Just an hour ago, I learned about Przybylski's Star. [0]
> Przybylski's observations indicated unusually low amounts of iron and nickel in the star's spectrum, but higher amounts of unusual elements such as strontium, holmium, niobium, scandium, yttrium, caesium, neodymium, praseodymium, thorium, ytterbium, and uranium.
While the explanation is likely some unknown natural process, salting a star with an impossible chemical composition might also be a way for a technological species to create a monument, correct? This seems like it would involve moving less mass around than a Dyson Sphere/Swarm, although it would need a constant feed, if I understand the situation correctly.
Astonishingly, there appears to be no contemporary analysis of this star.
Thanks, I missed the edit window to fix that to read: no contemporary observations,[0] though thanks to you I now realize even that might be not correct.
Given your research on these papers, do you think that this is still an object worthy of closer observation with even more modern tools?
Not an astrophysicist by any stretch of the imagination, but it's definitely an object that's worthy of close research. People are for sure doing that research as well. It takes time to produce serious scientific research though.
How can game theory tell us that hiding from a malicious civilization is a safer choice than exposing ourselves to a benevolent civilization that could rescue us from some danger impossible for us to handle?
My opinion is based on different theories and hypotheses, but the prevalent opinion is that there can't be a benevolent civilization in the first place. And even if there are, they would continue hiding themselves.
Essentially, any alien civilization that survives in the long term is silent and hostile. But especially silent since being hostile can reveal your location.
> but the prevalent opinion is that there can't be a benevolent civilization in the first place.
You'd have to explain why. Logically, the first two civilizations to "team up" would easily handle any single civilization that challenges them. A civilization that happens to beat them would find among its attractive options a Nobunaga Gambit: taking on the vanquished foe's mission of unification (since it worked until it didn't - and the one time it didn't work, there was a terrifyingly good chance that it could have).
"The Dark Forest" as an idea is inextricable from its cultural origins, a China that's rather pessimistic about inter-civilizational contact because of its recent history. That it resonates amidst a zeitgeist of global instability doesn't make it universally correct. Gene Roddenberry's competing vision might seem optimistic, but it's not naive; beneath Starfleet's cheery veneer is the Neo Princess Serenitian realpolitik of, "Peace, or else."
> Logically, the first two civilizations to "team up" would easily handle any single civilization that challenges them.
I don't think saying "logically" and then an unsubstantiated claim constitutes a proof.
If two civilizations team up, whether that makes them stronger, weaker, or equally effective, is not certain IMO.
When two human companies merge, the result is often mistrust, poor communication, poor effectiveness, and sometimes ultimately failure. Sometimes the result of the merger is more effective.
A single, decisive government can run more effective than an indecisive coalition with no clear leader.
I just don't see how a definitive conclusion is possible any way. Surely it would vary case by case.
>When two human companies merge, the result is often mistrust, poor communication, poor effectiveness, and sometimes ultimately failure. Sometimes the result of the merger is more effective.
Those are all important considerations when talking about particular circumstances. Mathematically, however, 2 is greater than 1.
I say "logically" in the sense that, across a broad view of conflicts, the larger combatant usually does the most damage. The reason why is particular to each conflict (more bodies to throw, more brains devoted to tech development, more industrial output, etc.), and when it does not happen, the reason why is also similarly particular. You can also argue whether the circumstances truly yield a "win" (as in asymmetric warfare that ends with the smaller force driving out the larger one on logistical grounds, despite sustaining heavier losses). (Also note that "war" is not "business"; alliances are more important when the outcome of lost battles isn't just lost access to capital, but lost lives).
> Logically, the first two civilizations to "team up" would easily handle any single civilization that challenges them.
This assumes defense is possible. Two loud cooperating civilizations don’t seem like they’d stand much of a chance against a silent, hostile civilization that quietly chucks a few rocks at both homeworlds and any interesting-looking moons, timed to arrive at roughly the same time.
A silent, hostile civilization that applies the astronomical levels of energy to accelerate enough mass to cause an extinction level event at the target in any reasonable amount of time would very likely cease to be a silent civilization. It imagine it would be difficult to hide an energy expenditure of that magnitude; the target may even be capable of deflecting the incoming relativistic payload with one of their own given enough lead time. Also, if there are sufficient loud, cooperating civilizations paying attention to large bursts of energy in their neighborhood, the asshole rock-chucking civilization may find multiple such relativistic payloads heading for their home relatively soon after firing theirs.
Send an agent to an uninhabited star system and launch the rocks from there. Everyone that can see would see the energy expenditures, but they would get very little information other than the knowledge that a stealth based hostile civilization exists. This information would encourage everyone else to be less noisy.
The "stealthy" civilization has ceased to be stealthy, in this case. Launching an attack of any kind defeats the purpose, if anyone but the fully-wiped-out target can see. Your example suggests that a stealthy, hostile civilization isn't possible.
What would an observer see? It’s plausible that they would see an attack from an uninhabited solar system but not be able to find the home location of the attacker.
Ooh, that's the fun part. What (augmented) sense does the observer rely on? On what timescale? How was the attack coordinated? The attack surface of the operation - and the ability to trace it back to its origin - might be wider than you can plan for. "Plausible" is a shaky ground to be on with your civilization in the balance, if you suspect there's even a chance you can be discovered and have chosen to remain as hidden as possible heretofore. Dark Forest doctrine and hostility are incompatible, I think.
If you can achieve faster than light travel (worm holes?) and some sort of immortality (digital? consciousness quantum woo?) then maybe you transcend the worries of physical destruction…
How does this play out with two apex predators...? When you travel in bear-infested woods, the common refrain is to make your presence known -- better to let the other apex predator aware of your existence so you can both give one another a wide berth. Or the Teddy Roosevelt style - walk softly, but carry a big stick.
The theory is that there may be civilizations, or remnants (AIs), that have a vested interest in removing possible competition for resources, or in the case of the AIs, have been instructed to snuff out signs of life for the same reason.
If you are the first one and want to make sure to prevent all future advanced civilizations from evolving, you send out von Neumann probes. You can tell them to build relativistic kill missiles and destroy all planets. No planets = no new civs, probably.
There is no such thing. I think physics and economics dictates that you can't really be advanced enough for interstellar industry and yet backwards enough to have the type of resource scarcity which would compel interstellar resource competition.
If these aliens can not only travel but do resource extraction at interstellar distances, that implies having highly advanced fusion or annihilation reactors.
Minerals are just chemical reaction products, and therefore necessarily cost negligible energy to synthesize compared to interstellar travel. It's easier to just make the minerals you need.
Isotopes are finite in number, and we already know and largely understand all the ones are likely to ever be useful. "Island of Stability" nuclei may or may not be possible beyond that, but even if they're not only possible but also useful, they will almost certainly have halflives short enough that they will also have to be synthesized rather than mined. So, there's no competing over planets either way.
At the lower end of the tech levels where you can have interstellar industry, the only "amazingly high-energy isotope/mineral" is hydrogen fusion fuel. There's nothing in the Earth's crust or core that could be useful for them, because terrestrial planets are made out of spent nuclear detritus. Though maybe they can bring a big fusion candle and just run off with Jupiter, if they forget about their own gas giants and stars.
At the higher end of the tech scale, even hydrogen stops being a resource. Matter annihilation (e.g. via microscopic black holes) means that it doesn't matter what element or chemical your fuel is made out of when you're converting it directly to energy.
I think any resource competition argument for "dark forest" exopolitics really undersells how vast space is, and how abundant resources are. A single Jupiter with basic fusion reactors could easily sustain quadrillions of humans in enormously inefficient utopian living conditions for trillions of years. [1] It's going to need to get a lot more crowded before fighting over minerals is something that any sane interstellar civilization would worry about.
> If these aliens can not only travel but do resource extraction at interstellar distances, that implies having highly advanced fusion or annihilation reactors.
No, it doesn't. You don't know what you don't know. Aliens can have tech based on some rare isotope/mineral/whatever.
> Minerals are just chemical reaction products, and therefore necessarily cost negligible energy to synthesize compared to interstellar travel. It's easier to just make the minerals you need.
Unless these minerals require special rare isotopes or some other material we're not yet aware.
> Isotopes are finite in number, and we already know and largely understand all the ones are likely to ever be useful.
No, we do not. Google "island of stability".
> At the lower end of the tech levels where you can have interstellar industry, the only "amazingly high-energy isotope/mineral" is hydrogen fusion fuel.
That statement isn't a fact. Unless you magically synthesized all possible isotopes and materials. Which you didn't.
> There's nothing in the Earth's crust or core that could be useful for them
But maybe there was, that's the argument.
> Matter annihilation (e.g. via microscopic black holes)
Again, you're talking about known science. Not everything. You don't know what you don't know.
> A single Jupiter with basic fusion reactors could easily sustain quadrillions of humans in enormously inefficient utopian living conditions for trillions of years.
Yes, but that has nothing to do with the argument we're having. It doesn't disprove that there might have been some rare resource (or maybe it's still here, we just didn't get to it).
Properties like the binding energies of molecules and nuclei are a direct and well-understood consequence of the laws of physics. Materials in the real world aren't like Star Trek, where dilithium and the omega molecule can be treated as an infinite energy source because the name sounds cool. In order for a material to be an energy source, that energy has to come from somewhere.
You can only put so much strain on a chemical bond before the electrons decide to stop sticking together anymore. You can only get as much energy out as the mass change from splitting an atom. You can only store as much energy in a heavy nucleus as was originally put into it by the supernova that created it. Anything else would violate basic laws of physics, to such a degree that everything in our universe would presumably immediately cease to exist.
> No, we do not. Google "island of stability".
I already addressed the hypothetical island of stability in the sentence immediately after the one you quoted. The term is relative. They are expected to have longer halflives than the instantly decaying superheavies like ununoctium, but even the longer predictions of their decay properties have them disappearing far too quickly to be mined as minerals.
I'll add now that there's also no reason to believe that island of stability substances, if they even exist, will have any more particularly useful or powerful properties than any other heavy metal. When was the last time you needed to use Mendelevium for something?
> Yes, but that has nothing to do with the argument we're having. It doesn't disprove that there might have been some rare resource (or maybe it's still here, we just didn't get to it).
It disproves the idea that there might be some useful resource which you would want to go conquering for. The resources available in any star system are already more than any conceivable civilization could ever use.
The other side of this is the difficulty of interstellar travel. Reaching relativistic speeds implies turning a significant fraction of your vehicle's mass into energy. With the ability to create and manipulate such power densities, you're better off just synthesizing whatever you need.
> No, it doesn't. You don't know what you don't know.
> But maybe there was, that's the argument.
> Again, you're talking about known science. Not everything. You don't know what you don't know.
If the argument for suggesting a complete break from the known laws of physics can be summarized as "You don't know what you don't know", then you may as well argue that the universe is secretly controlled by a giant space cat which will reward us with salmon if we all shine laser pointers in our retinas every third Thursday.
"Maybe there was" is not actually an argument, in the sense that there is neither anything specifically substantiating it which can be examined, nor any falsifiable conditions which may disprove it.
All your arguments are basically "we already know all of physics, there's nothing new to learn". Which is just wrong.
And then you engage in obvious logical fallacies like talking about mendelevium, as if it's exactly the same as hypothetical stable isotopes from the island of stability. You have no idea what you're talking about, you have not produced those isotopes, no human did.
And then you engaged in completely dishonest straw man with the space cat. I never claimed that there are such isotopes or other used yet unknown natural materials, I just suggested that there may have been some.
Considering how dishonest you are, I won't respond any more.
My argument is that based on everything which we do already know, it is unlikely that any material with the physical and economic properties like what you are suggesting can exist, and any "suggestion" that such a material does exist is completely arbitrary. Russell's teapot, and all that. There's plenty new to learn, but it'll probably be closer to strangelets and dark matter in exotic conditions than "baryonic rocks but amazingly shiny".
The entire point of "science" is that you can and should make reasonable predictions based on past observations. E.G. Mendelevium. Calling that a "obvious logical fallacy" is… Disturbing, frankly.
You know, I've yet to see you make a single point that's based on anything more than "Maybe", "No, it doesn't", or "How dishonest you are". Lots of rhetoric. Not much else.
It is your choice to interpret disagreement and contradictory information as "dishonest". Have fun with that.
Offense is easier than defense. How do you know some other civilization isn't going to, say, get angry at their own decline and unleash destructive Von Neumann machines on the galaxy?
By the time you know whether or not another civilization is hostile, it’s probably too late. “Interstellar war” sounds like a long dragged-out set of engagements when it’s more likely that one random day without warning your planet intersects a sizable chunk of tungsten traveling at 0.9c.
Another reason not to confine your civilisation to one planet, or to planets generally.
Much harder to wipe out a civilisation that's dispersed among hundreds or thousands of smaller space colonies. Especially if many of those colonies are hidden in an asteroid belt of millions of rocks.
Whatever scattered remnants that are left of humanity hanging out in the asteroid belt are going to have a hell of a time finding food to eat or oxygen to breathe.
Resources. Perhaps their star will soon (on a cosmic timescale) consume their planet and they're looking for another solar system to inhabit. Labor for their Dyson sphere. Who knows. But, if something goes out of their way to make contact, odds are it won't be a friendly hello.
> If you are a civ who is able to do it, surely you can grow whatever food you need at home and have advanced AI/robotics that can provide labour.
That's about as reasonable an argument as "if you drive a Tesla, surely you can afford to donate to my cause". Maybe they are way over-invested in their FTL technology and really have no choice but to look for external labour. Maybe they painted themselves into a corner with the FTL tech that can get them here, but they need our labour to enable their drives to restart for the trip back. Or maybe whatever reasoning they have is so _alien_ to us that we simply can not comprehend it.
Yes, it is possible that whatever FTL tech they are using will work with a living creature but not with some machine. Maybe they just encode human DNA to clone for slaves because their culture does not allow them to use their own DNA for slaves, and DNA is easy to send over their FTL tech.
When discussing aliens you have to consider that their reasoning, their culture, their motivations, their technology, their customs, their values are all _alien_ to us. You have to be open minded, for every excuse we can come up with for "why not" there are infinite explanations for "why so".
The thing is that culture, motivations, and technology are all shaped by constraints imposed by the laws of physics, which (by definition) can generally be presumed to be universal. Having plausible explanations for "why so" doesn't change the fact that doing so would likely be so inefficient that it would place their entire culture at a significant disadvantage.
Yet on a cultural level, I think the "food/slaves" narratives of alien invasion are actually failing to be open-minded enough. Mechanical labor and physical nutrition are the kinds of things that our newly industrialized post-colonial societies worry about. It's not actually a particularly "alien" idea. Thinking a much more technologically advanced society would come to Earth for the same reasons comes across to me as projecting our own anxieties and sins.
> If the rabbit is injured, making noise and hoping for humans to help is a fools errand as the fox is more likely to hear and eat the rabbit.
> This is engrained in our evolution.
Literally the exact opposite?
> Recent research has also shown that the acoustic properties of human screams can be reliably detected within noisy environments, something presumably indicative of having evolved in noisy environments, such as dense forests, where there is a strong adaptive pressure to reliably signal danger (Nandwana et al., 2015).
> Rabbit Basic Science: The only vocal sounds that are made are a loud high-pitched scream of terror or a range of growls and hums that denote pleasure or defence. Apprehensive or frightened rabbits will thump the ground with their hind feet. The loud thumping sounds acts as an alarm signal to other rabbits in the vicinity.
> Screaming among rabbits indicates alarm associated with fear, pain, and psychological distress. Your rabbit may scream because it is scared of being attacked or dying. Rabbits also scream when they’re in excruciating pain, or when they’re having a seizure. …it is a sign of extreme pain, terror, or calling out for help.
> Lima beans release volatile chemical signals that are received by nearby plants of the same species when infested with spider mites. This 'message' allows the recipients to prepare themselves by activating defense genes, making them less vulnerable to attack, and also attracting another mite species that is a predator of spider mites (indirect defence).
IMO "Dark Forest Theory"— The idea that (1) nobody would ever help anyone else and (2) nobody could ever understand anyone else because (3) we're all dumb forest animals capable of nothing higher than survival, so we may as well (a) hide and (b) kill anyone that tries to talk to us— That probably says more about the people arguing for it, or about our own providence, than it does about any probable intestellar ecology.
> Humans become a rabbit, the malicious species a fox, the benevolent species humans.
In fact, if anything, using humans as the example of a benevolent society points out the absurdity of assuming that more technologically advanced polities must necessarily be malicious.
Killers don't prosper in civilized societies. And technologically advanced societies ruled by killers don't last long.
Out of curiosity: is your statement based mainly on the Liu Cixin series? Or is there some more depth to it? If so, could you give some pointer to the more in-depth analysis of this hypothesis?
There is lots of work done on it in the SETI field. The dark forest theory doesn’t hold up under game theoretic analysis (hiding is not the optimal strategy, nor is predation), and is pretty resounding rejected.
Not sure what the best resource would be for an outsider to delve into this field though.
I imagine it depends on whether interstellar travel is practical. If intelligent species come to the conclusion that they’re forever isolated, a monument seems a rational, almost inevitable choice.
And how do you know you're forever isolated? There are things you don't know that you don't know. No rational species would ever build a monument IMO, and again, game theory supports this so far.
> Game theory reveals that the best thing an intelligent species can do is to hide. (The dark forest hypothesis)
Under certain conditions and with certain assumptions. Under other conditions and with other assumptions, the best thing for a species to do is be altruistic.
Does being the destroyer in the dark forest scenario not reveal yourself to other destroyers?
Also while I'm sure a relativistic kill vehicle could neutralize a planet, will it also get all the populated moons/orbitals in the system? What if the target species is already multi-system?
Accelerating a rock to intercept a separate star system doesn’t need to generate any particularly noticeable emissions.
If it was intercepted someone could work backward from its trajectory and determine an origin, but the odds of noticing a cold, small, dark rock at relativistic speeds early enough to do anything about it seems slim.
It is a nice scheme, but what if your target is not bound to gravity wells anymore and the most of its economy is artificial structures orbiting its sun?
You will hit some ancient rocks orbiting the star, and even if people there dont need them anymore they are bound to become curious of the origin of your missiles.
Sending a relativistic chunk of tungsten is something we could accomplish at essentially current technology levels. Hell we could send a hundred of them. It’d be expensive and it would take awhile to get there but we could do it in a decade given sufficient motivation.
If caveman-level weaponry is sufficient to take out anyone not well on their way to becoming a Type II civilization, I’m betting on the cavemen.
I don't think we could do this at all, even theoretically.
If we took all the proven petroleum reserves in the world, and magically converted them into kinetic energy with 100% efficiency— With zero overhead for transportation, launch, agriculture, or obeying conservation of momentum— That still wouldn't be enough to launch even a single planet killer. At most you could crater a small country, but not kill a civilization:
So let's say you do nuclear pulse propulsion like Project Orion. You've still got Tsiolkovsky's rocket equation to deal with. Assuming a speculative fusion bomb ISP of 75,000s, you would need a rocket with… over 50 orders of magnitude more mass than the entire observable universe, in order to accelerate a single proton to 0.9c:
Light sails will be huge, obvious/visible, and slow. Beamed power will run into issues with diffraction.
In fact, reaching 0.9c while you're still in the solar system plainly implies maintaining multiple hundreds of g's of acceleration over many dozen astronomical units of distance. That doesn't seem feasible at all. It's wildly beyond not only our best existing ion drives, but probably also any remotely feasible existing concept for space propulsion.
This probably isn't true: we don't even have enough conventional weapons to destroy our own planet, and we've been optimizing that for centuries. A relativistic missile is a conventional weapon scaled up.
We couldn't accomplish this. Theoretically speaking, yes we could, but "theoretocally" means "ignoring the half of the reality". We can't even travel to Moon now practically.
To send a chunk of tungsten at a relativistic velocity would mean an effort for trillions of dollars. Don't forget that it is not enough to just get a chunk of tungsten moving, you want it to hit a moving target, and you'd better add some thrusters to it and a guidance system. Is there anyone willing to pay for that?
Any civilization will need to concentrate a lot of efforts to fire a chunk of tungsten, but why might it do it? There are better ways to utilize that effort. Maybe it is a rational thing to go aggressive nevertheless, but the benefits will be in a far future while politicians needs to justify spending now. People and societies are not rational. There is no real examples of rational agents, but people still insist on treating rational agents as something real. Theoretically speaking AGI might become a rational agent, but I doubt it from a practical standpoint: AGI will be limited by a computational power and by its abilities to gather data. So it will use heuristics, and it will be not rational. It can be closer to a platonic ideal of a rational agent then human, but even that is not free of doubt. People surpisingly well do with all their heuristics and when they appear irrational it is mostly due to inability of observers to understand the real motivation of people.
You need a much more advanced civilization to be as aggressive. A civilization that can do it by spending maybe 0.1% GDP for 10 years. At least looking at humanity, I'd say that any cost higher than that will not work definitely.
Such unprovoked and costly agression having no observable results easily could end a lot of political careers.
Theoretically speaking we can ignore all these difficulties and start with the assumption that it is possible to concentrate 100% GDP on a one task for years or even decades. Practically it is impossible.
Maybe another civilization will have another structure and will be able to concentrate efforts on a larger scale then humanity? Maybe. But could you imagine such a hypothetical civilization and estimate chances of it to get to a sufficiently advanced level? I cant neither. So while I keep in mind this theoretical dreams of rational civilization purging each other, I do not assign any credibility to them. I keep myself in an uncertain state, the best state to have an open mind, to be ready to absorb any evidence or reasoning.
They might notice the bits of interstellar dust that at the upper size range hit at 0.99c with kinetic energy on the order of magnitude of tactical nuclear weapons yield. This also makes targeting interesting without thrusters and fuel to correct their probably regularly perturbed trajectories. Those cold, small, dark rocks may not be quite so cold or dark if they're going to actually try to hit their targets.
People seem very confused by this so let me try and spell it out.
For the sake of argument let’s say we become aware of another intelligent civilization on a rocky body orbiting Proxima Centauri. They are, virtually by definition, apex predators on their homeworld. We cannot know their intentions should they learn about us.
Meanwhile, it is trivial for us to end their civilization. If we decided to, with more or less today’s technology, we could accelerate a chunk of tungsten to comical speeds and obliterate their homeworld. It would cost a fortune and it would take awhile, but we could do it. Certainly it would be orders of magnitude easier than getting humans there, setting up any sort of interstellar trade, or working to understand each other’s language and culture. And nobody at the receiving end would be the wiser until their planet essentially ceased to exist one day.
I’m not saying we want to. But we could. And importantly, they could do the same to us.
Do we:
1. Loudly announce ourselves, gambling our entire civilization that they aren’t aggressive, paranoid, misunderstand us at some point and take grave offense, realize we have a nicer planet than they do, or find some other reason to become openly hostile.
2. Shut the fuck up and hope they don’t catch our leaked radio signature from before we knew any better.
3. Strike first, just to be safe. Better us than them.
If we think that any other civilization might decide to open door number three, the calculus tilts sharply in favor of doing it first ourselves. Or at the very least going with the second option and investing a hell of a lot of money into figuring out how to detect, intercept, and redirect relativistic kill vehicles.
It doesn’t even have to be the Centauris in this scenario who are evil or paranoid. They could be just as hopelessly naïve as us and happily engage in a mutually beneficial back-and-forth. Meanwhile the Sirians (who have been quietly observing from the sidelines) one day fire off a pair of surprise care packages to the both of us, before we can get big enough to potentially threaten them and their way of life.
More or less today’s technology could not accelerate tungsten to speeds that would obliterate a planet.
And you say it’s trivial? Who told you this?
Just run some calculations it doesn’t make sense.
(just one example, 10,000lbs of tungsten hitting the earth at 99% of light speed would not destroy it)
——
it is trivial for us to end their civilization. If we decided to, with more or less today’s technology, we could accelerate a chunk of tungsten to comical speeds and obliterate their homeworld. It would cost a fortune and it would take awhile, but we could do it.
Not to mention the difficulty of hitting a planet-sized target at 99% of the speed of light from 5 light-years away. I'm pretty sure this would be vastly more difficult than anything we've ever accomplished as a species.
Plus with those same resources you could probably build a solar-system-sized passive interferometric radar swarm, and get decent warning time on any relativistic launches.
0.99c of blueshift coming from a specific star's direction? Weird. Shoot a couple relatively slow BBs at it, and the projectile will vaporize itself around the Kuiper Belt.
Poor guys. They've now announced to the universe that they're an aggressive threat to all life around them…
With our current technology, it isn't possible for us to accelerate any amount of tungsten to relativistic speeds except for a few atoms in particle accelerator. The rocket equation means needs ludicrous amounts of fuel to reach relativistic speeds.
This includes near-term technology like fusion reactors. You could take Jupiter along for fuel but still not reaching 99% of light speed. For stationary launchers, they would be super long or require enormous amounts of energy. Giant arrays of lasers aren't "possible with current technology".
Relativistic projectiles probably requires antimatter. Which are pretty far beyond our technology. There is big question is antimatter rockets are possible, they require producing and containing a lot of antimatter. Although, it instead of accelerating super fast, it is probably easier to send the antimatter.
That's like 0.003X of a Chicxulub impacter. Or around 1X the geologically very recent eruption of Mount Toba.
The ecosphere will be fine. You'll probably vaporize a small patch of ocean, and they'll get colorful sunsets for a couple days. But that's about it.
By contrast, assuming "more or less today's technology", we're now out of petroleum reserves because we used them all in our magic instant-acceleration kinetic-energy-converter.
At the link below you can see simulations at 99.9% light speed. An entire Egyptian pyramid, hitting Earth at this 10x higher speed, might kill off life, but it’s still not obliterating the planet.
We are not capable of accelerating any macroscopic object to .999C. Let alone a huge piece of tungsten, which still wouldn’t be powerful enough.
In this hypothetical scenario, we wouldn't know if they have known of our existence for a long time, and maybe even taken precautions like installing some proxy killer probes in case we had a stupid crazy idea like trying to launch a genocidal relativistic missile against them.
So, why would we go so blindly for option 3 and risk it all by being the first ones to defect in an interstellar prisoner's dilemma? Especially if we have good reasons to suspect that they've known about us for long and have remained neutral so far. After all, Proxima Centauri is quite close, and our atmosphere gives ample signals of there being life here. And we haven't been particularly quiet either.
I haven't delved deep into this, so there might be some much more tight logic to it. But my first impression is that the dark forest hypothesis seems a bit forced; sort of constructed backwards in order to explain a cool idea (that space is full of civilizations but everyone is quiet).
For example, one of the assumptions it makes is that obliterating another space-faring civilization is easy. And, at the same time, that we (and everyone) have very little information of other civilizations. I don't see how these two assumptions can hold at the same time.
These scenarios are so funny because they’re totally focused on threats and destruction as the key assumptions, and then they invariably conclude “so we should destroy them”.
And it’s just like, that’s such a colonizer mentality, trying to game out a completely unknown society and immediately focusing on threats, technology, and destruction.
I wonder, what are they like? What could we learn from them? Why are we assuming all beings are violent like us? Does it really make sense to immediately obliterate a culture you’ve never even seen? I seriously doubt it. You could send probes, spies, and try to covertly learn about them. You could send envoys, without revealing your origin, and try to gain knowledge from first contact. You may learn there is no threat, and a great deal to be discovered.
What if they had medicine which could cure every disease? Energy generators which could save our planet? What if they were simply peaceful beings with a rich beautiful history, and no desire or capacity to harm us?
The threat/destruction paradigm feels so simplistic, impoverished, and brutal.
> I wonder, what are they like? What could we learn from them?
Of course I wonder these same things. But when the consequences of becoming known to the wrong civilization are inevitable destruction, what are your alternatives?
We very nearly killed ourselves (we still might!) with nuclear weapons because we thought the other side might shoot first. This is that taken to an even further extreme: we won’t even know if we’ve been shot at until it’s far too late to do anything about it. We likely wouldn’t ever even know who sent the damn thing in the first place.
The balance of things is that silent civilizations with caveman-level technology are more than capable of wiping out noisy and naïve technologically-advanced civilizations.
You can wonder all you like about who and what these beings are and what wonders they must know of, and absolutely none of that will matter when a tungsten rod turns the planet into a fireball because you made the mistake of sending up a signal flare without having any idea that it was safe to do so.
One in a thousand civilizations could be paranoid enough to sterilize other spacefaring civilizations and it would be reason enough to be very, very quiet.
> when the consequences of becoming known to the wrong civilization are inevitable destruction
This is the presupposition that seems entirely baseless to me. An explanation has been constructed that comes to this as the only conclusion, but the assumptions in the explanation seem themselves to come from nothing. I think this is what often called "projection". Human beings are a violent creature that destroys others, so we assume these alien creatures must be. But they are aliens. We presently know nothing about aliens. My view is that we should interrogate the assumptions that lead us to your brutal conclusion. Projection of our own fears is insufficient to make the right choice.
Another question to reflect on: Why do you not destroy every person you come in contact with? They could likely kill you if they tried. But more so than legal consequences, you simply feel no desire to do so. There are reasons for your feeling that way.
If you believe in dark forest, it's not one in a thousand, even benevolent civilizations have a reason to genocide you, because you would shoot them indiscriminately.
> It would cost a fortune and it would take awhile, but we could do it. Certainly it would be orders of magnitude easier than getting humans there, setting up any sort of interstellar trade, or working to understand each other’s language and culture. And nobody at the receiving end would be the wiser until their planet essentially ceased to exist one day.
Many of these arguments seem to work equally well for France nuking Britain.
I am also skeptical of any overly pessimistic alien interaction theories, but I don't think this analogy applies here. We already have open communication channels and centuries of trust between the British and French, and we certainly did pillage each other before we figured out how to speak to each other.
> Meanwhile, it is trivial for us to end their civilization. If we decided to, with more or less today’s technology, we could accelerate a chunk of tungsten to comical speeds and obliterate their homeworld.
We wipe out their planets, then the 99% of their civilisation that isn't living on planets wipes out our planets. Now we have two very angry civilisations (without planets) in a protracted interstellar war. Great.
Specify a current technology that could accelerate to 99% light speed. Heck, specify future technology that we could conceivably build. Now, what is the exhaust velocity? What is the mass ratio for the starship? How big is that compared to mass of the entire solar system?
How is that energy expenditure going to be not noticeable to aliens?
4. If they didn't notice anything, we can wait more and send them a spy probe to learn their culture. If they are mad foresters, we might genocide them, but if they aren't, it's not more dangerous than having France with nuclear weapons. Under this strategy only foresters get what they want :)
I've never really understood the dark forest thing. Being an intelligent species or not doesn't change whether your planet has useful resources. And if you're a naive species yapping on all frequencies, you're clearly not a threat. So... why would another civilization go to all the trouble of eliminating you?
The idea is that, because of the risk of a technological explosion, any sentient species is a threat.
I don’t really buy the idea though - cooperation has been the strongest strength of humanity and is one of our greatest evolutionary edges. Why wouldn’t that apply on the interstellar scale too?
Shoot first and ask questions later, if anything shooting first is safer (civilizational risk) on the chance they are thinking the same. On the flip side, an alien civilization sees our request to cooperate, they can accept or they can destroy us, to them we could be lying or go back on our word and destroy them.
I see some criticism of dark forest theory in here, but keeping quite and shooting first are the least risky options when the inentions or capabilities of another civilization are unknown and making assumptions about the other sides friendliness could lead to eithers extinction.
Reasonable to assume that if I have a weapon that can destroy a civilization, others may have it too. Assuming also they have the similar risk calculus, it leans towards hiding and then nuking when either gets afraid enough. You can't do much but hope the other side is not more advance that you and can mitigate the attack.
It seems like a big stretch to assume aliens are going to share ideas of liberal democracy like fairness/cooperation etc (which are fairly recent) when there are groups of humans who do not
Then we are probably dead anyway, the onus would have been on them to contact us as they are probably several centuries more advanced. In that case its like going with a tank to an island population that still uses bows and arrows
You do realise that comment supports strongly the dark forest theory right? The best thing do do before you have a tank is to shut up and hide. Of course you don't pick fights when you could get squashed
Implied was that the actions to take if we had full info are obvious. If their capabilities are known you would not have to resort to "shoot first, ask later"...
But the dark forest theory suggests when you have an arrow, you should shoot others, because they can have an arrow too. This strategy can go wrong if they have a tank. And if you systematically shoot everyone, you're systematically looking for a tank.
So far, yes, but not intentionally. Any electromagnetic wave we emit becomes noise. We're still ants compared to what alien civilization can be theoretically. But this does not mean we'll always stay this way.
I'm a supporter of making humans detectable in any way illegal.
> salting a star with an impossible chemical composition might also be a way for a technological species to create a monument, correct?
It's an impossible composition from a nuclear physics point of view, since the star shouldn't be producing these atoms, and they can't be part of the initial makeup of the star since they're unstable elements and would long be gone by now. The most likely explanation is still that something randomly collided with the star.
If it's a monument, then it certainly is the right one to send a (very vague) message far into the future, "we were here".
> This seems like it would involve moving less mass around than a Dyson Sphere/Swarm
It's a bit weird to compare two endeavors we haven't even tried yet, but making a Dyson swarm seems vastly easier than this. To pull off the salting of a star, you'd need to constantly manufacture vast amounts of exotic radioactive materials. A Dyson swarm may be massive (although there would be very light-weight ones you could build if the only function was to be a monument), but it's "just" a lot of solid bodies orbiting a star. A star salter, on the other hand, would require way more complex engineering.
Yeah, you are correct. My brain is a bad model lately, since Advanced Neuro Lyme Disease. I synthesized the information from those podcasts + google poorly. This is depressing.
There are plenty of possible signatures (though uncertain) of actinides in there as well, some of those -could- have short lifetimes so not that far off.
Thanks, but I should have caught that. The good news is now that my brain is not as good at the details [0], I may finally be a good fit for a management role (:
[0] It's actually getting a lot better, I hit brain-rock-bottom a year ago. I literally could not think at all. Damn those ticks.
Thanks. The crazy thing is that I never noticed any bites, that's how it got so advanced. I only know that's what it was for a fact due to blood tests, which I only got after I started to lose my freaking eyesight.
After recovery, my brother and I laughed about this once he pointed out that I do in-fact live in a village called Deer Mountain (loose translation.) Like what does one expect? They are deer ticks, after all.
Also, I love opossums! I grew up with them in The States, but we don't seem to have them here in Europe.
Thanks. To answer your question: well, I kept sleeping too much at first. But I live a very sequestered life lately, so I had little frame of reference. Looking back, one of the most surreal things is that I recall telling my friends on the phone that I was having a hard time telling dreams from reality. It wasn't until after the diagnosis that I looked this up and found out that this was a symptom of Advanced Neurological Lyme Disease. WTF.
Then I got joint pain, then the really weird eyesight loss, in short order.
What I would recommend is getting the antibody tests if you have any concern. I am in the EU, so that was very cheap w/o insurance. I believe in The States they recommend prophylactic Doxycycline, at any concern, instead of testing because testing $.
Prophylactic Doxycycline is a couple pills. Since I missed that, Advanced Neuro Lyme was 30 days of 2 high-dose pills a day. In the USA, they require IV antibiotics for Advanced Neuro.
This dumb crap changed my life, so again I would ask, or demand testing for ELISA. If that comes back positive, then there will be a different "Western blot" confirmation blood test. If they say no, then find a local clinic and pay for the ELISA yourself.
Yes please! It's less than 300M light-years away! It's crazy that we haven't done this from the ground recently. One of the issues is that it's in the Southern sky.
According to Prof. David Kipping, ~"The guys who are into these weird things have somehow never heard about this star, it just got lost in the shuffle."
Also, Kipping mentioned that some of the research was Czech-based, and not in English, which may have also been a factor.
My very uneducated guess was that two planet-like objects smashed, and there is some cloud around the star which gave those weird spectrographs?
> My very uneducated guess was that two planet-like objects smashed, and there is some cloud around the star which gave those weird spectrographs?
Another guess: it got close to a neutron star merger, and was showered with high atomic number debris. Heavy elements can be produced in mergers of such stars.
Something which might align with this guess is that this type of star apparently has an extremely strong magnetic field which could trap, and excite those particles?
However, assuming that it's not misidentification, would it be fair to say that new physics would have to be discovered to explain things like Americium and Einsteinium?
> One such theory is that the star contains some long-lived nuclides from the island of stability (such as 298Fl or 304Ubn) and that the observed short-lived actinides are the daughters of these progenitors, occurring in secular equilibrium with their parents.
One could also imagine a huge rotating, sun-orbiting ring with alternating openings that blinks a out message to astronomical observers, perhaps in some form of Morse code or binary.
That is what I always used to imagine as our monument, maybe the Fibonacci sequence via orbiting star shades. Or maybe that's too natural, maybe a binary sequence via orbiting star shades.
However, while I ain't no city-slickin' Kardashev Type II orbital mechanic, all those star shades might not be in a stable orbit over hundreds of millions of years. They might require some propulsion for station keeping. That sounds hard for anyone, across those time scales, especially as the star grows.
It might be "easier" for longevity, to terraform a Mercury type planet with unnatural chemicals, then smash a large off-plane comet into it, to create a band of non-star weird chemicals which would fall into the star and should last for millions of years, giving it a one-in-a-billion spectrograph?
edit: Come to think about it a bit more, I would argue that the latter solution is entirely within our technological grasp nearly today, as a pre-Kardashev scale civilization.
> Przybylski's observations indicated unusually low amounts of iron and nickel in the star's spectrum, but higher amounts of unusual elements such as strontium, holmium, niobium, scandium, yttrium, caesium, neodymium, praseodymium, thorium, ytterbium, and uranium.
While the explanation is likely some unknown natural process, salting a star with an impossible chemical composition might also be a way for a technological species to create a monument, correct? This seems like it would involve moving less mass around than a Dyson Sphere/Swarm, although it would need a constant feed, if I understand the situation correctly.
Astonishingly, there appears to be no contemporary analysis of this star.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Przybylski%27s_Star
"The Star That Shouldn't Exist" - Prof. David Kipping
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maMDGZOD3mI
"Why is There Plutonium in This Star? Przybylski’s Star with David Kipping" - Event Horizon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUbjdaPy4mw