Why I Don't Worry, Part 2

Last time I explained why I don't lie awake nights worrying that contact with extraterrestrial civilizations will lead to humanity getting conquered by invading alien armies. It's just too hard to be worth the effort.

But what if the aliens don't want to conquer the Earth? What if they just want to wipe us out?

It's actually easier to destroy rival civilizations across interstellar distances than it is to conquer them. Conquest, after all, involves fairly large armies, supplies — and above all, deceleration when the starships reach the target system. Relativisitic warheads don't need any reaction mass or energy to slow down (though they might need a motor for terminal guidance). A few bricks hitting the Earth at 99.9 percent of lightspeed would do as much damage as the asteroid which killed the dinosaurs. (And those bricks could be intelligently targeted to maximize the harm they do.)

At least one conference, featuring the likes of Isaac Asimov and Jill Tarter (I can't find a link to reference it), proposed that launching a salvo of relativistic projectiles would be the optimum strategy for any species which so much as detects another advanced civilization nearby. Get them before they get us!

As with interstellar conquest, I don't buy it. There are sound logical reasons why first strikes across interstellar distances are very bad ideas.

Hi There! Launching an interstellar death-barrage is not something you can hide. The energy output of a relativistic rocket is very bright. Any civilization with immense space-based telescopes (like the kind we're planning to use for detecting extrasolar planets) can spot them at arbitrarily large distances. If the projectiles are launched using some kind of ground-based laser or maser system, the launching beam is like a beacon shining in the direction of the target.

This is important for two reasons.

First, the target world gets some warning that the strike is on its way. That means they can they could launch a counter-strike during the flight time of the projectiles.

(How do they know it's a salvo of projectiles rather than a fleet of friendly starships? The color and brightness of the exhaust reveals the energy output involved; the Doppler shift reveals the acceleration profile and thus the mass of the payload. If someone's launching small objects at very high velocities, it's not a friendly gesture. About the only way to fool the target is to go all-in and launch a very big projectile, at a velocity which might match the mission profile for a starship. But when the "starship" fails to start decelerating, the target system still gets a clue something is amiss, and a slower vehicle could be intercepted.)

Second, other civilizations can also see this happening — civilizations the would-be genocidal lunatics don't know about. And even if you're kind of on the fence about the wisdom of firing off pre-emptive genocidal relativistic kill-vehicle attacks on other civilizations, watching someone else do it would overcome a lot of objections, and move the demonstrated genocidal lunatics to the top of everyone else's hit list. So . . . don't do it.

Time Lag, Again. I think we all agree that attacking a superior civilization is a bad idea, right? Some piddly Kardashev Class I outfit decides to take pot-shots at a big-time Kardashev II crew, they're gonna get messed up but good. Stands to reason.

This means, of course, that if you are a big-time Kardashev II civilization, you really don't have to worry much about the Kardashev I peons bothering you. They may be primitive, but they're not stupid. They know you can mess them up if they start something.

So nobody's going to be shooting at superior civilizations, and nobody's going to be shooting at inferior civilizations, either. What does that leave? Well, you can target civilizations at about your level of technology, just in case they have similar ideas about you.

See the problem yet? Time lag! Suppose you launch your attack at a peer civilization 50 light-years away. Even if the missiles are going nearly the speed of light, they're still going to spend half a century getting there. During which time the target civilization has half a century of technological progress. So if your aggressors are Stalin's Russia, launching the missiles in 1950, the weapons arrive in Clinton's America in 2000, equipped with interceptors which can easily handle them.

This is especially important because of course you can't know just how much progress a distant civilization will make during the transit time. Maybe you're advanced enough to catch them off-guard and wipe them out . . . but maybe you aren't, and now you've got an implacable enemy.

Of course, the odds of even detecting a peer or near-peer civilization are remote. Given the immense age of the universe and the long time-scale of life on Earth, it's highly improbable that any aliens we detect would be close to us in technology. It's far more likely that we'll pick up indications of Godlike Kardashev II civilizations, or send out probes which observe species just figuring out how to make tools, than beings with similar capabilities to our own.

The gods are safe from us, and we're safe from the primitives. So nobody has to get pre-emptively violent.

Deterrence. Once you're capable of building weapons which can strike across interstellar distances, you're also capable of hiding weapons across interstellar distances — tucking away a little counter-strike force in nearby star systems, or deep in the Kuiper Belt. There's no way for an attacker to know in advance if you've got some entertaining surprises in store — and the consequences for that attacker are likely to be dire if you do.

This means that the rational assumption, for anyone interested in keeping their species and civilization intact, is to assume all possible adversaries have just such a counterforce in being. So don't attack them.

If I can think of these things, so can alien strategic planners. And really, it's difficult to imagine any being with the ability to construct interstellar vehicles thinking it's a good idea to launch unprovoked attacks on newly-discovered civilizations. There are simply too many unknowns.

So that's why I don't worry about E.T. trying to wipe us out. Back to whatever you were doing.

 

For stories about primitive and super-advanced extraterrestrials, buy my ebook Outlaws and Aliens!

Comments

[Gregory Benford]

Good summary ! I agree. Gonna write a novel about this, next year or two.

[Chakat Firepaw]

"If someone's launching small objects at very high velocities, it's not a friendly gesture."

Um, there are people proposing doing exactly that as a way of sending probes.

[MadRocketSci]

"That's not a relativistic weapon, punks. THIS is a relativistic weapon." :D (explodes moon)

"Real world physics? You've only HAD physics for 300 years, and you're *already* confused." (Makes your world go all Dali)