THE DARK FOREST HYPOTHESIS ♠️ | The Terrifying Silence of the Cosmos: Solution to the Fermi Paradox?

Conceived in 2008, the Dark Forest hypothesis seeks to provide a solution to the Fermi paradox by proposing that the Universe is home to many other intelligent civilizations that, out of fear of being discovered by a more powerful and advanced one, hide in the darkness of space. Hidden like hunters lurking on a moonless night.

Since the 1940s, stemming from the collective hysteria over the UFO phenomenon, dreams of finding intelligent life beyond Earth, the discovery with the most important philosophical implications in our history, have driven us to look up at the sky to answer the eternal question of whether we share this space and time with someone else.

The real efforts began in 1960 when the young astronomer Frank Drake, famous for theorizing the homonymous Drake equation, developed Project Ozma, an experiment that would be the precursor to SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) and that, for the first time, allowed us to listen to the darkness, seeking possible signals in the form of radio waves that a hypothetical civilization could be sending across the Cosmos accidentally or intentionally.

Subsequently, with the famous Kardashev scale, the Soviet scientist Nikolai Kardashev went a step further by categorizing any civilization in the Universe into three classes depending on its use of energy, which taught us that beyond the archaic radio waves, we should look for other echoes of their existence, such as traces of a megastructure like a Dyson sphere.

However, despite more than six decades of efforts observing and listening to the firmament, we have found nothing. A disturbing calm. A great silence that, due to the incongruity between the optimism of the numbers and the pessimism of observation, led to the conception of the Fermi Paradox. An apparent contradiction between the supposedly high probabilities of intelligent life existing out there and the total absence of evidence.

Since its theorization in the 1970s, many solutions to the Fermi paradox have been proposed, such as the Great Filter or the pessimistic idea that we are alone in an eternal ocean. But recently, and perhaps as the most terrifying solution, a hypothesis postulated in 2008 by the Chinese writer Liu Cixin, the Dark Forest theory, emerged to explain that terrifying silence around us.

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CHAPTERS:

00:00 - Chapter I: "Where is everybody?"
05:15 - Chapter II: The Drake Equation
11:33 - Chapter III: In Search of the Emperors of the Cosmos
18:52 - Chapter IV: The Great Silence
30:48 - Chapter V: Hidden in a Dark Forest