Is the Universe a Dark Forest? – with Adriano V. Autino

Abstract

Following the golden age of science fiction, the genre spent decades dominated by dystopian narratives that blamed human intelligence and technology for environmental ruin. In this era, humanity was urged to move to a lower profile after wasting Earth. A shift emerged in the 2010s with authors like James Corey, Andy Weir, and Daniel Suarez, who restored a more balanced dynamic between human initiative and nature’s uncertainties. Concurrently, a new paradigm arose from the East: Liu Cixin’s “Dark Forest” theory. Expanding on the Fermi Paradox through a paranoid, game-theoretic lens, Cixin posits that the universe is a hostile arena where civilizations must hide or strike first to survive. Philosophically, this view sweeps away benign, humanistic cosmologies in favor of compulsive risk mitigation. However, the underlying premise of the dark forest theory remains flawed: it assumes that intelligence inherently drives aggression and malice. The theory overlooks the possibility that higher intelligence—and superintelligence—naturally leans toward cooperation and good, realizing that in a universe of virtually infinite resources, more intelligence creates mutual opportunity. Much like eco-dystopian fiction, the dark forest philosophy implicitly suggests that humanity should regress to a low-tech, rural existence—not to live in harmony with nature, but to avoid being perceived as a threat by galactic neighbors. This presentation, built upon a paper presented at the SRI 4th World Congress in July 2026, analyzes the cultural flaws of the dark forest theory and proposes literary counter-perspectives.

Short bios

Adriano Vittorio Autino, born in Moncrivello (VC, Italia), is co-founder and former president of the Space Renaissance Initiative, since 2010 Space Renaissance International (SRI), an inter-cultural non-profit association, whose mission is the opening of the space frontier: low-cost access to space, space tourism, industrialization of the geo-lunar space, use of near-Earth asteroids, and the full development of the space economy. Adriano is a self-taught space philosopher and author of numerous original concepts regarding space humanism. Adriano has a diploma in industrial electronics, having acted since 1971 as a software and system engineer, then as a project manager and entrepreneur in the field of real-time automation systems. His insatiable curiosity and the desire to engage in frontier fields have led him to work in the aerospace environment and to devise and develop an integrated software system, supporting the systems engineering and project lifecycle management processes. Adriano authored and co-authored several books, papers, and articles on the theme of civilization expansion into outer space.

Alberto Cavallo, co-author of the mentioned paper, is an electrical engineer who graduated from the Politecnico di Torino in 1985. He was involved in all business areas of the Fiat Engineering, the engineering and construction company of the FIAT Group. Since Fiat Engineering was transferred from the FIAT Group to a new EPC group and then merged with a large EPC company in Milan, he was involved in large oil and gas and petrochemical projects all over the world until his retirement in 2024. Besides his professional activity, he has always taken part in several cultural activities. He was a member of the Associations of Alumni of the Liceo Classico Vittorio Alfieri of Turin, active in promoting humanistic culture as well as its connection to the technical and scientific area. He manages his own website, www.eurinome.it (in Italian only) about philosophy, science, and politics/geopolitics. Due to this, he got in contact with Adriano Autino and his website Technologies of the Frontier (TDF) and then became one of the founding members of Space Renaissance International. Besides several papers in his professional area, he has written several articles for his own site, for TDF and SRI, co-authoring the book “Three Theses for the Space Renaissance” with Adriano Autino and Patrick Q. Collins. He is currently a member of the Board of SRI.