The Dark Forest hypothesis does not make sense

I am new to sci‑fi and I loved it. I’m a huge fan of Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past series—the writing is top-notch, the characters are original and deep, the plots are gripping, and the ideas are wildly imaginative. The first two books take us through humanity’s brush with the alien Trisolarans, who nearly wipe us out, until Luo Ji, a sociology professor, turns the tables using his twist on the Dark Forest Hypothesis.

On paper, it sounds brutal yet cleanly logical—a cosmic pre-emptive strike system where survival depends on absolute secrecy.

But here’s where it gets absurd. The whole concept hinges on the idea that the universe is inherently hidden, like a pitch‑black forest with nothing to see. In reality, the cosmos isn’t that impenetrable. With ever‑advancing telescopes and deep space probes, the night sky is less a dark forest and more a well‑lit map. Civilizations—if they’re out there—would likely leave behind traces, and advanced societies would find ways to detect even the faintest signals. So, the idea that every civilization can hide forever just doesn’t add up.Also, why did not Liu assume the existence of a giant telescope. If even a fraction of their resources were devoted to detection, the so‑called “darkness” would be punctured by countless bright signals.

Then there’s the game theory angle. If every alien thinks it’s rational to wipe out any sign of life, why would any civilization ever take the risk of initiating an attack when doing so might expose their own location and benefit all their rivals? In reality, much like on Earth, cooperation, trade, and mutual deterrence should often beat out needless, suicidal aggression. The logic of universal annihilation simply doesn’t hold when you consider that genocide, in this cosmic setup, is essentially a public good—someone’s always going to free‑ride on the carnage.

A closely related issue is the risk of detection. If whatever you have to do in order to destroy another civilization — a hyperkinetic projectile, or an interstellar attack with a fleet of warships, or whatever — has even the slightest chance of revealing your position to onlookers, then that means genocide carries existential risk. And of course, it’s impossible to know how good other civilizations’ sensing technologies are — perhaps they can trace the source of a hyperkinetic projectile from the patterns of ejecta when it strikes the target, or perhaps they can use statistics to guess where an attack came from. So the risk is never zero. That risk acts as another cost, exacerbating the public goods problem.

A third problem is the risk of deception. If you get a radio transmission that seems to be from a low-tech world, you should consider the possibility that it’s from a decoy probe that some advanced civilization sent out to the middle of nowhere to trick other civilizations into launching attacks that reveal their positions so they can be destroyed. Since it’s always uncertain how good your enemies’ deception technologies are, the possibility of deception must add yet more existential risk to the decision to launch an interstellar genocide. All of these issues point to the same fundamental game-theoretic problem with the Dark Forest idea: attacking creates risk and cost for the attacker, while giving free benefits to the attacker’s surviving enemies. Basically, the only way it makes sense to destroy another civilization in the Dark Forest universe is if it’s really cheap, and if you’re overconfident enough to be really really sure that it’s not going to exposure your position.