The Berserker Hypothesis And The Dark Forest Theory: Are We Alone?

One of the most essential mysteries of the universe that science has not yet been able to solve is whether life exists anywhere else in the universe besides on Earth.
Scientists have tried to answer this question for years without a clear answer. There could be life out there, but if that’s the case, why haven’t we found it yet?
If life is something normal in the universe, where is it? Why haven’t we found other planets full of life like Earth?
Why haven’t we received radio signals from other civilizations?
Or could it be that, on the contrary, life is something extraordinary and complex, and all the life that exists in the entire universe is found on Earth?
Could it be that we are utterly alone in the entire universe?

The dark forest theory
The dark forest hypothesis is that there are many alien civilizations throughout the universe, but they are silent and paranoid.
This is explained so that any spacefaring civilization would view any other intelligent life as an inevitable threat and destroy any nascent life that makes its presence known.
In other words, if a civilization is aware of its ability to destroy other living beings, it will believe that the rest of the civilizations are also just as dangerous as them. Therefore, it is best not to contact them since they could enter a war where both of them fight and are destroyed.
As a result, all civilizations would eventually learn to hide, and the electromagnetic spectrum would be relatively silent, with no evidence of any intelligent extraterrestrial life, as in a “dark forest” full of “armed hunters lurking among the trees like a ghost” observing without being observed.
This would explain why, although we searched for signatures of life throughout the universe, we found nothing. Maybe it’s because we’re the only ones looking, and no one emits detectable signals.

Berserker hypothesis
In the context of extraterrestrial civilizations, there is a type of spacecraft called “Von Neuman Ships,” also known as Self-replicating Spacecraft.
This type of spacecraft, as its name indicates, is characterized by being a spacecraft that can collect materials from any celestial body to create more copies of itself, imitating the operation of an intelligent 3D printer that would be able to make pre-determined decisions programmed so that when it finds a celestial body with valuable materials, it would simply land on that body and begin mining it to create more copies.
Given this behavior and its similarity to the reproduction pattern of bacteria, several authors have expressed that von Neumann machines could be considered a mechanical, not biological, form of life.
In his short story Lungfish, David Brin touches on this idea, pointing out that self-replicating machines launched by different species could compete for the materials of celestial bodies.
Given a sufficient variety of species, they could even form a type of ecology or, if they also had some form of artificial intelligence, a society. In this way, the ships could mutate over thousands of generations, slightly changing the objectives for which they were initially programmed.
There are many variants of self-replicating ships, but the topic that matters to us today is the Berserker ships.
These types of spacecraft are a variant of the Von Neuman probes programmed to search for and exterminate life forms and exoplanets capable of supporting life as they are detected by these spacecraft.
The Berserker hypothesis arises as a response to the Fermi paradox.
Beerserker probes exist ?
A vital component of the hypothesis is that a berserker probe has not yet visited Earth’s solar system. A 2013 analysis by Anders Sandberg and Stuart Armstrong at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford predicted that if a small fleet of Berserker probes were able to destroy civilizations elsewhere even very slowly, they would most likely have encountered Earth by now and destroyed all traces of life millions of years ago.

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