This very much reminds me of the following story told by Joel Spencer regarding Ramsey numbers[0]: > Erdős asks us to imagine an alien force, vastly more power

This very much reminds me of the following story told by Joel Spencer regarding Ramsey numbers[0]: > Erdős asks us to imagine an alien force, vastly more powerful than us, landing on Earth and demanding the value of R(5, 5) or they will destroy our planet. In that case, he claims, we should marshal all our computers and all our mathematicians and attempt to find the value. But suppose, instead, that they ask for R(6, 6). In that case, he believes, we should attempt to destroy the aliens. [1] Although Ramsey numbers are computable, they are really, really hard to compute exactly, and we don't have great upper or lower bounds for them, either. Edit: I found the version of the story that I was more familiar with that had a 1 year time limit on it[2]: > Suppose aliens invade the earth and threaten to obliterate it in a year's time unless human beings can find the Ramsey number for red five and blue five. We could marshal the world's best minds and fastest computers, and within a year we could probably calculate the value. If the aliens demanded the Ramsey number for red six and blue six, however, we would have no choice but to launch a preemptive attack. --- [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsey%27s_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsey%27s_theorem [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsey%27s_theorem#Computational_complexity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsey%27s_theorem#Computation... [2]: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/moores-law-and-ramsey-numbers/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/moores-l...