It seems safe to say that there isn't life that wants our planet.

But if nobody wants our world and they're scared of intelligent life then just send out Von Neumann probes to ensure intelligence isn't showing up elsewhere. First mover's advantage nullifies the entire dark forest.

So either they'd - already have gotten here & already have destroyed the earth when we showed intelligence OR - already have gotten here & don't care about destroying intelligence.

Or... civilizations don't experience unbounded growth over millions of years across millions of light years to begin with.

Many motives from the age of exploration could apply - imperialism, religious beliefs, religious or political differences, cultural exchange, scientific discovery, competition with others, etc. People don't always take the cheapest option; the same could be true of aliens.

We were almost wiped out after the first large impact. The impact that happened a few millennia after we killed all those awful looking smarty octopus that lived in this planet. But we could not defend against the large Comet, it come from behind the Sun and way too fast. We had minutes notice.

Some microbes survived...And here we are again typing on our keyboards. :-)

Gur nyvraf ner ynathntr areqf. Gurl bpphcvrq Rnegu fb gung uhznaf jbhyq perngr n arj qvnyrpg bs gurve ynathntr.

Colonizing other planets and making them into homes for aliens long before a native civilization has a chance to arise seems more plausible than just destroying them.

(Of course, you may still have any amount of conflict with your fellow settlers, or your someone in your original species' descendants two systems over, but that's a completely different conversation.)

> There is no compelling reason to wait until a planet conclusively proves it has intelligence on it to nuke it into oblivion with a kinetic kill projectile.

Or send a technologically engineered molecule that can hijack single-cellular life to help establish your needed technology in the target solar system.

You've got two major approaches: Fling a kinetic kill projectile, or if you have the tech to get "something" into the target system at roughly orbital velocities, send some machines to do the job with local resources.

None of these things appear to have happened in Earth's past. Ironically, trying to spin yarns in which they did anyhow still end up countering the Dark Forest hypothesis, because all such attempts must either include significant probabilities of failure of the attempts or the possibility that the life out there is benevolent (to some degree, at least sufficient to avoid simply wiping us out, which on this scale is "benevolence" despite whatever else they may be doing) which itself would imply the forest isn't that dark.

If I was also murderous, I would have programmed the probes to destroy any signs of life.

So, the fact that we are still alive after broadcasting the presence of life through out atmosphere for the last couple billion years is quite reassuring.

Granted there could be some technical limitations that prevent you from observing certain systems but that pool will be much smaller than an entire galaxy of stars.

Also, don't forget that a Von Neumann probe is at a disadvantage when it arrives in a system since you want to send the minimum number of probes to each star and then have them replicate on arrival. If your probe accidentally shows up in a system that contains an advanced civilization capable of detecting and capturing it then you've given away the fact of your existence and your intent along with all the information that can be gained by studying the probe.

Also I'd expect the probes would communicate with the homeworld via relays (where they were replicated) rather than directly, so it'd take a fair amount of effort to unravel a replicator network unless you caught one of the very first probes.

And also it'd be conspicuous if there was a volume of space in your network where your probes always failed.