What really maddens me about Dark Forest is that it absolutely is not easy. You're trying to build a machine with enough energy to glass a planet that you're somehow going to launch interstellar distances, with enough delta-v to catch another planet, and enough delta-v for course correction and terminal manuevering, and some kind of hardened control sytems that can survive decades, centuries, or millenia in the deep black, and some kind of power system that can run all of this presumably using magic bc idk what other power system could do all that.

People just grossly underestimate how much energy it would take to legitimately blow up a planet. Like, launching a moon-sized asteroid straight to the Earth isn't enough to blow up the Earth. And there's a flip side to this where people also underestimate how much aliens would have to do to end (vertebrate) life on Earth. All they have to do is nuke a critical mass of metropolitan areas for a massive firestorm that blankets the Earth with smoke to form. They don't really need sci-fantasy tech to end (vertebrate) life.

I feel like people assuage their very rational fears of nuclear holocaust by coming up with fanciful how-Earth-can-be-destroyed scenarios (what if a giant space station shoot a giant laser, what if a mass of self-replicating nanobots reach Earth, what if a parasitic species that can mind-control humans invade Earth, what if the Earth gets sucked into an artificial black hole) and assuring themselves that since these are all obviously fantasy, there's no real way for humans to be wiped out.