Why would anyone come from light years away to inhabit a planet. It would be cheaper to just build habitats or colonize a planet in their solar system. There is almost nothing we can provide to a civilization capable of traversing between start systems.

All resources are scarce.

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.

relatively scarce, sure. There are millions of times more of all the resources Earth has between us and any civilization coming from light years away. By the time they needed Earths resources they’d have to have gobbled up large chunks of, if not the whole, Galaxy.

Right but the whole premise of the Fermi Paradox is that it doesn't take long (on a galactic scale) to gobble up the entire galaxy using STL transit if you're dealing with a constantly growing civilization.

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.

>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.

Well okay but I believe that premise is flawed. It still takes millions of years for one (which is a long time on human timescales) and it’s more likely civilizations Balkanize and begin fighting each other if they even were to be so resource driven they wished to colonize the galaxy that quick which I don’t think we have any reason to believe is true.

> Why would anyone come from light years away to inhabit a planet.

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.

This seems to be projecting a human trait that is itself obsolete to us unto civilizations that share no common culture or genetics and are leagues ahead of us technologically speaking. Not to mention the age of exploration was driven by economics. Seems foolish to me.

Or maybe that carbon based intelligent life that wanted our planet it's us.

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. :-)

The aliens in Scott Westerfeld's Fine Prey invade Earth for a novel reason. It's ROT-13 (https://rot13.com/) encoded to avoid any spoilers.

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

Or they did want it and used it for seeding more complex life so they could eventually create homo sapiens. Like the start of the film Prometheus.

Which would mean that the dark forest is still false right?