xammer99 wrote:Regarding the use of RKV's to wipe out a species in a solar system is still pretty easy, even if they have spread out throughout a solar system.
1. If you can do 1 RKV, you can do as many as you need.
RKVs are actually somewhat expensive. All that energy to accelerate them has to come from
somewhere. The cost-benefit analysis might suggest that the energy expenditure would be better-spent on accelerating probes to find uninhabited systems, or on accelerating starships to get there.
3. Orbital mechanics don't change and so any habitat of worth is going to be in a very predictable place over th elong term.
Aiming is still going to be a bear. You're aiming for a spot in space smaller than 10,000 kilometers (in the case of a planet. It's actually much worse if you're aiming at an orbital habitat. Sure, they need less killing, but a slower projectile is easier to spot and intercept,) from a distance of up to tens of trillions of kilometers. And gravitational interactions between bodies in the system, outgassing, addition and removal of non-trivial quantities of mass, etc, will introduce huge long-term uncertainties in the orbit of a space habitat. Smacking planets is easy, getting the rest of a civilization's space infrastructure will be exceedingly difficult.
Second, your scouts then message back to the incoming RKVs, or even act as laser designators, where the targets are, their orbits, etc... Since the scouts know the direction the RKV's are coming from, and their utterly predictable course, use a tight beam back so you don't get any leakage.
The typical RKV isn't like a guided missile. It won't be able to affect significant course changes. (Especially not after it gets up to the relativistic velocities that make them so dangerous.) So they will have been aimed well in advance after watching a given system for decades to accurately plot out the orbits and locations of everything of significant mass.
Third, since you aren't just chucking rocks, you actually have variable mission munitions. So that at a planet, you are throwing a big mass or at something smaller, say a space station/asteroid, you kick out a bunch of sub-munitions (read a few tons of sand) to cover a broader area.
You seem to be suffering a failure of understanding. Space is
vast, and randomly tossing out sub-munitions in the hope of sweeping the area near a planet is just stupid, because the odds are decidedly against you.
Fourth hit the surrounding solar systems as well just to be safe in case they've spread out in the intervening flight time.
An RKV strike requires many years of monitoring and planning. And that huge energy expenditure. Ideally, you'd not want to waste it if you didn't have to.
Fifth, follow up. Send another wave through just to "bat cleanup" 6 mo later, then a year later, and so on for the next oh 50 years. Then follow it up with an automated drone to actually go and baby sit in the system for the next few thousand years and kick over anyone who might try and get back up.
If you wanted to stomp down an upcoming alien civilization and keep them stomped, you'd seed their Oort Cloud or scattered disc with Von Neumans. They'd then randomly latch onto comets and nudge them into any sizeable moon or planetary body. Or else hunt down and ram any space habitats that turn up. Given the sheer quantity of leftover mass you'd expect to find in a solar system, this would be effective for tens of millions of years. Granted, you'd be denying the system to yourself, but most planetary systems ought to be uninhabited anyway.
Of course, that abundance of systems inhabited by nothing more sophisticated than stromalites tends to argue against flattening what few alien civilizations exist anyway. You could provide living space for trillions of members of your own species in just one solar system, and since you need a mature space infrastructure to afford the cost of launching interstellar expeditions anyway . . . realistic expansion ought to be slow. Even with magic handwavium drives.
Now... as for them wanting to do it?
Well, the only way it WON'T be done is if...
a. Some every member of the neighborhood nice benefactor species invents some sort of FTL comm technology and teaches every single one of the neighbors
Their neighbors would have to have receivers capable of receiving these transmissions. Of course, your neighbors will either be too advanced to care, or barely capable of smashing rocks together to make tools. (Angels versus Cavemen.)
how to use it to set up their own sensor platforms in ALL the other solar systems AND in deep space to detect incoming RKVs.
The whole point of RKVs is to be minimally detectable. They're supposed to be going quick enough that they arrive not too long after the light-rays bearing news of their launch (and there are going to be lots of those,) and the light-rays heralding their passage through interstellar space. (Lots of those too. Relativistic collisions are energetic.)
b. That all the neighbors trust the benefactor species not to be screwing with them.
They will probably have to. The comparative abilities of interstellar civilizations ought to be orders of magnitude different. Even if you had a technological ceiling that could be reached very early on, a civilization that has been around for 10 million years will likely defeat a civilization that has barely achieved 1000 years of interstellar status by way of
grossly superior quantity, and grossly superior industrial capacity.
e. That some, or 1, of the neighbors doesn't get a lunatic in charge that doesn't give a toss and does it anyways because the dialectic/divinity/beans of the month doesn't tell him to do it.
Presumably a civilization that has been around long enough to build up the sort of infrastructure needed to become interstellar would have bred these sorts of traits out. They're counterproductive to a civilization's ability to achieve interstellar status to begin with. And even if you had an actively genocidal civilization, they're eventually going to run into someone with a
much greater ability to produce interesting ways of killing people . . . who would rather have put that industrial output into expanding their Dyson swarms in Zeta Reticuli, and bringing new Hypernet termini to their client states . . . and are now very pissed off because they now have to divert that industrial expenditure to reminding the genocidal upstarts exactly why all interstellar diplomacy is a very cautious game of Angels and Cavemen.
f. That everyone trusts everyone else implicitly and completely to act not just logically, but logically AND benevolently.
Everyone will have to trust everyone else, and will assume that the actions of other species must make sense in the context of their own survival (as the more aggressive and self-destructive species will tend not to make it to the interstellar stage.) Which generally means letting sleeping dogs lie.
Without all that, then an RKV slinging match is inevitable.
No, and here's why: Let's establish a few premises:
A) Life will be everywhere. The precursor chemistry for it turns up over and over, and in the strangest places.
B) Life will be overwhelmingly primitive. For over 90% of the history of life on Earth, the most sophisticated form of life were blue-green algae. And over 99.2% of the remaining history of life was dominated by creatures too stupid to fashion
stone tools.
C) The advancement of technological life will be extremely variable. Were it not for a certain asteroid impact, certain dinosaur families were (possibly) a scant few million years from having the cranial capacity necessary to start on the technological evolutionary path. Sapient life could've appeared on this world several tens of millions of years ago. Conversely, had the bottleneck at 70,000 years ago been a little more extreme . . . the most sophisticated sapient on the planet today would still be
Homo erectus. (Assuming that over-specialized Neanderthals don't survive the end of the Ice Age.)
D) The average age of habitable planets in the galaxy is expected to be older than Earth.
E) It takes a fully-mature space industry for a civilization to become interstellar. Most sci-fi authors don't grasp this, grossly underestimating the mind-boggling quantities of energy required in getting a starship/star probe/RKV across all those hundreds of trillions of kilometers in a reasonable timeframe. Thus, a civilization capable of engaging in an RKV match will already be very old, and industry-rich.
From these premises, I postulate the following:
1) Anyone you are liable to encounter in any given random meeting of spaceships will either come from a civilization who can't control enough resources to seriously inconvenience you, or will control enough resources and industry that you'd be little more than a minor irritant to them. The ones in the former category are "Cavemen" the ones in the latter "Angels"
2) All sensible interstellar diplomacy will be based on the following rules:
First Rule: In any First Contact situation, assume that you are the Caveman, until further interaction demonstrates otherwise. As such, further interaction should be approached very carefully.
Second Rule: No matter how powerful you think you are, there will always be someone bigger than you. Try not to do anything that would piss them off.
Third Rule: Displays of power put on by interstellar civilizations are highly conspicuous. As such, they are easily detectable at great distances by sufficiently sophisticated sensors. Do not assume that violations of the second rule will go unnoticed or unseen.
There are only two exceptions to the first rule. The first is if your civilization has not yet attained interstellar travel and you're visited by an alien starship. Thus, by default, you are the Caveman and all future interactions will be done very respectfully. The second is if you are the starship paying the visit to the system of primitives. Then, you're definitely the Angel, but how you behave will be constrained by the second and third rules.
3) Given the previous three rules, the logical thing to do will always be to act respectfully, cautiously, and meekly. Those who don't will tend to get made examples out of.
Plus it only takes 1 neighborhood asshole to start popping people off “just to make sure”.
Say you are the President of Planet Assholia, and you spot my planetary system through your telescopes. You burn off several tons of antimatter to shoot an RKV at me and give my world a severe case of impact winter. Problem solved, right?
Guess what, you failed to determine who was who on the totem pole. Turns out I had 100 fully-developed planetary systems to your one. Cavemen who piss off Angels suffer very sorry ends. I respond by dispatching swarms of Von Neumanns to mostly-empty brighter star systems surrounding yours, and wait a thousand years. They make little copies of themselves and build giant arrays of mirrors. Then they all point these mirrors at your planet. I may position several fleets of slower ships, arrayed in gargantuan space-going Fresnel lenses to tighten the beams of light. The first warning you get is when the level of light shining on Planet Assholia suddenly goes up by many orders of magnitude and you suffer an Outside-Context Problem.
One might say that this would possibly be a violation of the second law, and definitely the third law. Except to a properly placed observer, Planet Assholia's popping of his neighbors will be noticed, and recorded, thus rendering my roasting of his planet as an enforcement of the second law.
