THE DARK FOREST THEORY

Always welcome.

Pleased to be able to reply before thread shut down.

Science fiction.

The premise seems to be based on the idea that alien civilizations will exhibit the characteristics of human society – paranoia, fear of the "other", and the universality of predatory behavior.

It posits the likelihood of advanced alien civilizations and then uses the total lack of evidence for their existence as evidence itself since these civilizations obviously wish not to be discovered.

Another plausible explanation for the silence of the universe is that alien civilizations, if they exist, may have developed communication technologies which aren't based on the broadcast of electromagnetic signals. Or that advanced forms of extraterrestrials exist successfully without establishing civilizations.

Not as dismissive as you think.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_existing_technologies_predicted_in_science_fiction

It's a bloody long list.

I don't doubt that life has evolved elsewhere. I just don't believe without evidence that said life can navigate from one solar system to another. There is plenty of speculation how it's possible but no hard examples.

I am convinced there is other life out there. The fact that it does not visit the Earth proves that it's intelligent.

Is Interstellar Space Travel Possible?

The distances are so vast that any aliens traveling in space are not exploratory vessels from their home planets. They would be beings living in colonies on spaceships that have totally abandoned their planets for whatever reason. You can't think of space travelers as having left their planet exploring the universe like in Star Trek and other science fiction because the distances are too vast. To even consider leaving one star system to explore another star system with the idea that you'll be returning is irrational.

That was the theme of Star Trek: Voyager. They were trapped in another galaxy, which even with warp speed was unfathomable. But even traveling to another star system is unfathomable because of the distances. Only in science fiction does that happen.

To travel to the next closest star, Proxima Centauri, that are present rate of speed would take approximately 40,000 years. That time could be halved or doubled, but either way it's too long to even consider. It would take at least 1,000 generations, therefore, it would have to be a ship that was self-sustaining and capable of carrying a thousand generations of people.

When the ship eventually arrived in the vicinity of Proxima Centauri, the people would start questioning about why they are there. They might as well turn around and head back towards Earth. They would be on a spaceship with no destination nor reason to exist at all and would have an existential crisis.

There is a theory that space is flat, and can be folded to create wormholes.

In Chocky by John Wyndham the aliens astrally project themselves into the minds of others, thought being the only thing faster than light.

Both those scenarios could work.

I'm not a scientist, I don't pretend to understand any of it.