"The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is a hunter with a loaded gun. If you hear another hunter, you must kill them — because if they hear you first, they will kill you. This is not paranoia. This is the logic of coordination failure at cosmic scale. The universe is silent not because it is empty but because coordination is fatal when there is no trust layer."
Chinese science fiction author whose Three-Body Problem trilogy is the most consequential science fiction of the 21st century. The Dark Forest theory — his in-universe explanation for the Fermi paradox — proposes that all advanced civilizations hide because detection means destruction: the universe is a prisoner's dilemma with no communication channel and lethal stakes. His work imagines a universe that has already solved the coordination problem — by universal defection.