I love the Wikipedia image. It adds no information value except underlying how ominous the theory makes the universe seem. Always gives me the chills.

I don't understand something about this: how would the civilization that destroys another one know that they don't expose themselves to some even more hidden civilization? Isn't the best option to sit still and hope the Precursors don't notice you?

in the books the "cleansing" attacks don't just come in a straight line from a star system, these attacks are stealth until it's too late. thus, the attacker cannot be identified by others.

But how do you know space isn't filled with a network of probes to detect just that? It seems to me you need to be confident you're first on the scene, or at least that the Precursors don't have such a huge lead on you that your diversions are useless.

Edit: Also it seems that by a strange argument combining 1) any civilization earlier than you is likely to be massively more technologically advanced and you cannot hide and 2) you exist, that any civilization could assume they are either first or first enough, which also seems to break the dark forest.

Von Neumann probes to fill up the galaxy are an interesting concept, one that wasn't really explored in the Three Body trilogy though.

I enjoyed that wikipedia link more than the novel

"The Dark Forest" is literally the title of one of the books, and they were published quite a few years ago.

I said posting the link, not mentioning the title. The "theory" is named after the book. The wikipedia article was added in October 2022 and is mostly just modeled after Cixin Liu's use of the theory. From one of the citations:

>This particular proposed resolution to Fermi’s Paradox question is a very recent addition. It takes its name from the novel The Dark Forest by famed Chinese science fiction writer Liu Cixin.

So the title of a book wasn't a spoiler for itself.

> The "theory" is named after the book

You know, that's what I previously thought, but the article says the hypothesis has been around in some form since the 80s, so I figured it wasn't a huge spoiler. The article directly contradicts your source quote (science fiction versions section).

To be fair it's a recurring space opera theme, nothing particularly new.

Dark forest being a trope in other books is irrelevant to it being a huge spoiler for the series if you read the wikipedia which definitely will make the experience of reading it less enjoyable.

That's like saying murder is in a lot of books so it's not a big deal to spoil a book with a pivotal murder in its plot. Have you read the books? Because I would think the importance would be obvious if you had.