The hypothesis also assumes that your target has not left their home system. But there’s no reason to believe that this is the case. If you’re attacking an enemy that has multiple star systems under their command, you have no guarantee that you’ll find and destroy all of them before they find and destroy all of yours.

And of course, if your target is a cooperator by nature, it is possible that they will have allies who can now strike at you before you can strike at them. Even if you succeed in destroying your target civilisation entirely, their allies will still learn of their demise, and treat you as a threat.

The hypothesis falls apart the moment you give any consideration to the value of cooperation. Now, in all fairness to Cixin, I think that might actually be the point. Basically every failure or near brush with failure in the books happens because of people trying to do things on their own when they should have been working together. While the Dark Forest is bad science, it’s a great metaphor. My issue with it is that people keep treating it as some kind of brilliant revelation about the nature of the universe when a) it’s not, and b) I’m not even sure it’s meant to be.