Huh. Your article and mine are on much the same subject, and are almost concurrent. Your is much more scholarly and well-written than my own (and I mean that sincerely).
Problem is, there’s a factor that the Drake equation does not take into account: concurrence. Dark Forest Theory is terrifyingly logical, but it assumes that (1) there are other spacefaring civilizations in our particular neck of the galactic woods, and — more importantly — (2) the spacefaring capability of the other civilizations is relatively concurrent to our own.
Think on this for a moment: of Earth’s billions of years of existence, there’s been several extinction events. Between each of those extinction events, there was an opportunity for intelligent species to develop…but as far as we can tell, none did. It’s only within the past few ten thousand years or so (a relative blink of an eye in the geologic time frame) that an intelligent species has learned to use tools and developed even rudimentary technology, it’s only within the past three thousand years that technology has really taken off, and it’s only within the past two centuries that we’ve gone from riding horses to SpaceX and dreams of Mars.
In cosmic terms, this all occurred in the proverbial flash in the pan. I think you would agree that our experience is that the higher the level of technology, the faster technology develops on an almost logarithmic scale…and that this likely applies to other species as well.
In other words, for Dark Forest Theory to apply to us, then other civilizations must rise to spaceflight capability in or about the same time frame as our own, in addition to being in the same region of the galaxy as we are.
I address this in more detail here:
