Event Description
During the Doomsday Battle, the Droplet annihilated nearly two thousand human warships with devastating force, leaving only a handful of ships that barely escaped. These fleeing warships — including Natural Selection, Blue Space, and others — became the only remaining seeds of human civilization in interstellar space.
However, the fleeing fleet soon faced a cruel reality: there were no resupply stations in deep space, and the ships' fuel and supplies could only sustain a limited range. If all ships consumed these resources together, none could travel far enough to find a new home. The only survival strategy was to reduce the number of consumers.
The chain of suspicion reemerged among humans. Every warship knew that other ships were making the same calculation: if the other side struck first, you would be eliminated; if you struck first, you could claim the other's resources. In this "prisoner's dilemma," trust could not be established and cooperation could not be sustained.
Eventually, warships opened fire on each other. Comrade against comrade, ally against ally — the darkest chapter in human history played out in the vast emptiness of deep space. Zhang Beihai, the visionary who had planned centuries ahead for humanity's survival, also perished in the Dark Battle.
A Micro-Scale Validation of the Dark Forest
The profound significance of the Dark Battle lies in its proof that the Dark Forest theory applies not only between different civilizations but also within a single civilization. When the following conditions are simultaneously met — finite survival resources, inability to establish reliable trust between participants, and mutual capability to eliminate the other — the Dark Forest state naturally emerges.
This battle gave Luo Ji's cosmic sociology its most heartrending validation. Humanity didn't need alien civilizations to teach them what the Dark Forest was — they could reenact it themselves under extreme conditions.
Final Outcome
After the Dark Battle concluded, the surviving ships continued into deep space. Blue Space eventually entered a four-dimensional space fragment, gaining a chance to change its fate. The descendants of these fleeing ships ultimately developed into the Galactic Human civilization, ensuring humanity's continuation in the universe.