Often for the purpose of financing power struggle and conflict between similarly matched civilisations, that do present a real or perceived existential threat (see the competition for the americas or scramble for africa).

Which does not correlate with our own experience of history.Ĭertainly from medieval history onwards, the pattern of subjugation or destruction of less advanced/militarily strong civilisations by stronger civilisations has not been driven by self-defense. It also assumes that contact between civilisations has been happening in this 'nasty, brutish and short' state of nature for some time. It gives several possible explanations, and the dark forest theory from TBP would fall into explanation group 2, possibility 4.

There have been a few other links here for further reading, but one I haven't seen yet that I really enjoyed was the essay on. Stars randomly disappearing or going nova at unexpected points in their life would be an example of that, and are things we haven't seemed to observe yet. Related to that, one of the points of the Fermi Paradox is that we haven't yet seen evidence of intelligent life. Both examples we saw in the book relied upon advanced technology that may never be possible/practical. In addition to the explicitly mentioned axioms in the book, it also rests on other assumptions being true such as dark forest attacks being relatively cheap to carry out. 'A proposition (whether true or false)' axiom, n. The citation is the second definition from the Oxford English Dictionary: From the Wikipedia article on Axiom:Īs used in modern logic, an axiom is a premise or starting point for reasoning. I just wanted to add that an 'Axiom' doesn't necessarily have to be true, it's assumed to be true as the basis for further reasoning.

The dark forest problem