4 ms·
A starship is a relativistic projectile that bothers to slow down. If you're going to smash a planet that acts up, you might as well just cut to the chase. All
by hugh3 16y ago
A starship is a relativistic projectile that bothers to slow down. If you're going to smash a planet that acts up, you might as well just cut to the chase. All even-remotely-physically-plausible forms of interstellar travel are also intrinsically planet-busters, including the various exotic FTL drives that hover on the edge of plausibility.
Sure, but they might not be complete dicks. They might not want to kill us unless we're a threat to them.
The more I think of it the more unlikely the kill-everyone-immediately strategy seems. Suppose you're Robinson Crusoe. You've been all alone on an island for five years. One day you're out hunting and you see another human. Do you pull out your gun and shoot him in the head before he can do the same to you? Or do you take the calculated risk that he isn't a homicidal quick-draw champion?
- Groxx 16y agoClearly the only correct answer is to camp your starting location, occasionally peeking around an obstacle to see if anyone's out there, and turtling like there's no tomorrow. It's worked so far. No possibly-homicidal-quick-draw-champion aliens encountered today! Good job, Team!
- jjs 16y agoThat shouldn't be overlooked. A species that is social enough to cooperate and build a civilization, and curious enough to develop science, might stay their hand out of loneliness or curiosity. OR Or perhaps this is a grim answer to Fermi's Paradox: the galaxy is quiet because someone preemptively wiped out the competition a long time ago.
- hugh3 16y agoOr perhaps this is a grim answer to Fermi's Paradox: the galaxy is quiet because someone preemptively wiped out the competition a long time ago. Except us?
- jerf 16y agoThe metaphor doesn't work because there are too many dissimilarities between meeting a human on an unknown island and meeting another species in space, under the conditions that life is forever planet-bound. You could slightly improve the metaphor if you meet the guy and he has a gun pointed at the head of everyone you ever knew or loved and behaved like an unpredictable raving lunatic (or at least someone that you fundamentally can not understand the motivations of). But you're still better off just dealing with the issue directly; metaphors will lead you very astray here, if only because metaphors are intrinsically populated with humans and human things in a problem domain that is most emphatically not human.