Why We Should NOT Look For Aliens - The Dark Forest

The Milky Way has 200 billion stars and perhaps 100 billion planets. If only a small fraction of those planets harbor life, and even if only a small fraction of those planets have intelligent life forms, our galaxy will be teeming with alien civilizations.
If an advanced civilization had the technology to travel between stars at just 0.1 percent of the speed of light, it could colonize our Galaxy in about 100 million years.
Given that the Milky Way has been around for billions of years, that's not long -- so in principle any space-felling civilization should be able to spread rapidly over vast areas of the Galaxy. Yet we see nothing, we hear nothing, the universe seems empty.
And the seeming dissonance between how many advanced civilizations there should be in space and the lack of any evidence is known as the Fermi paradox. Over the decades, it has led to many hypotheses and potential solutions.
Some argue that life was rare to begin with, others that the development of intelligence is a bottleneck, and still others believe that most civilizations will survive only a short time before exploding or, conversely, will never even invent radio.
However, one solution is darker than the others!
The dark forest theory explains why we haven't heard from aliens by assuming they've been deliberately quiet.
Why haven't we heard from aliens yet? If this solution is correct, they purposely hide in the darkness of space out of fear of death. Now compare this dark forest to our own universe and each hunter as a separate civilization. We humans will be one of those hunters, as will unknown alien civilizations -- we all live in total silence, without any other contact. We're just following the rules in this forest... That is to avoid contact with anyone at all costs.
In terms of trying to survive in this deep, dark forest, we never know what's out there waiting for us. Are we digging our own grave, or are we welcoming new friends? Maybe it's up to us when we meet aliens in the future!