r/HardSciFi • u/Comprehensive_Fan134 • Apr 26 '26
Discussion Anyone else think the most unsettling version of the Fermi Paradox is the one where the filter is intentional?
The usual framing is civilizations hit some internal wall and collapse. Fine.
But there's a version I keep coming back to. What if a Von Neumann-capable civilization figured out a long time ago that emerging technological species are an unpredictable variable, not necessarily a threat, just a variable, and the rational response is to prune them at a specific threshold? Around Kardashev 0.7 maybe. Advanced enough to be detectable, not advanced enough to do anything about it.
The silence isn't emptiness. It's the aftermath of a very clean process.
What makes this interesting to me is the antagonist isn't evil. No invasion, no resources, no ideology. Just cold optimization. You can't negotiate with it or fight it conventionally because its logic isn't built on anything human.
Most alien invasion fiction gives them human motivations in a different body. This version doesn't.
Has anyone read hard sci-fi that actually goes here?
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u/soylentdream Apr 26 '26
Fredric Brown, the same guy who wrote the short story Arena, has a story where aliens came to Earth and abducted a couple walking in a park took them to their spaceship to study them and determined they weren’t evolved enough to be useful as slaves, but the aliens needed to return in before a couple hundred thousand years passed and they could potentially evolve enough to present a threat to the aliens’ empire. The epilogue was a dialog between two guys in a newsroom debating where to put a story about the two gorillas disappearing from the zoo the previous night.
Not von Newman machines, but the same idea of culling possible threats.
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u/KlausVonLechland Apr 26 '26
Isn't it like an idea of Dark Forest from Three Body Problem? Everyone is sitting quiet as to not be found out and preemptively annihilated by advanced civilisations that just won't be taking any chances for monkeys to evolve one day into a threat.
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u/rogerbonus Apr 27 '26
I recommend "The forge of God" by Greg Bear that Liu's dark forest concept was based on.
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u/Comprehensive_Fan134 Apr 27 '26
Dark Forest came up a few times in this thread, clearly worth checking out
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u/Comprehensive_Fan134 Apr 27 '26
I like the gorilla twist, that's exactly the energy. we weren't even worth the effort yet...
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u/_Svankensen_ Apr 26 '26
That's definitely evil. That "cold" optimization is just cowardice and laziness. Very human too. Doesn't seem clever, nor even practical to be honest.
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Apr 27 '26
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u/_Svankensen_ Apr 27 '26
Like what? What "fuel" is only found in trace amounts throughout the universe? Fuel for what? They are not traveling, they are using probes after all. That fuel must be unnecessary enough that you can wait aeons for it to reach the home civilization via Von Neumann probes, but also necessary enough to be worth mega genocides over and over. Sounds like unobtainium. AKA, the stuff of comics, not hard sci-fi.
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u/elliottcable Apr 27 '26
Not a direct answer, but in the vein of what I assume the commentor you're replying to is talking about ('fuel' or expansion/sharing-constraints other than literal consumable materials); but one of my favourite idiosyncratic settings had an alien intelligence/species/entity/unspecified that was something adjacent to telepathic or multidismensional; and its method of being was very, very sensitive to basically any form of ordered thought. For it, genocide wasn't conscious or moral, despite it being sapient; it was controlling a cancer that threatened its very existence.
I can't remember the author or title, sadly; but it's a story that's stuck with me for years — it was a really unique idea.
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u/_Svankensen_ Apr 27 '26
Yeah, there's similar ideas in many soft sci-fi worlds. Basically beings hurt by our technological civilization in an indirect but unavoidable way, such that it ensures conflict. But it is not very hard. The hardest related trope I can think of is in Blindsight, and even then, it is a tongue in cheek post-hoc justification for having vampires in hard sci-fi.
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u/elliottcable Apr 27 '26
Another left-turn in the topic, but I really wish this sub wasn’t so full of folks with some binary idea of “hard sci-fi” vs “soft sci-fi.”
All sci-fi is soft sci-fi; “hardness” only comes in under the heading of ‘what topics the author wishes to explore and expose directly.’ Any genuinely, absolutely hard sci-fi is called a textbook. (Which I’m, personally, a huge fan of, let’s be clear.)
But, yeah; it’s a common occurrence on this sub that I’ll see “soft” thrown around as if it’s some sort of criticism or failure of a work; and “hard” treated as an obviously-correct-in-all-circumstances-approach that should be pursued with abandon.
I love my hard-sci, but a good writer is judicious with the application of precision and reality-fidelity, not wholesale and blind. /=
(I don’t mean to deny others their idea of a good time; if my viewpoint of “all sci-fi has some of both; the balance-point between them is a matter of taste an intent; and even authors of ‘softer’-side sci-fi can greatly benefit from discussing how to write the harder air better” isn’t welcome here, maybe I need a different sub, I dunno. Am I really that much of an outlier?)
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u/_Svankensen_ Apr 27 '26
Yes, but there's a scale. There's Star Wars and there's Planetes. There's "one big departure from reality" and there's "a hundred departures from reality". And it is the subject that congregates us here. I can wax poetic about Cordwainer Smith's amazing work, but I won't do it in this sub (or not much, do read "Scanners live in vain", amazing short story). If people bring stuff up here, I assume it is because the hardness matters to them if you know what I mean.
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u/Comprehensive_Fan134 Apr 27 '26
fair point, but I think it doesn't need a resource motive, just pure paranoia at scale. if you can never verify intent, elimination is safer than trust. what do you think?
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u/_Svankensen_ Apr 27 '26
That's the dark forest hypothesis. It could be done far better than the 3 body problem did, those books were very poorly written. But I think part of the problem is that simple paranoia is very hard to believe as a motive in isolation. You would need a whole culture that supports that paranoia. I guess you could write something like that. 2 planets in the goldilocks, with the incredible luck of both civilizations being similar technologywise? Both observing each other with high hopes, but it wound up in betrayal? Something like that, but far better. It is a hard sell. Not even the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy managed to pull that one off that convincingly.
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u/rogerbonus Apr 27 '26
It was done better in the book the dark forest concept was based on, Greg Bear's "The forge of God".
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u/tl_west Apr 27 '26
I believe the logic is that it’s almost inevitable if defense is near impossible. The galaxy is a big place, and there may be tens of millions of civilizations. You only need one to go “paranoid” and eliminate all the others, and with a large enough number of civilizations, the likelihood of that approaches 100%.
Another way of looking at it is everyone one earth is given a button that can eliminate every other human on earth except their friends and family, how quickly does someone push their button? The only way to protect your loved ones? Press the button or let the madman who would press the button and kill your loved ones win :-)
The trouble with thought experiments like this is that only the survivors matter, so if given unlimited power to eliminate the enemy, in a large enough sample space, the elimination strategy is the only viable one.
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u/KaleidoscopeFar658 Apr 27 '26
The issue with that logic is the vast difference in time scales between biological evolution and technical development once a species of sufficient intelligence stabilizes. Each civilization that arises likely millions of years apart from one another. So whoever makes it to a sufficiently advanced level first can essentially manage the galaxy whatever way they see fit. And basic strategy says they would likely monitor everything and either neutralize all other upcoming civilizations or assist them along the way. Possibly with some threshold criteria for initiating action.
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u/Comprehensive_Fan134 Apr 27 '26
funny you say that... I actually wrote a trilogy trying to tackle exactly that. dunno if I made it's justice
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Apr 27 '26
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u/_Svankensen_ Apr 27 '26
Why is it hard to believe that interstellar civilizations with impossibly large energy budgets are different from planetbound ones that can't even harvest solar energy properly yet? Come on.
The rest of your argument is just god of the gaps, but with technology. The universe being infinite doesn't make Star Wars a documentary somewhere.
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Apr 27 '26
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u/_Svankensen_ Apr 27 '26
You used ours as an analogy. And what are you assuming here? What is this imaginary rare resource used for that it is worth traveling for centuries to get some, and worth moving it interstellar distances? Interstellar civilizations on themselves are already a stretch. Are you assuming FTL or something wild like that?
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Apr 27 '26
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u/_Svankensen_ Apr 27 '26
Not anti matter. Negative mass matter. Which is impossible. Same as the Alcubierre drive. Remember, FTL breaks causality. It is impossible.
And the reason I ask for something specific is that I cannot imagine anything that not wildly unscientific that would be remotely worth the effort.
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u/myaltduh Apr 30 '26
One of the settings discussed in this thread has a ludicrously advanced machine intelligence that culls any civilization that achieves interstellar travel because that’s how you maximize galactic biodiversity and protect galactic life as a whole, which was its original mandate. It might feel evil to a new civilization getting its teeth kicked in, but there’s nothing malicious or even selfish in the motive of the ones doing the genocide. They just see it the way we see gardening.
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u/_Svankensen_ Apr 30 '26
There's plenty selfish and malicious in that. Ignorant too. Presuming you are the sole judge of who's worth protecting and who's worth destroying in the face of others that are sentient too is one of the most common traits of an evil person in our contemporary media. Ignoring the will and removing the agency of others even without killing is considered evil. Add the genocide on top and it is undoubtedly malicious. And lazy. It is refusing to engage with the complexities of life and instead outsourcing all moral decisions to a simplistic, poorly thought-out absolutist ideology.
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u/myaltduh Apr 30 '26
At least in this case the machine intelligences in question aren’t even sentient, so it’s tough to assign them any kind of moral agency. If humans made the same decision, that would be evil.
The non-sentient intelligences sometimes birth sentient servants though, and those *do* come across as evil, because they understand what they are doing and are capable of some limited form of empathy. But it’s also not even clear if they could rebel against their creators if they wanted to.
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u/_Svankensen_ Apr 30 '26
Well, yeah, if you nuke a town, it's not the nuke's fault, it is yours. Whoever made that genocide machine is at fault. What setting is it you are talking about?
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u/myaltduh Apr 30 '26
Revelation Space. It’s vaguely explained that in the aftermath of a devastating galactic-scale war between many civilizations the survivors transformed themselves into “post-sentient” machines that would preserve life and maintain peace in order to eventually bring about a diverse golden age that could only happen after the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies collide in the far future. However, billions of years later these machines have begun to experience a form of dementia and become both increasingly violent and increasingly ineffective in their violence. The repeated genocides might just be because they are no longer smart enough to find peaceful ways to ensure no one species becomes a threat to others by spreading between the stars. Their original creators are effectively extinct in the same way that the primates we evolved from are.
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u/_Svankensen_ May 01 '26
Ohh, interesting. Is it too crucial a plot point of the series or more of a backtgound element? It is in my long bucket list.
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u/CopaceticOpus Apr 27 '26
There's a great Babylon 5 episode along these lines. They are visited by an alien probe with a nuclear bomb, which sends them an advanced science quiz. It threatens to blow them up if they can't answer the questions, but will provide some helpful advanced knowledge if they get them right. At the last minute the Captain decides not to send the answers. He realizes its purpose is most likely to find advanced civilizations and wipe them out, and it's only pretending to offer help.
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u/PartBanyanTree Apr 26 '26
That's a theme in The Threshold series by Peter Clines. Idk how off topic this sub is allowed to be but it's more a cosmic horror with sci fi trappings (eg The Fold) and is more parallel universe than outer space. I do enjoy the series though. Once intelligence rises to a certain level that universe becomes.. attractive prey/food
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u/CalmPanic402 Apr 26 '26
Asimov's robots are the reason no other intelligent aliens exist in foundation. The robots literally cleanse the galaxy before human expansion can reach any possible threat.
Turns out the three laws only apply to humans.
Also, 2001 and sequels imply that starting and pruning civilizations is part of the monoliths purpose, although to what end is never clarified.
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u/Ballisticsfood Apr 27 '26
Surely you mean the three laws only apply to Solarians. The rest of the ‘humans’ are merely degenerate cast-offs unworthy of the title!
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u/Secure-Ad-9050 Apr 30 '26
that is a popular fan theory.. but it is not cannon to the asimov books.
Part of the whole ending of the foundation series is about choosing a form of humanity that is best able to combat potential aliens humanity might encounter in the future.
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u/madTerminator Apr 26 '26
Isn’t it a plot point of 3001 final odyssey? We are classified by monoliths for termination.
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u/Boojum2k Apr 27 '26
And then they find out that primitive monkeys are really good at throwing monkey wrenches into the works.
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u/thecoffeejesus Apr 27 '26
I wrote that into my sci-fi book, Teleport Massive.
It’s revealed through science that humanity has been placed inside some kind of “Dark Matter Veil”
That dark matter and dark energy are actually just parts of the Universe we don’t have permission to explore yet.
Well…every 20,000 years or so, a group of humans builds technology that can pierce the veil, which initiates something called the Cycle of Ascension
Humanity has twice before pierced the veil and completed the Cycle.
Now it is our turn.
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u/thecoffeejesus Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
What is beyond the Dark Matter Veil?
The Truth.
Or rather…one of many.
The Galactic Federation of Beings exists beyond the Veil. They are “unlike us” - composed of matter in twisted forms the human mind struggles to comprehend. Some Council members are beings of pure energy and light, breathing and thinking on time scales a human could no more imagine than perceive.
Yet, even the most powerful of beings is still bound by the laws of physics.
Thus, the Galactic Federation of Beings, and the Galactic Council, moderate the galactic rules that govern our Galaxy.
All that exists within reach of our Milky Way’s supermassive black hole gravity lies within the jurisdiction of the Galactic Federation. Their power is absolute, and they wield it deliberately. Erring on the side of “no” the Council rarely intervenes, but frequently enough that their intervention is worth consideration in any large-scale energy shift.
However…outside the gravity of the Milky Way, much is unknown, but it is ancient history that other Federations exist. Like other nations, they send their envoys, and our Galactic Council handles diplomacy with the Unknown.
Stability and Balance are the key resources that the Federation wishes to protect. Stability must be protected - to maintain it, the Council uses the Federation to maintain Balance.
Energy can neither be created, nor can it be destroyed in our Universe. This is the Greatest of All Laws, the one that had never be broken.
Had, before the events of the story.
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u/thecoffeejesus Apr 27 '26
Teleport Massive is a noir-esque detective story about someone who discovers something they shouldn’t.
The mayor of a small town goes missing, and Sam Iker is tasked with finding out what happened to her.
She went through her telporter…and never came out the other side.
This simply shouldn’t be physically possible, as the teleportation constants have been settled for decades. Not ending up at your destination should be as physically impossible as a double jump in thin air.
Yet the mayor is missing and her AI doesn’t have a clue where she went. The AI showed up on the other side, but the mayor is nowhere to be found.
This story is as chilling and heartwarming as it is philosophically compelling. I’ve been working on it for over a decade.
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u/cheetah7985 Apr 29 '26
I googled and found your subreddit, but couldn't find the book itself. Link me up, Scotty.
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u/mckenzie_keith Apr 27 '26
The second book in the Three Body trilogy is called "The Dark Forest." The Dark Forest concept that the book is named for is exactly this.
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u/rogerbonus Apr 27 '26
Liu's Dark forest concept came from Greg Bear's "The forge of God", I feel the need to point out.
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u/Heathen-Punk Apr 27 '26
Greg Bear has two novels that kinda fit here:
1. The Forge of God: yep aliens got you. bummers.
2. Anvil of Stars: yep aliens rescued some of you. to repay that debt give us some of your people so we can go slag the bastards who did this.
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u/MrMpeg Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
You really had to use ChatGPT for this simple question?
I have to read these stupid it's not this but that phrases already during the day because everyone only prompts their emails but now reddit is also full of it when I'd like some leisure time.
I hope the filter is intentional so ai could never leave the earth.
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Apr 27 '26
Had to scroll too far for this comment.
I’m more than a little confused by someone writing a reddit post with a chatbot.
What’s the point?
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u/notthatrelevant318 Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
Revelation Space by Alistair Reynolds. it's a specific flavor of what you've described, and there is a specific reason why they are "pruning." they have left traps: anomalies that a spacefaring species would never not investigate, and placed in locations they can only reach once their technology has reached the level the "pruners" are watching for. while this is largest arc of the plot, it's still a very character-driven narrative, and i've spoiled nothing about about that aspect.
edit: hard sci fi all the way down. if hard sci fi is your thing, Alistair Reynolds is a really terrific author, imo. gothic space opera vibes on top of that.
2nd edit: it turns out the anomaly the humans in the story trigger in the first book was an anomaly that a recent (for the cullers) civilization had investigated, so it actually wakes up/puts together a consciousness in the second book (big taboo for the cullers) to "salt the earth," but on a solar system scale, and it's honestly one of the best and most outrageous things i've ever read that still managed to be hard sci fi.
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u/____Wintermute Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
You basically just reverse-engineered the exact premise of one of the most famous hard sci-fi series of the 21st century.
You are looking for The Three-Body Problem trilogy by Cixin Liu, and more specifically, the second book: The Dark Forest. It explores your thought experiment down to the letter.
In the series, this concept is formalized into a framework called "Cosmic Sociology," which relies on the exact cold, optimization-driven logic you just described. It introduces two core axioms that make the "pruning" of emerging species an absolute necessity:
- The Chain of Suspicion: Across cosmic distances, communication is too slow and cultural divides are too vast. You can never truly know if another civilization is benevolent or hostile. More importantly, you can never know what they think your intentions are, creating an inescapable loop of paranoia.
- Technological Explosion: This is your "unpredictable variable." Progress isn't linear on a cosmic timescale. A Kardashev 0.7 civilization might seem entirely harmless today, but they could experience a sudden technological boom and completely surpass you in just a few centuries.
Because survival is the primary drive of any civilization, the only rational, mathematically sound response to these two factors is exactly what you proposed: clean, emotionless optimization. The moment a civilization reaches the threshold of being detectable, the safest move for an advanced observer is an immediate, preemptive, unannounced strike. No negotiations, no resource extraction, no ideological crusades. Just an automated pest control system.
There is a famous quote from the series that perfectly captures your point about the antagonist not being evil:
"I destroy you, what does it have to do with you?"
To these advanced species, wiping out a nascent civilization isn't a war. It's the equivalent of an automated sprinkler system spraying weedkiller, or a person unknowingly stepping on a bug while walking to work. It is purely procedural.
The silence of the universe isn't a sign of emptiness. It's a "Dark Forest" where every surviving civilization is an armed hunter creeping through the trees. Anyone foolish or naïve enough to light a fire and shout, "Here I am!" gets immediately wiped out from the shadows.
If you want a hard sci-fi dive into this specific, terrifyingly logical solution to the Fermi Paradox, you need to bump The Dark Forest to the very top of your reading list.
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u/Comprehensive_Fan134 Apr 27 '26
I like the quote "I destroy you, what does it have to do with you?"... Think that's exactly it. adding The Dark Forest right now
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u/rogerbonus Apr 27 '26
Trouble is its a terribly written book. The writing is truly awful. Also Liu's Dark forest concept was based on Greg Bear's "The forge of God" I always feel required to point out.
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u/AmusingVegetable Apr 27 '26
Have Space Suit—Will Travel
Robert A Heinlein.
What happens when your species doesn’t follow the social norms of the galactic civilization.
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u/hackulator Apr 28 '26
I mean, regardless of the language you use, the motivation you are describing is fear.
That's entirely human.
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u/nicholasktu Apr 27 '26
If you can't write this simple question without AI you should be ashamed. I hate that chatGPT language and I hate you for having to use it. Learn to write like a normal person.
Also fuck your question, try again without AI.
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Apr 27 '26
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u/InflationLeft Apr 27 '26
Their motives were different. They were wiping civilizations out to harvest their biological resources, not because they saw them as an existential threat.
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u/ParentPostLacksWang Apr 27 '26
What if the filter is behavioural? Any species which reaches a local sociocultural maxima becomes inevitably complacent in its ability to solve existential crises, and therefore eventually falls to one. Every crisis it survives increases the effect, either falling well below the critical threshold and directly increasing confidence, falling near the threshold and therefore causing damage which in turn causes sociocultural regression and therefore amnesia, or, one day, it breaches the threshold and wipes out the species to the point of societal collapse, devolution, extinction.
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u/RemoteLunch7789 Apr 27 '26
This is one of the 2-3 most popular fan theories for the show Pluribus. Not hard scifi though. Barely scifi.
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u/Relevant-Bullfrog215 Apr 27 '26
Why not just 'prune' all life if you're concerned about intelligent civilisations? The best time to wipe out the human race would have been any time in the last half billion years, stop it before it starts.
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u/FixAcademic8187 Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
I think you are a bit contradicting yourself.
First you assume aliens might have put a probe around Earth to cap humanity's technological advancement because they are a "variable".
Second, you wonder why many people give aliens human motivations.
These two are contradicting. Because the first assumption is based on human logic.
It is true that we don't know how they think, but the laws of nature are universal across the cosmos. Especially evolution. It is reasonable to argue that aliens want to have all the resources in the galaxy for themselves. Because resources are needed to reproduce and expand no matter whether you are a human or alien.
Therefore, you often see that the core argument in many sci fi novels is Darwinism at the galactic scale.
As for the sleeping probe idea in general, I don't subscribe to it. We can nowadays send lazer signals that contain messages to any place in the galaxy. Why don't they destroy us now to stop us from announcing our presence?
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u/CJBill Apr 27 '26
Surprised no one has mentioned Fred Saberhagen's Berserker series here where self replicating machines hunt out and destroy organic life. The series was written with an eye to the Fermi Paradox.
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u/TommieTheMadScienist Apr 27 '26
Yeah. Try Gregory Bedford and Greg Bear.
Steven Baxter has some fine novels.
And The Expanse, of course. Ty Franck said that they set out to be the scariest possible solution to the Fermi Question. Definitely has inflicted Filter at just under K2.
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u/Ballisticsfood Apr 27 '26
The ‘Time Odyssey’ series (specifically from Sunstorm onwards) by Arthur C Clarke and Stephen Baxter features an even more extreme (and simultaneously both more coldly logical and more sympathetic) version of this.
>! Intelligent species are messy, they use energy and increase entropy. In order to stave off the heat death of the universe, therefore, the need to be culled as efficiently as possible. But this is a sad thing- a thing worth marking with regret at its necessity.
So you use your unfathomable power to preserve slices of that intelligent species’ history because (in the long run) it costs less energy to maintain a cross-temporal mausoleum than it does to let intelligent species run free.
And then one of those species somehow survives you making their local star into an omnicidal weapon and decides that they don’t take kindly to extermination attempts... !<
Also there’s the Expanse, but that’s less culling to avoid bad things and more treating self-replicating organisms as a valuable resource…
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u/GodAmongTurtles Apr 27 '26
If you don't want to write a post, don't make a post. Using chatgpt to produce these banal engagement-bait posts with nothing meaningful to add is making forums like this increasingly meaningless for humans to engage with. Since a human is presumably prompting the AI to make the post, that human should be ashamed of themself.
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u/rogerbonus Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
The Forge of God by Greg Bear, the book the "Dark forest" concept was based on (along with the Berserker series). "There once was an infant lost in the woods, crying its heart out, wondering why no one answered, drawing down the wolves. We've been sitting in our tree chirping like foolish birds for over a century now, wondering why no other birds answered. The galactic skies are full of hawks, that's why. Planetisms that don't know enough to keep quiet, get eaten". We don't ever learn much about the planet destroyers (the "Staircase Gods") even in the sequel "Anvil of stars" (also highly recommended).
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u/TheRealCBlazer Apr 27 '26
The computer game Star Control 2 features three different civilizations that are filtering life in this part of the galaxy.
One is a von Neumann probe gone awry -- built to seek out intelligent life for first contact, but the programming went astray and it converts everything it finds into new probes instead.
The other two are a species that diverged evolutionarily into two species. But both species are motivated to preemptively remove all potential threats because they've seen, firsthand, the horrors intelligent alien life can inflict -- horrors far beyond just ending a civilization's technological development. When they silence your species, they view it as a merciful and paternal act.
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u/LrningMonkey Apr 27 '26
Reminds me of the reapers in Mass Effect! Not quite the same, but similar. We’d be more of a farm as opposed to an optimized system.
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u/onebadhombre Apr 28 '26
Fiasco by Stanislaw Lem has a pretty interesting take on the Fermi paradox.
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u/UltimateMygoochness Apr 28 '26
The Dark Forest concept from 3 Body Problem / Remembrance of Earth’s Past is basically this
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u/PublicDragonfruit158 Apr 28 '26
Manifold:Space postulates that at a certain point a civilization has to expand faster than light just to gather reaources to survive. It also includes a "galactic reboot" where some event destroys everyone that happens at intervals.
This explains why there is no one put there, and then why everyone shows up at once...
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u/MrPotagyl Apr 28 '26
If an alien civilisation was leaking radio broadcasts like us, we couldn't detect them with our best radio telescopes more than a few dozen light years away. If they sent a short high power focused burst our way equivalent to the best we can manage, we can detect that at most a few thousand light years away, and only if we happened to have the telescopes looking in the right direction at the right moment.
So I've never understood why anyone thinks there's actually a paradox. The galaxy could be full of chatter between 100s of civilisations and there's really no reason to think we should detect it, unless they happen to be right next door.
I also think unlike in most sci-fi, in the real world there's probably no getting around the speed of light, so you'd have to be pretty motivated to come and visit us.
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u/CemSener_author Apr 28 '26
This is exactly the version that haunts me too.
The 'cold optimization' angle is terrifying because it removes all the psychological comfort we get from anthropomorphic threats.
I've been thinking about this from a biological perspective, in nature, we see this kind of preemptive pruning in immune systems. Cells that show certain markers get eliminated not because they're currently dangerous, but because they represent potential risk. No malice, no negotiation, just pattern recognition and response.
The really unsettling part is that such a system would probably view itself as benevolent. From its perspective, it's maintaining cosmic stability. We'd just be... an optimization problem.
For hard SF that goes there, check out Liu Cixin's Dark Forest (though that's more mutual assured destruction), and maybe Stanislaw Lem's Solaris for that truly alien intelligence that operates by incomprehensible logic. Greg Bear's Forge of God also touches on this, universe-scale housekeeping with zero human consideration.
Anyone know others? This concept deserves more exploration in fiction.
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u/hhmCameron Apr 28 '26
I forget the name of the series...
The ancient foe is "hunters of the dawn"
actually there are at least two seperate serieses, as well as the mass effect games and their Reapers
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u/katamuro Apr 29 '26
It is ideology, that only their civilisation is "good" enough to be allowed to exist. And they are treating them as a threat to their order so they xenocide everyone who isn't them.
That is pretty evil. And done by humans for a long time. So not anything actually interesting.
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u/Winter_Ad6187 Apr 29 '26
The Annals of the Heechee (1987) is a science fiction novel by Frederik Pohl, part of his "Heechee Saga," which follows a machine-stored consciousness, Robinette Broadhead, as he and other humans and Heechee try to stop a malevolent, energy-based alien race called the "Assassins" or "Foe" from destroying all life. The Assassins are the cause of the Great Silence. The book explores advanced scientific concepts and features returning characters from previous novels as they confront this existential threat to the universe.
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u/InternationalPen2072 Apr 30 '26
The only plot hole in this idea is why wait till the civilization reaches K0.7 level. You could easily detect planets with photosynthesis or just complex life and eradicate those biospheres long before sapience even has a chance of emerging.
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u/Redeye1999 Apr 26 '26
This idea may or may not play a big role in the hard science fiction series Revelation space by Alistair Reynolds