What if aliens exist—but they're just hiding from us? The Dark Forest theory, explained

The famed Fermi paradox has bewitched astronomers for more than half a century. To put it concisely: If the cosmos is nearly 14 billion years old, then where are all the interstellar societies? Why haven’t they popped over to say hello? Myriad solutions to this conundrum have been proposed, but perhaps none more chilling than the Dark Forest theory.

But technically anything is possible considering we don’t have any evidence for ETIs to begin with. Perhaps everyone really is hiding. Maybe there truly is a threat lurking out there, somewhere in the dark. And maybe humanity just hasn’t realized it yet.by physicist Enrico Fermi during a lunchtime chat way back in 1950. It has many nuances, but at its heart is this central premise: Our solar system is just 4.6 billion years old, whereas the universe is 13.8 billion years old.

Even as we’ve begun to grasp the hypothetical threat, it's not like we’re about to go completely silent, either. “We’ve never given the slightest thought to turning off all the radars because it might be dangerous,” says Shostak. “It’s just not gonna happen.” “There may be hostile aliens out there,” says Shostak. But the distances between them are likely to be unfathomably vast, so much so that the idea they would feel the need to preemptively attack one another seems odd. Even if they feared each other, the expanse between them means that they wouldn’t likely need to compete for resources; each would have near-limitless worlds, asteroids, and even stars to exploit.

That all ETIs would share the very human instinct of assuming the worst about an unknown entity is also a massive presumption.

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