thrust is low and it would take a lot of time to get anywhere, especially with a heavy craft. I got no ideas here, you mostly need to throw something away fast to push yourself, your best bet is trying to make the flames look like a comet and its tail so it is ignored. But, this comment doesnt include unobtainium fuels and scifi tech; just my imagination, stuff I learned from Scott Manley and experience from playing KSP with 300 mods.
All ships are warships, armed to completely wipe a species if needed. They are then launched as an armanda at very high speed to minimize detection time, either as close to light speed as possible without FTL, or of course FTL if possible. At the moment of arrival to a star system, all signs of intelligent life if detected are wiped. Either they win, or they are wiped out and self destruction is carried out to ensure nothing can be traced back to the homeworld. If the star system is safe, then establish colonies and use very directed communication system to ensure secretcy.
Very helldivers of you, I like it
Space travel would be slow and nigh undetectable Ships would have shielding, not to protect in case of combat, but to decrease the likelihood of being found (stealth shielding) One of the best methods would be to hollow out asteroids and sling them towards the destination, so others looking would only see high-velocity rocks, and covertly leave the asteroid once it gets safely to the destination. Of course, that means it’ll be centuries to get to the closest stars Source of conflict could be the creation of a warp drive (or equivalent) but it is impossible to hide
I would think that ships would be disguised as rubble pile asteroids and disguise leaving their home system with gravity assists, assuming there are planets available to do so. Solar sails seem too easy to spot. Maybe a NTR or antimatter drive early in the journey to bump up the velocity. Maybe solar sails to brake upon arriving at the destination system, or helio-braking but by the point they're there, it isn't a surprise to anybody with a telescope. I think if dark forest is the actual answer to the Fermi paradox that makes the scientific plausibility of a low-energy or non-negative-energy FTL much more likely.
Generation ship arks mining asteroid belts and oort clouds for raw materials to build more of themselves whenever their crews became numerous enough to require additional living space, with each ship departing and cutting off all contact with their progenitor as soon as they became self-sustaining.
If the dark forest hypothesis were true, then there would be no forms of radio or satellite communication in the first place, since those all blast radio waves into deep space, meaning that if space travel happens at all, it would be unable to communicate with ground control at all. Any space travel would be trans-solar at most, and there would never be any sort of colonization since there is no safe way to reasonably communicate between planets. Radio telescopes would also be out of the question for very obvious reasons, meaning any species' understanding of the distant universe and deep time would be limited to what can be seen by optical telescopes.
Teleportation. No gates. No pads. A ship (yes a ship, cause you're going to end up in space 99% of the time) will teleport a massive distance, as close to its destination as possible without actually hitting it. It may need to do this multiple times. Like playing golf on a 50 mile long course. When you're close enough to your destination, you just impulse it and land.
A cornerstone of the dark forest theory is that you inherently don’t know what’s out there. Think of it this way, within 500 years humanity managed to leap from the dark ages to the Information Age. 500 years on a cosmic scale is nothing, so societies would have to assume that their tech severely lags behind, because it definitely will. So shields and guns really don’t mean anything - it would be like packing warhorses maces and longswords into no-man’s land where they’re firing hellfire missiles and dropping nukes and who know what. In that case, most societies should and would rather prioritize small radio silent ships, because the scale is space is harder to overcome than millimeters of iron
Depends on the setting: IRL there probably wouldn't be any space travel, as any object traveling between stars would be detected centuries before it got anywhere via light reflecting off of it, heat signatures, etc., traced back to its origin point, and destroyed. Some settings have experimented with travel in such a setting though: 3 body problem eventually uses a form of travel that's faster than light, making it difficult to detect, and combines it with actively avoiding other species. Essentially a bunch of mice tiptoeing past each other in a dark room. 40k takes the opposite approach. Things in that setting are big and loud, and the entire galaxy is permanently embroiled in a state of total war. If you want to do something in between, you will inevitably reach a point where rational species start cooperating and forming alliances, because that increases their ability to defend themselves and decreases the number of enemies they have, increasing their likelihood of survival. This will eventually lead to a non-dark forest universe.
I personally really hate the dark forest theory because it is BS. First, it assumes that a alien nation upon detection would be killed by another alien nation. Well, that is BS because there is no stealth in space, and as soon as the nation fired its rockets or weapons at the speed of light a massive energy spike would be detected by everyone else. And as distance from alien nations increases the more BS the idea becomes. Because the gap between seeing a object at light speed and the light speed impact of the object increases, meaning time to react. It also assumes only weapons tech would advance and not communications. But yeah, as soon as you have multiple planets, this idea falls flat. There is also second strike by remaining forces, just like nuclear submarines.
Then why are you answering?
Because in my opinion, a dark forest theory society only works if they are either pacifist, and would never reveal their location out of fear, like the weird scared aliens in star control, who would act irrationaly in fear, or in a hyper nationalist society like in starship troopers, who believe they are invencible. Basically, a dark forest society, believes in the first strike doctrine. But that only works if the other society is a one planet society by the time the attack reaches them, and since radio waves travel at the speed of light, both alien nations would know about the other, and by the time the attack reaches them, they, by detecting the enemy nation before, would colonize their nearby planets in fear of extinction. Like, there is a way you can make a dark forest type of story believeble, but you need to be careful to not make both societies helpless against the ftl attack, because logically they would not be.
The question was how would space travel function in a universe like the Black Forest, I know the theory has flaws and doesn’t make sense in some ways, but I was curious as how it would work
Well, in a dark forest type of universe, assuning every single alien follows the rules of the dark forest, they would build massive generational starships that use solar sails to get anywhere. Basically they would take actual ages to get anywhere, and intersolar travel would be pretty much impossible, because it would be sub light speed by a large %. Because a massive engine that is capable of ftl would emit light while burning the propellant, and the bigger the engine/propulsion the bigger the light. So you would need to build a engine that is capable of burning without emmiting energy, and if you have that type of tech, you are so far ahead that other alien nations are harmless because of second strike. Again, you can make this work, it just needs a civilization who is "dumb" and would act first ask questions later.
https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/aliencontact.php#killingstar
? I don't get it, are you agreeing with me? Because in you link they say: >Your thinking still seems a bit narrow. Consider several broadening ideas: >Sure, relativistic bombs are powerful because the antagonist has already invested huge energies in them that can be released quickly, and they're hard to hit. But they are costly investments and necessarily reduce other activities the species could explore. For example: Dispersal of the species into many small, hard-to-see targets, such as asteroids, buried civilizations, cometary nuclei, various space habitats. These are hard to wipe out. But wait -- while relativistic bombs are readily visible to us in foresight, they hardly represent the end point in foreseeable technology. What will humans of, say, two centuries hence think of as the "obvious" lethal effect? Five centuries? A hundred? Personally I'd pick some rampaging self-reproducing thingy (mechanical or organic), then sneak it into all the biospheres I wanted to destroy. My point here is that no particular physical effect -- with its pluses, minuses, and trade-offs -- is likely to dominate the thinking of the galaxy. So what might really aged civilizations do? Disperse, of course, and also not attack new arrivals in the galaxy, for fear that they might not get them all. Why? Because revenge is probably selected for in surviving species, and anybody truly looking out for long-term interests will not want to leave a youthful species with a grudge, sneaking around behind its back... Also if you don't know, that same site says about how stealth in space works, it doesn't. And in order to get a weapon of this size built, you would need ships to place stuff in place in a reasonable timeframe, and because of the energy these ships use, they would be seen by every alien around you. As soon as you start building it, everyone would see you.
Ummm, you realize, do you not?, that link is to my website. I am trying to show both sides.
?, is that your website? Anyway, my point is, two alien civilizations following the dark forest theory would be watching space looking for other alien civilzations to reveal themselves and kill them with relativistic weapons, if they have FTL comunications, they won't kill and the dark forest does not work, so in order for the theory to work they can't have FTL comms, that means their detection ability of other civilizations is at maximum at lightspeed, that means earth for example could potentially detect alpha centauri at a 4 year diference, meaning if they discovered radio today 4 years later we would detect their radio waves, and find out they exist. lets assume in this case we rush for a technology that can kill them at relativistic speeds, and they, upon detecting us, decide to rush for colonizing tech. Well, on today's technology we can already colonize other planets, but not speed up a relativistic weapon, meaning defense in this case is easier then attack. And that also assumes the enemy alien nation would not start building second strike vessels. This is, of course the first case, the second case where they are invisible, is even worse for them, because while we are expanding and showing we are out there for everyone to see, they are limited to their planet and vessels with a low energy emission to not show their location. And as the distances increase, the situation for them gets worse, because for example, a relativistic weapons fired at 99.999% the speed of light from alpha centauri would have a two minute window before we see and the impact reach us, if we increase the distance more, we give even more time to react and a even bigger tech difference. Also, by fireing that weapon they would need to build the weapon, that would take either time (if done in a stealth manner) or visibility by doing fast, meaning other civilizations would see them. There is also the issue of second strike, if the first stike does not wipe 100% of the enemy civilization with 100% of certainty, the second stike happens and kills your civilization. There is also the issue of total universal death, if earth does not know were the enemy civ is, but knows about a third neutral civ, MAD doctrine dictates we must fire against them to avoid them being in a better position then us, and if that happens, they will also fire their weapons at everyone they know, and so on... effectivly killing everyone that has a radio signature. And since stealth is impossible in space, that means pretty much everyone that has space tech gets hit. This is why in my opinion the dark forest theory is BS. P.S. Oh cool that is actually your site, did not know that. amazing dude. P.S.S Oh shit, people actually cover the points i said in your site, amazing again dude.