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Sterilizing planets is cheap. Particularly if you focus on potentially habitable planets, preferably before they show signs of intelligent life.
A K1+ civilization is a little more resistant to bleach. They can pack their bags and move to lower-rent neighborhoods like the local Oort, and which makes total eradication a real pain.
You are no longer aiming for a single planet in a system, assuming your terminal guidance allows for that. Now you've got to kill every asteroid, every orbital, every stealthed facility running cold, probably every rogue planet in the vicinity. Good fucking luck if they're multi-system. And if they've got VNRs, AGI/ASI? Sorry. You'll need to really up the budget or send your own berserkers.
To illustrate. Let's assume a civilization 200 ly away picks up Hitler's broadcast and decides they don't like the mustache. They fire an RKV at 99.9% of c. It'll get to Earth, at the earliest, somewhere past 2340. The solar system will look very different by them, assuming we haven't exterminated ourselves.
I am extremely confused by accusations that I haven't addressed the downsides of indiscriminate RKV spam, particularly if you're targeting systems with budding civilizations or near-peers. Given the speed of light is a rather hard limit, there's every chance they've grown up in the span of time between detection and terminal effect. That gap could be anywhere from decades to millennia, depending on fast the RKVs are.
Hang on a moment. You are quite possibly the first person who has told me that it's "very easy" to intercept RKVs. Citations please. As I've mentioned elsewhere, a sufficiently fast RKV will appear barely any time after the light that came off it. There's scope for (minor) evasive maneuvers, better versions of MIRVs, just going fuck it and exploding early to turn into a macron gun.
In particular, point 3 assumes zero terminal guidance, which is... a bold demand to make. It's hard to steer relativistic projectiles, of course, but not impossible.
And then there are Nicoll-Dyson beams. If you can build one, GG to whoever tries to block them. You can reach across a whole galaxy with ease.
Also, if someone was sterilizing every potential life bearing planet in the Milky Way, I think we wouldn't be having this conversation. At the bare minimum, we haven't been hit.
Uh... What about all the photons that stars are busy wasting right now? At the bare minimum, you should harvest that. Maybe make kugelblitzes with a Nicoll-Dyson beam, if you're more inclined towards civilian applications. Dyson swarms can be dual use.
You forget that you can extract rotational energy from existing black holes with remarkable efficiency (compared to most power sources). It's easy. You just have to drop mass in the right way. Plenty of papers on black hole farming out there. You don't even need to make one yourself, you can happily appropriate the closest one if you can get to it.
You don't have to wait till they shrink and emit significant Hawking radiation. If you do, you're waiting a very, very long time. The Aestivation hypothesis fails because you don't see any of the infrastructure work you need before that wait makes sense.
I have read it. I found a Medium post. I still think it has severe hypoxic brain damage.
Oh god. I'm genuinely disappointed, and I don't say this for the sake of insulting you. You really, really underestimate how important selection pressure or exponential growth is. Consider humanity. All it takes is a single person with a dream, like Elon Musk, to move forward timelines by decades. VNRs are trivial to the kinds of civilizations we're discussing. Nominal population doesn't matter, especially when we consider robotics or AGI.
Your argument must be true for every civilization.For its entire history till the present. One defector, in one galaxy a million ly away? They'd have eaten the whole thing and sent probes and VNRs our way.
Even a very, very low rate of growth can take over galaxies in what is the barest fraction of the time that has passed since the universe formed, even counting since the earliest plausible eras for life to form - when metallicity was sufficient. We have billions of years to work with.
You demand that every civilization convergently decides to become a hermit. They is really not a good argument.
Either RKVs are dangerous enough that you should expand out in space as quickly as possible to defend yourself against them because people will fire them off indiscriminately, or they aren't actually all that dangerous and so there's no rush to expand. We both seem to agree that firing off RKVs isn't actually all that great of a strategy, so it doesn't make sense to try to be grabby specifically to survive RKVs.
This sufficiently fast RKV will never arrive, because it will hit a piece of interstellar dust and vaporize. If you're worried this won't happen, you can make sure of it pretty trivially as a defensive measure by creating armor belts of small high-density particles, which is going to be considerably easier and cheaper than making an RKV kill chain.
Any RKVs that travel at a more leisurely pace to avoid obliterating itself will likely be detected by any "peer" civilization and intercepted by another RKV of some kind, or a high-energy laser or particle weapon that will ablate it and push it off course.
None of these defenses are technically hard; some of them could be probably be accomplished by civilizations below K1 on the Kardashev scale. (For reference, the interplanetary dust cloud - which is thick enough that dust strikes are routine on spacecraft - has less mass than a relatively unexceptional asteroid).
Why? If you've decided to wait until the end of the universe to crunch numbers then you might as well just wait until then to do everything.
Uhhh, here's what I in fact said:
I think you may have just skipped over my most interesting proposal for an Aestivation civilization. Sad! I thought it was neat.
Sure, and this might have already happened and we just don't happen to know it!
VNRs are considerably more complex and far-fetched than solar-sails, and, just like separatist expeditions into space, an inherently dangerous technology that a smart civilization would think twice before launching.
Not at all, my argument (which I am mostly making for the case of intellectual honesty since I too am skeptical that life elsewhere in the universe is abundant if it exists at all) is that there are a multitude of reasons why there might be aliens in the universe that we have not observed, and thus the inference from not seeing them is not especially strong.
Including, hilariously, that they've already converted most of the galaxy to Dyson swarms and we don't know that because they routinely divert a tiny fraction of their energy into masking their position from any planet with biosignatures. You say it would be pretty trivial to detect those planets via inferential telescopic means at ludicrous ranges and take seriously the idea of a Nicoll-Dyson beam; very well, I find those sorts of megastructures very far-fetched but if you're going to the trouble of making one and have the technical means to do it, you likely also have the technical means to trivially prevent planets you've detected with biosignatures from noticing via selective emissions or laser masking.
"Grabby aliens" is only one path out of thousands for a society to take, and the fact that we have not observed it being taken is not particularly strong evidence that it hasn't happened, let alone that the other thousands of options have not been pursued.
That is a very false dichotomy. RKVs are existentially threatening to a planet-bound civilization in a way they simply aren't to a K1+ one, both because the latter has its own countermeasures and deterrence, and because dispersing across enough volume makes comprehensive eradication prohibitively expensive.
RKVs are also not made equal, any more than a Stinger and an ICBM are interchangeable because they're both missiles. You can go from planet-killer to whatever the limit of your launch infrastructure allows. You can modulate speed, switch from a single projectile to a macron gun, have the projectile intentionally disintegrate, switch to MIRV mode at terminal phase, etc etc. You're also not limited to RKVs or Nicoll-Dyson beams. Ultrarelativistic electron beams are perfectly nasty in their own right.
So yes, they're dangerous enough that you'd want to grow, and a sufficiently advanced civilization can also harden itself. Both can be true.
I don't dispute that more advanced civilizations can substantially harden themselves. That's half my argument. I do dispute that a dust shield is anything close to insurmountable, because, as I mentioned, a macron gun is literally relativistic dust. Seriously. The defenses that make a "durable" interstellar craft viable apply right back: laser sweeps, sacrificial forward drones, extended Whipple shields, etc. Disintegrating an incoming RKV is also not a guaranteed solution; it depends on how far out you intercept and how massive and fast the projectile is. It's worse than trying to blow up an asteroid with a nuke, because the debris cone can do nearly as much damage as the intact projectile.
I know about black holes as propulsion mechanisms and as power plants. My point was that you don't need to make one yourself; you can just co-opt one if it's close enough. If.
The whole content of GAH is that it predicts visible, persistent signatures. "It already happened invisibly" collapses straight back into the masking argument and inherits the same thermodynamic problem, so let me deal with both at once.
I have grave reservations about this being feasible at scale, and you're getting an awful lot for free here. A Dyson swarm has to dump waste heat somewhere. To mask it, you'd need either to redirect that heat away from every potentially-observing system in real time (which fails on light-cone delay alone, since you can't react to observers you don't yet know exist), or to eat leakage that scales with swarm size. At galactic scale that gets prohibitive fast. Selective emission masking also presupposes tracking every civilization in your light-cone with biosignatures, in advance, which is strictly harder than detecting them in the first place.
Project Hephaistos is actually informative here, and you're the one who mentioned it as a technosignature candidate in the first place. The fact that we can flag mid-IR excess candidates around individual M-dwarfs at galactic distances, and that the follow-up work suggests background Hot DOGs explain the contamination rather than masking failures, all of which tells you the detection floor is low. Hiding swarm-scale waste heat isn't a free lunch you can hand-wave. That is a ridiculous amount of engineering effort, for not very good reason. We don't hide the ISS from uncontacted tribes in the Amazon, even though we are actively trying not to contact them.
GAH only needs one civilization, anywhere, in the entire history of the observable universe, to launch them. If 99.9% of species are too cautious or too sensible or too risk-averse, the remaining 0.1% fills the lightcone. That was my "all it takes is one defector" point earlier, and it applies equally hard here. You're implicitly demanding universal restraint without admitting that you are, and "every species coordinates on the same restraint forever" is the part of your argument that I or anyone else familiar with Hanson would strenuously object to.
Pointing out that it's "one path out of thousands" is sloppy reasoning. There are an unbounded number of paths from my bed to the living room. I could climb out the window. I could head out the front door, catch a flight to Singapore, then another to Djibouti, come back in a bus and grab lunch on the way. But what would I actually do? Walk there. It's 10 seconds away.
The strength of GAH is that the absence of the signatures it predicts genuinely is strong evidence, because the assumption set is minimal. All you need is: STL interstellar travel is possible, and at least some civilizations will use available resources over geological timescales. That's it. Non-trivial amounts of time have passed since metallicity was sufficient for life to form. So either nobody is out there, or every single civilization in the lightcone independently converged on some elaborate restraint or hiding strategy.
The speed of light allows for cross-temporal sampling. We know what's happened in our galaxy in the last few tens of thousands of years, and we can see billions of years back. That's a lot of data.
The alternatives all require multiple, often jointly held assumptions about alien psychology, technology, or coordination. Aestivation needs everyone to also forgo currently available resources while they wait. Dark Forest needs a workable hiding strategy plus universal adoption. Fodor's intraterrestrials need every civilization to virtualize and also forgo probes. Masking needs a thermodynamic miracle plus universal adoption plus advance detection of every observer. The fewer joint assumptions, the better the explanation, and "no one is here yet" is just the cheapest fit.
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