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I admire your commitment to this discussion :) In the Three Body Trilogy, the hyper-advanced aliens use projectiles accelerated to very near the speed of light

by lph 4y ago

I admire your commitment to this discussion :) In the Three Body Trilogy, the hyper-advanced aliens use projectiles accelerated to very near the speed of light. The premise is that there's enough energy in these that their impact is an extinction-level event for the planet they hit. There's a fun thread on Quora[1] about so-called "relativistic kinetic kill vehicles", with the top comment making the good point that a small projectile moving very fast might just punch a clean hole in the planet and keep going, thus not transferring most of its energy. [1] https://www.quora.com/What-are-Relativistic-Kinetic-Kill-Vehicles-RKKVs?share=1 https://www.quora.com/What-are-Relativistic-Kinetic-Kill-Veh...

jonathankoren 4y ago
>I admire your commitment to this discussion :) Oh god. I made a fucking spreadsheet! @_@ I had been thinking about aliens, von Neumann probes, and even giant super computers to simulate the universe recently. I've come to the conclusion they're all absurdly dumb like a pulp scifi story. People always think these shots are one and done, but they’re not. You have to keep hitting the planets with extinction level events, and you have to do it before you detect a civilization simply because of the transit times. If for sake of argument, we assume the dinosaurs were murdered, how did that work out for the trisoleans? >There's a fun thread on Quora[1] about so-called "relativistic kinetic kill vehicles", with the top comment making the good point that a small projectile moving very fast might just punch a clean hole in the planet and keep going, thus not transferring most of its energy. I saw something similar about a microblackhole or strange matter or something like that. Basically, you wouldn't even notice unless you standing right under/over it. Then you'd have a bad time.

by lph 4y ago

jonathankoren 4y ago

>I admire your commitment to this discussion :) Oh god. I made a fucking spreadsheet! @_@ I had been thinking about aliens, von Neumann probes, and even giant super computers to simulate the universe recently. I've come to the conclusion they're all absurdly dumb like a pulp scifi story. People always think these shots are one and done, but they’re not. You have to keep hitting the planets with extinction level events, and you have to do it before you detect a civilization simply because of the transit times. If for sake of argument, we assume the dinosaurs were murdered, how did that work out for the trisoleans? >There's a fun thread on Quora[1] about so-called "relativistic kinetic kill vehicles", with the top comment making the good point that a small projectile moving very fast might just punch a clean hole in the planet and keep going, thus not transferring most of its energy. I saw something similar about a microblackhole or strange matter or something like that. Basically, you wouldn't even notice unless you standing right under/over it. Then you'd have a bad time.