The Dark Forest and Fermi Paradox
I recently finished “The Dark Forest” by Cixin Liu , second book in the “The Three-body problem” trilogy. It is one of the best hard sci-fi I have read in a long time and is very different from common plotlines. But what got me thinking was the explanation Liu gives for Fermi Paradox. If you do not know what Fermi Paradox is, please watch this video. I was opposed to Stephen Hawking’s view that we should never initiate “first contact “as finding intelligent life will most surely be the end of our world, but now I share his opinion. Liu's explanation below is what convinced me. To start with, these are the axioms for a cosmic civilization: Survival is the primary need of a civilization Civilization continues to grow and expand but the total matter in the universe remains constant Time at a universal scale has a different meaning. A million years are a blink of an eye for something that is existing for 13.5 billion years. So, we can never be sure how many civiliza