4 ms·

> Might be a decent way to METI since it'd not require much energy or high angular resolution at the other end. I really don't think this is a good idea, unles

by pault 10y ago

> Might be a decent way to METI since it'd not require much energy or high angular resolution at the other end. I really don't think this is a good idea, unless we want a massive object accelerated to a significant percentage of c to get lobbed our way. :) Disregarding the effects on atmosphere loss, wouldn't a machine like this eventually be more or less essential if humans ever decide to move in long term? At least, if we want to hang out on the surface (in bubbles, of course).

thatcherc 10y ago
Sounds like something straight out of Cixin Liu's "The Dark Forest"
- pault 10y ago
  Indeed, it's a pretty strong argument that the most prudent (in the context of the continuing survival of your own civilization) reaction to discovering a developing civilization in another solar system is to preemptively destroy it. Also, The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks. :)
  - jcoffland 10y ago
    Unless you assume that cooperation is more likely than conflict. Maybe conflict is more common than usual on Earth. Imagine for example a group of worlds that were able to survive only due to cooperation. On encountering us they would likely lean towards cooperation as that was their experience. We might lean towards conflict but our experience tells us little about the average experience of other inhabitants of our galaxy.
    - pault 10y ago
      What if the first message you receive is from a peaceful and advanced civilization, and you reply with "Hi, we are earth, send your teleportation devices here please", and within the 60 years that the round trip message has taken to be received, a military junta has taken over the civilization and decided to exterminate all humans because our exponentially accelerating technology will make us a threat to their hegemony in another 60 years? :)
    - WillPostForFood 10y ago
      While we only have a sample of 1 (Earth), we have do millions of samples of interspecies behavior that lean strongly to conflict, and often the cooperation isn't necessarily pleasant for one species either.
    - vidarh 10y ago
      The scary thing about the xenophobic solution to the Fermi paradox is that there might be lots of nice civiliations around that do want to cooperate - but it could potentially only take a few very aggressive, advanced xenophobic bullies lobbing large objects at anyone they spot before the threshold for everyone else to stay in their metaphorical foxholes hiding until/unless they have very good reason to assume they have established a clear advantage.
  - mirimir 10y ago
    I enjoyed that trilogy greatly, but damn, it was depressing :(
VLM 10y ago
The good news is "to get lobbed our way" doesn't mean much to a culture that can do distributed projects all over a solar system. A problem along the lines of whats the ideal cannonball size to genocide the common mosquito? There is also a really nice MAD effect where the window where you can hit a solar system without getting hit back is extremely short, like a century perhaps. Longer than that and we send a probe to the cannonball and turn it into diffuse gray goo that the solar wind blows away when it enters the system, and we return fire 1000 times over, so any logical civilization would send in the asteroid weapons much earlier, like the first time they sniff RF transmissions or the first dark side of the planet electric lights.
- mirimir 10y ago
  Well, the attackers in The Killing Star, by Charles R. Pellegrino and George Zebrowski, did more than just lob an object our way. And there's the issue: "One of the iron rules of relativistic bombardment was that if you could see something approaching at 92 percent of light speed, it was never where you saw it when you saw it, but was practically upon you...". So sending probes is rather unworkable. In the The Killing Star, our doom was already sealed by "Star Trek" :(
lutusp 10y ago
> Disregarding the effects on atmosphere loss, wouldn't a machine like this eventually be more or less essential if humans ever decide to move in long term? I think it's more practical in the long term to create a magnetic field at Mars itself. Using future technology on a scale unimaginable at present (and similar to that proposed in the linked article), we could magnetize Mars' (now-solid) ferrous materials by the onetime application of a very strong magnetic field. Mars once had a dynamic magnetic field like ours, but Mars' liquid ferrous materials solidified as the planet cooled, which caused its field to disappear. A permanent field could be created by the deliberate application of a strong temporary field that would magnetize the planet's ferrous materials. Details: http://arachnoid.com/restoring_mars/ http://arachnoid.com/restoring_mars/

by pault 10y ago

thatcherc 10y ago

Sounds like something straight out of Cixin Liu's "The Dark Forest"

pault 10y ago
Indeed, it's a pretty strong argument that the most prudent (in the context of the continuing survival of your own civilization) reaction to discovering a developing civilization in another solar system is to preemptively destroy it. Also, The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks. :)
- jcoffland 10y ago
  Unless you assume that cooperation is more likely than conflict. Maybe conflict is more common than usual on Earth. Imagine for example a group of worlds that were able to survive only due to cooperation. On encountering us they would likely lean towards cooperation as that was their experience. We might lean towards conflict but our experience tells us little about the average experience of other inhabitants of our galaxy.
  - pault 10y ago
    What if the first message you receive is from a peaceful and advanced civilization, and you reply with "Hi, we are earth, send your teleportation devices here please", and within the 60 years that the round trip message has taken to be received, a military junta has taken over the civilization and decided to exterminate all humans because our exponentially accelerating technology will make us a threat to their hegemony in another 60 years? :)
  - WillPostForFood 10y ago
    While we only have a sample of 1 (Earth), we have do millions of samples of interspecies behavior that lean strongly to conflict, and often the cooperation isn't necessarily pleasant for one species either.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    The scary thing about the xenophobic solution to the Fermi paradox is that there might be lots of nice civiliations around that do want to cooperate - but it could potentially only take a few very aggressive, advanced xenophobic bullies lobbing large objects at anyone they spot before the threshold for everyone else to stay in their metaphorical foxholes hiding until/unless they have very good reason to assume they have established a clear advantage.
- mirimir 10y ago
  I enjoyed that trilogy greatly, but damn, it was depressing :(

VLM 10y ago

The good news is "to get lobbed our way" doesn't mean much to a culture that can do distributed projects all over a solar system. A problem along the lines of whats the ideal cannonball size to genocide the common mosquito? There is also a really nice MAD effect where the window where you can hit a solar system without getting hit back is extremely short, like a century perhaps. Longer than that and we send a probe to the cannonball and turn it into diffuse gray goo that the solar wind blows away when it enters the system, and we return fire 1000 times over, so any logical civilization would send in the asteroid weapons much earlier, like the first time they sniff RF transmissions or the first dark side of the planet electric lights.

mirimir 10y ago
Well, the attackers in The Killing Star, by Charles R. Pellegrino and George Zebrowski, did more than just lob an object our way. And there's the issue: "One of the iron rules of relativistic bombardment was that if you could see something approaching at 92 percent of light speed, it was never where you saw it when you saw it, but was practically upon you...". So sending probes is rather unworkable. In the The Killing Star, our doom was already sealed by "Star Trek" :(

lutusp 10y ago

> Disregarding the effects on atmosphere loss, wouldn't a machine like this eventually be more or less essential if humans ever decide to move in long term? I think it's more practical in the long term to create a magnetic field at Mars itself. Using future technology on a scale unimaginable at present (and similar to that proposed in the linked article), we could magnetize Mars' (now-solid) ferrous materials by the onetime application of a very strong magnetic field. Mars once had a dynamic magnetic field like ours, but Mars' liquid ferrous materials solidified as the planet cooled, which caused its field to disappear. A permanent field could be created by the deliberate application of a strong temporary field that would magnetize the planet's ferrous materials. Details: http://arachnoid.com/restoring_mars/ http://arachnoid.com/restoring_mars/