Comment by zhoujing204
5 months ago
Liu Cixin's Dark Forest theory is a pretty dumb take, honestly. Just look at Earth — different species don't constantly try to wipe each other out. Sure, it happens sometimes, but it's actually relatively rare, and a lot of the time extinction isn't even intentional. Like, a huge chunk of Native American deaths came from disease, not deliberate extermination.
At the end of the day, Liu Cixin is basically a social darwinist who's got a thing for authoritarianism, and it bleeds through pretty heavily into his work. Dude is massively overrated imo.
I think the book specifically and explicitly covered the "dark forest doesn't apply when species are near one another" angle.
How far is "near," really? Human civilization took tens of thousands of years just to discover a new continent, and the ocean back then was essentially as vast and impenetrable as space is today. If we ever actually develop near-lightspeed spacecraft, are we seriously assuming the first thing we'd do is build weapons capable of annihilating entire civilizations — and then actually use them? Oh my god, we already have those weapons, and the most likely target has always been ourselves.