The 4th assumption about real aliens

[Gil Hamilton]

I think the idea they are touching on is not whether or not aliens have changed from their primitive era (that's information we cannot know), but whether or not you are willing to bet the human race on that they have changed.

This is based on three assumptions they've cooked up:

1) Any alien species that becomes the dominant species on their planet probably did it by aggressive expansion.
2) Any alien species will value its own survival over any other.
3) Any alien species will assume those two points are true about us.


The authors Ender cite tend to argue since you can't know anything else about aliens, there is a sort of Games Theory to it that barring any mitigating circumstance, you MUST assume that the aliens are hostile. This is because without any information on us, the aliens will be unwilling to risk us being hostile and will seek to shoot first because they are afraid we are doing the same.

Of course, I find this logic somewhat circular. The whole thing is based on the Prisoner's Delimma applying to aliens, that you can't risk being wrong about them being friendly. Which I kind of find silly, but I tend to find Pentagon/Soviet Style Paranoia to be somewhat silly if it weren't for the fact that the people who do it are in charge of all the bombs.

[Darth Wong]

It would be prudent to assume that aliens are hostile only for the purpose of making sure you are ready in case they turn out to be.

It would be foolish to actually assume that they are hostile as a general approach, because if you did that, then your first impulse upon encountering any alien would be to immediately attack and destroy it without provocation, thus turning the possibility of alien hostility into an absolute certainty.

[Gil Hamilton]

I agree with you Mike, but people have a very Dr. Strangelove attitude about it. It's better from them to be CERTAINLY hostile then an UNKNOWN hostile. Of course, these are people who very any move with suspicious, doubly so it is a friendly move.

[Mayabird]

All of this is entirely predicated upon the assumption that the intelligent species in question is biologically unchanged from its primitive era, just like we are.

Given a hypothetical species which has advanced to the point that it has begun tinkering with its own genetic code on a large scale, it is entirely possible to conceive of a species which is far more rational and less driven by sexual selection biology to be hostile and aggressive.

D'oh, I was going to mention this! Too slow, too slow.

It's also possible that the hypothetical species might be an uplift or a flat out creation (organic, inorganic, whatever) made by some other intelligent species, engineered to have certain traits that might not evolve naturally, like really good, peaceful diplomatic skills. Natural aggression and hostility might make bootstrap species like ours rare, but you only need one going around the universe making others for their own reasons (because they can, because even asking someone else of their own species to dinner is awkward and they can make robots that can handle it much more smoothly, because wouldn't it be AWESOME if these flying yeast butterfly things could talk) to make a lot. Or just one that makes another one, which then makes millions, because talking flying yeast butterflies are awesome.

Really, we may just be thinking too narrowly about the possibilities. It's a lot wackier out there than we imagine. Almost every exo-planet we discover seems to bear that out.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

The thing I find most irritating is why it tends to be assumed that aliens will want humans dead. Perhaps they'd just conquer us and integrate us into their state--we tend to ascribe xenophobix speciesm to other races as a matter of course.

[Adrian Laguna]

The thing I find most irritating is why it tends to be assumed that aliens will want humans dead. Perhaps they'd just conquer us and integrate us into their state--we tend to ascribe xenophobic speciesm to other races as a matter of course.

The assumption is not so much that they want us dead, as that they'll want to kill enough of us, and destroy sufficient infrastructure, that we are not a threat. The reason why this is assumed as a matter of course, is because humans are as a whole are xenophobic, and it's very natural for people to ascribe their own traits to other people.

[Gil Hamilton]

The thing I find most irritating is why it tends to be assumed that aliens will want humans dead. Perhaps they'd just conquer us and integrate us into their state--we tend to ascribe xenophobix speciesm to other races as a matter of course.

I think the argument is that not that they necessarily want us dead, but they will shoot first on the assumption that without any evidence to the contrary, there is the clear risk that WE will attempt to make THEM extinct.

It's pure Cold War political thought and an application of the Prisoner's Delimma, in the Atomic Rocket case. Of course, its that line of thinking that ASSURES there cannot be peace (be it between humans or between humans and aliens).

[Axiomatic]

Also, it only works if the aliens conveniently come at you one at a time, and no alien race is aware of the existence of more than one other living alien race at any given time.

As soon as that isn't true, as soon as even the slightest form of a galactic information network exists, rumors of that one race of crazy psychos who exterminate everyone in their path are going to spread much faster than the crazy psychos (specifically, humanity) themselves, and everyone is going to wipe us out for the safety of the galaxy.

In other words, unless you can rig a sufficient percentage of stars to go supernova at the same tiem and exterminate all life in the galaxy in a single blow, you're dead if you try to be a genocidal asshole.

[kinnison]

This is a subject treated in quite a number of places, to say the least. One way of looking at it is that it might be a good idea to assume benevolent, or at least indifferent, aliens, or none at all, as a working assumption.

Why? Simple. The best estimate I can find of the number of intelligent species in the Galaxy is around a thousand, and it's been at least a billion years, probably more, since it became possible for intelligent life to evolve (very early in the Galaxy's history, there were very few heavy elements around, so stars a bit older than the Sun are the earliest likely to have life-bearing planets).

This means that the probable technological gap between us and any other potential intelligent aliens is about a million years - in either direction. We're a million years older? No problem - people weren't even people then. They get uppity, we crush them like a bug - or put them in zoos.

The aliens are a million years ahead? If they are benevolent or indifferent, again no problem. If they are belligerent? Then we have about the chance of a snowball in Hell. We have come from stone axes to computers and spaceships in much less than a million years, and the pace of change is accelerating. There is no reason to think that any aliens will be different in that respect.

So if they are belligerent we are screwed. Why worry about something we can't do anything about?

And we can't hide, either. For about fifty years now, we have been putting out more radio power than the Sun, and in a spectrum bearing no resemblance whatsoever to any natural process. That's one giveaway. Another is the unnatural chemicals, detectable in spectrographs, such as CFCs in our atmsophere. Another is the occasional microsecond-thick shell of gamma rays that we emitted, for a while, from time to time.

[PeZook]

It's pure Cold War political thought and an application of the Prisoner's Delimma, in the Atomic Rocket case. Of course, its that line of thinking that ASSURES there cannot be peace (be it between humans or between humans and aliens).

Besides, how are you going to guarantee you killed the entire alien race?

Unless you can make stars go supernova, simply blasting planets with RKVs isn't going to do you much good ; There is absolutely no guarantee the alien species didn't move out to space habitats long ago, and that they won't retaliate in kind with more RKVs.

And they will know that, too. Thus, mutually assured destruction rears its ugly head and forces both species to talk first, shoot later.

[Ariphaos]

Unless you can make stars go supernova, simply blasting planets with RKVs isn't going to do you much good ; There is absolutely no guarantee the alien species didn't move out to space habitats long ago, and that they won't retaliate in kind with more RKVs.

Of course, if a species is so collectively stupid to resort to firing with RKVs, they deserve to be wiped out.

I really need to write an article about this, or maybe get into a coliseum debate over it. I've had this argument twice here and yet people still think that excerpt in 'The Killing Star' on Atomic Rocket was remotely intelligent.

Actually I'm only missing one data point, should go ask for it in SLAM. >_>

[Lusankya]

I'd actually dispute the notion that we became the dominant species purely through aggressive expansion.

One of the factors in our success has been in forging mutually beneficial relationships with other animal species. And given that most people have at least some kind of empathy with animals (this, of course, is anecdotal, so if anyone has any argument against this point, I'll concede), I'd be inclined to think that cooperation with other species is in some way genetically ingrained into us. I also would not be surprised if a similar trait was found in other technological races.

Now, granted, we are causing a lot of environmental havoc now, but the vast majority of extinctions caused by us are not through agressive targeting of other species, but are related more to habitat destruction, or the introduction of feral pests (which is more carelessness than aggressiveness). In fact, I'd view this kind of apathy/carelessness as more likely source of danger in an alien species than flat-out aggressiveness.

[xammer99]

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.

2. If you are inclined to use'em, you don't use just 1.

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.

So...

First, you send X scout drones through on a .5C flyby of the solar system looking for potential targets at a few light hours out so you aren't passing near anything. I.e. anything putting out a radio source, and then obviously any rocky planet & significant asteroid/moon.

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.

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.

Fourth hit the surrounding solar systems as well just to be safe in case they've spread out in the intervening flight time.

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.

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 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. Alternatively, you could have it so everyone else invents one on their own, but hey, not likely.

b. That all the neighbors trust the benefactor species not to be screwing with them.

c. That some, or 1, of the neighbors hasn’t found a way to jam the FTL comm system.

d. That some, or 1, of the neighbors doesn’t THINK that the other neighbors have a way to jam the FTL comm system.

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.

f. That everyone trusts everyone else implicitly and completely to act not just logically, but logically AND benevolently.

Without all that, then an RKV slinging match is inevitable. Why? Because it’s the Dark Ages all over again, but instead of not knowing what the hell is coming out of the forest at you, you don’t know what’s coming out of deep space at you, and you are holed up in a nice small chunk of real estate that is pretty easy to play smashy smashy with, because, as I said at the start… if you can do 1, you can do however many you need. Plus it only takes 1 neighborhood asshole to start popping people off “just to make sure”.

But as someone else said, why worry about it? Until we either get the FTL comm thing on our own or get it handed to us and trust it implicitly, then we won’t know what’s coming out of the forest to say howdy.

[Turin]

It's pure Cold War political thought and an application of the Prisoner's Delimma, in the Atomic Rocket case. Of course, its that line of thinking that ASSURES there cannot be peace (be it between humans or between humans and aliens).

Except that it isn't actually a Prisoner's Dilemma. Prisoner's Dilemma requires that the "lone defection" payment outweighs the "mutual cooperation" payment. For each participant the payments in Prisoner's Dilemma are DC>CC>DD>CD.

In the case of first contact with an alien species, the mutual cooperation payment could potentially be far higher than the lone defection payment, or in other words CC>DC>DD>CD. This changes the game to one of Stag Hunt, which has a Nash Equilibrium of Mututal Cooperation. The only time you would defect in this case is if you doubt the rationality of the other player -- in this case the alien species. Unless you have extended contact with the other species, that's a hard assumption to make. On the other hand, if they've been listening to our radio signals, they might not make that assumption about us, either, in which case we could be in Big Trouble.

[xammer99]

You can't have any sort of contact to establish such a dialog at all without some sort of magical FTL comm technology.

So its not the Cold War, its the Dark Ages, but without the friendly personal touch of a sword upside the head.

[PeZook]

1. If you can do 1 RKV, you can do as many as you need.

Yeah, obviously - I mean, since the US can build 6 carriers, it can build 6000 just as easily, right?

2. If you are inclined to use'em, you don't use just 1.

Granted

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.

Except habitats can maneuver.

First, you send X scout drones through on a .5C flyby of the solar system looking for potential targets at a few light hours out so you aren't passing near anything. I.e. anything putting out a radio source, and then obviously any rocky planet & significant asteroid/moon.

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.

And during all that, the enemy just sits there and takes it? The drones have to maneuver in-system, and so can be shot down pretty easily. Then the enemy will maneuver his habitats,making your data completely useless.

Hell, if a habitat is in orbit of a gas giant like Jupiter, it may simply be impossible to reliably hit it with an interstellar RKV without slowing it down first.

Fourth hit the surrounding solar systems as well just to be safe in case they've spread out in the intervening flight time.

The problem is that while you do this massive, massive investment of resources into attacking everyone you detect, if you miss even one star system, you will get massively hit in response.

[Ender]

I was kinda looking for more discussion about the logic of the presented assumption guys. So far Mike is the only one to really address it, with his point about the possibility of their society advancing while no longer selecting for aggressiveness and high technology, however there you need to way the probability of just a change and then decide if the probability is high enough to invalidate the "implies" part of the assumption.

Discarding all talk of attempts at xenocide and such, is the logic there flawed? Does technology imply belligerence based off its role in society?

[Lord of the Abyss]

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.

A culture that worried about attacks like that could attach a solar or magnetic sail to the habitat, and constantly 'jink' the habitat for zero fuel costs. And, they could use various ECM tricks to make them harder to localize; hiding in space is hard, but I doubt that fuzzing your location well enough so that you can't be accurately targeted from beyond the solar system would be all that hard; especially when they can move.

First, you send X scout drones through on a .5C flyby of the solar system looking for potential targets at a few light hours out so you aren't passing near anything.

Most likely they'd be seen; at that speed, they'd have problems with space debris, and even if they can survive/deflect it that doesn't mean they'll be invisible.

Well, the only way it WON'T be done is if...

< snip >

f. That everyone trusts everyone else implicitly and completely to act not just logically, but logically AND benevolently.

Or :

G : Worries that a potential target might be just as paranoid as the RKV throwers, and have ( for example ) something like a fleet of Berserker style Von Neumann war machines out in the outer comets, mining and replicating, and listening to the inner system. And if something kills the Creators, that's the deadman switch that puts them into eat-the-galaxy mode. Or, they have their own fleet of RKV hurlers waiting to take vengeance.

H : Any species THAT paranoid kills itself, or tears down it's civilization every time it gets powerful enough to do so. Which seems likely; the same logic that applies to outside cultures applies to inside rivals.

I : Local space sets up agreements to gang up on and destroy anyone who does any such thing.

Discarding all talk of attempts at xenocide and such, is the logic there flawed? Does technology imply belligerence based off its role in society?

'Belligerence', perhaps, but not violence. Look at Microsoft; they certainly have a rep for being aggressive with competitors, but they don't use missiles or assassins. Competition doesn't need to be violent; victory doesn't need to be a military victory.

[Commander 598]

I thought the idea here was that it would be highly improbable that any species capable of achieving spaceflight would be just "We come in peace" levels of nice since something less nice would have probably killed them or attempted to kill them somewhere along the evolutionary line, including the spaceflight point, and it would be far more probable that they would at the very least be cautious of other species that they haven't met yet.

Did I miss something?

[Ariphaos]

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.

Wrong. Once a civilization has moved the majority of its infrastructure into space, no number of RKVs put out by the power of a single star will be sufficient. This of course is above and beyond the stupidity inherent in RKV's in the first place.

2. If you are inclined to use'em, you don't use just 1.

Go right ahead. Your civilization uses RKVs against my civilization, my civilization defeats them with sunshine and happiness and turns your world to cinders with said sunshine and happiness. Not that it would hurt you much, but given that your civilization obviously doesn't know the meaning of gravity tug, you will lose a fair bit of sentimental value.

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.

Wrong. 10 nm/s^2 worth of random acceleration is enough to clear Earth out of the path of an RKV launched at a distance of one light-year.

So...

What can I do to get a big sticky saying Relativistic Kill Vehicles are the weapons of retards stickied to the top of this board?

[frogcurry]

Discarding all talk of attempts at xenocide and such, is the logic there flawed? Does technology imply belligerence based off its role in society?

Most modern technological advance from at least about 1980's onwards (I can't comment before about before then) seems to come primarily from commercial research, rather than military funded. This comes down to basic survival desires (make new idea = make money) and maybe desire for better status and comfort (make money = get better mate and house). Most of this is happening in the most benign and safe environments humanity has ever achieved (Europe, USA, Japan, Korea), so that kills off the argument in paragraph 5 of the original post.

I agree with the original logic of technology = better competition with environment. But intelligent belligerence seems pretty tawdry as an environmental factor compared to disease, security of needs, environmental threats, economic pressures, status and mortality as drivers. Most people even in medieval times won't have died of war, or even its consequences, and everyone here probably knows about the relative death rates from WW1 vs. the 1919 Influenza plague.

Some degree of belligerence is probably essential to not be a pushover. But too much will probably be self-harming (i.e. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan), as you can end up creating new threats to your survival that wouldn't exist.

I'm guessing that the original author is attributing the success of western cultures to greater military prowess to come to these conclusions as opposed to the existence of a culture (and agricultural wealth) that allowed the developments required to achieve that greater military prowess.

(Indcidentally - since someone brought it up, the most successful tactic in a study I read about a few years ago on the prisoners dilemna (assuming you play indefinitely) was to always play nice until betrayed, then never forgive even a single betrayal.)

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

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.

[Junghalli]

Yeah, obviously - I mean, since the US can build 6 carriers, it can build 6000 just as easily, right?

As a little aside, I think if you are going to use an RKKV it would make much more sense to build it as a missile carrier than a big missile. You would fill it with small "missiles" powered by ion drives or something like that. The RKKV is preceeded by scout probes which drift through the system and radio back to the RKKV (using tightbeam) the location of every major artificial energy emission source, and the RKKV then breaks up and releases these missiles which use their own drives to alter their course to collide with the habs. Ideally you'd do this many AU away so the low-thrust ion drives won't be spotted and the enemy won't know what hit them (you'd probably be doing this anyway because your little missiles will probably only have a few hundred km/s delta V at most and they'll need to do their burns months or years from impact). The RKKVs discarded engine block might be slammed into a "hard" target like an Earthlike planet but the initial strike would be with thousands of little missiles and aimed at the space infrastructure.

The approach of just slamming a huge relativistic starship into each individual target is really stupid. Unless your enemy is primitive they'll have population and industry scattered over hundreds or thousands of space habitats; you need to take them all out or all you've accomplished is to give reveal your existence and hostility to your enemies. Not to mention the terminal guidance problem. Little ion-driven missiles have a chance of making terminal manuevers while being relatively inconspicuous at thousands of AU, the huge RKKV with its powerful drive will need perfect aim from light years away or it'll be picked up instantly and any chump with a chemical rocket can take it out.

Anyway, generally "shoot first and ask questions later" is a bad idea unless you have pretty good intelligence on your enemy. It'd suck to send an RKKV or replicator weapon into the system of origin of the alien signal you just recieved and then find out you just really pissed off a hundred world interstellar empire.

[Junghalli]

The thing I find most irritating is why it tends to be assumed that aliens will want humans dead. Perhaps they'd just conquer us and integrate us into their state--we tend to ascribe xenophobix speciesm to other races as a matter of course.

Conquest in an STL universe would be somewhat difficult, given the enormous difficulty of sending anything at relativistic speed. Sending missiles or automated replicator weapons is probably all that is practical unless you are incredibly advanced. Of course, there is always rule through terror.

"Greetings, people of Earth. I am Xenu, God-Emperor of the Domination of Theta. Attached to this message is a list of my demands. My ambassador will be arriving on a small lightsail courrier in four of your years to insure your compliance with all of them. If I fail to recieve his message of your compliance the 2 petawatt pusher laser will be turned on your world and it will be laid waste. Any attempt at resistance and your world will be laid waste."

Such an approach could be a more humane version of the doctrine of "destroy any relativistic-capable civilization in your area because they're inherently a dire threat". Instead of destroy them, simply disarm them (disarm in this context meaning prevent them from building weapons that could hurt people in other systems, on threat of having such weapons used on them if they do anything you don't like). The "occupation forces" would be weapons inspectors making sure you aren't building anything they don't like the look of, and sending regular reports back home.

Of course, it is less reliable than extermination, in that such a scheme invites subversion by a sufficiently clever enemy (hold the inspectors hostage and force them to send back false reports, for instance), and it inherently gives your enemies warning. You can never tell when you might just meet somebody crazy enough to go for MAD, rebel, and use the lag time to your response to send to a bunch of "revenge weapons" at your solar systems, perhaps while sending out some "slowships" to other solar systems to restart their civilization elsewhere on the "if at the end there are two of us and none of them left, we win" principle.

It would be prudent to assume that aliens are hostile only for the purpose of making sure you are ready in case they turn out to be.
It would be foolish to actually assume that they are hostile as a general approach, because if you did that, then your first impulse upon encountering any alien would be to immediately attack and destroy it without provocation, thus turning the possibility of alien hostility into an absolute certainty.

I completely agree.