The hypothesis also assumes that your target has not left their home system. But there's no reason to believe that this is the case. If you're attacking an enemy that has multiple star systems under their command, you have no guarantee that you'll find and destroy all of them before they find and destroy all of yours.

And of course, if your target is a cooperator by nature, it is possible that they will have allies who can now strike at you before you can strike at them. Even if you succeed in destroying your target civilisation entirely, their allies will still learn of their demise, and treat you as a threat.

The hypothesis falls apart the moment you give any consideration to the value of cooperation. Now, in all fairness to Cixin, I think that might actually be the point. Basically every failure or near brush with failure in the books happens because of people trying to do things on their own when they should have been working together. While the Dark Forest is bad science, it's a great metaphor. My issue with it is that people keep treating it as some kind of brilliant revelation about the nature of the universe when a) it's not, and b) I'm not even sure it's meant to be.

Thanks for taking the time on this!

This reminds me of talking to a buddy who had vaguely similar ideas but when we got into it, the objections were more because he was offended and quite upset at the idea that advanced civilizations would be aggressive instead of the Star Trek utopian optimism, and then worked backwards to figure out reasons.

I generally don't buy these reasons though. The first is technical "there's a better way to do this!" and any species that hits FTL, explodes stars and creates mini black holes at will etc is using technology so far beyond our understanding that deciding there's a better way to do things seems a little silly. (If you asked the Romans to design a society where everyone was within an hour of all known knowledge, they'd be coming with interesting city designs etc whereas any of us would be thinking about throwing up satellites and getting a phone/computer in everyone's hands. It'd be like them criticizing us for launching satellites when we could just be using horses that are right there! The difference in tech makes criticisms along those lines ring fairly hollow.)

The second one depends on fear of some altruistic super species that fights on behalf of oppressed or destroyed species, which is noble but by no means assured. (Also, given the nature of the dark forest, you have to assume the weapons used are as non-traceable as possible.)

The last one only doesn't work for individual humans who are already in a society or social grouping (the notion of our neighbours randomly murdering us is so insignificant as to be laughable but we also all exist in a society with hard boundaries and rules, any neighbour who did so would be on the run etc. ) In fact, one of the first political science texts, Leviathan, basically argues the entire reason we form governments and societies is that because life in a state of nature is "nasty brutish and short" so we surrender our freedoms to an authority figure for mutual protection. And when you look at places without a strong state (think about all the random war groups in failing states. At the nation level, you see this kind of behviour all the time. Just last month Israel/US bombed Iran because they were worried about another power having the ability to destroy them. The entire concept of nuclear deterrence was essentially "if the other side thinks they can survive a first strike, they will do so before our tech gets to the point where we could survive a first strike, so we haven to make sure such an action is non survivable."

The uhhh, much more tragic and common example of dark forest theory on a human level is how many civilians American cops kill. They claim they are worried they can't tell who has a gun, who is attacking them etc, so they shoot first. And almost any of the footage of those shootings, it is the same story over and over again, anxious cop screaming at someone to stop, put something down, etc, victim moves their hand too quickly and a scared cop shoots them.