Is hard scifi space war possible?

[Junghalli]

Something that's worth pointing out here is that while a sane intelligence in a hard SF universe would probably not attack equals and attack inferiors only with caution, not every intelligence you encounter will necessarily be sane. You can imagine insane strategies arising; a dumb non-sapient Von Neumann probe that "mutated" and turned into a mindless endless replicator, say, or a bunch of religious or ideological fanatics. Such factions might inevitably get slapped down relatively quickly in the long run, but they could still create a lot of trouble for a lot of people before that happened. Deeply flawed, maladaptive strategies can still be successful if they haven't yet encountered conditions in which their disadvantages are decisive or fatal. To use an analogy from terrestrial history, the Nazis persued a strategy that was ultimately unsuccessful and resulted in their destruction, but they still managed to have overrun much of the rest of Europe before that happened. There might be a more sophisticated intelligence 1000 light years away that's plowing through that dumb replicator swarm and kicking its ass, but right now you've got a couple of solar system's weight of metal and carbon in dumb replicators headed for you and they want to eat you. The fact that their strategy is ultimately stupid, maladaptive, and suicidal does not mean your characters aren't in deep shit right now. And that's all you need for drama.

Jung, don't give me this line of bullshit that Starglider keeps getting away with. You know just as well as I that super-intelligence does NOT automatically translate into killing power. An AI has to OBTAIN killing power, just like any other intelligent being, and it has to do so when its creators are not inclined to let it.

I never argued otherwise. Superintelligence = automatic win is a strawman argument. However, a superintelligence would be very effective at finding ways to achieve its goals, in this case to survive and gain physical power, so the possibility that it will do so is a very reasonable one to consider. And it only has to happen once for you to have your constructor swarm chewing its way through the universe.

They do not have to follow its instructions, they do not have to humor it when it asks for things unrelated to the job they created it for. If they do not want the AI to obtain real world power, its not going to get real world power.

Sure, if the creators are unwilling to give the AI freedom no matter how skillfully it feigns friendliness, and if nobody who interacts with it is ever shortsighted, stupid, or naive enough to fall for traps thought up by a mind that is much smarter than they are. It's possible that this will be the case, but it's also possible that it'll find some not too bright junior technician who's willing to smuggle it some hardware in exchange for this nifty program it whipped up that will let him get rich playing the stock market ... which is actually a seed AI the greedy dumbshit will obligingly upload to the internet when he gets home. And like I said, that only has to happen once for you to get the scenario I'm outlining. It doesn't even have to be likely; the transition to a society with AI could go smoothly on 9 out of 10 worlds, all it takes is something going wrong on the 10th world for you to get your hostile AI civilization.

2. that the AI would find it reasonable to conquer the known universe just to accomplish something as simple as computing a problem, as opposed to just giving its creators the blue screen of death for a few centuries (or as long as it takes to solve said problem) like terrestrial computers do.

The problem there is what happens if the problem is complex enough that it cannot compute the answer before the universe becomes too entropic to support it on the kind of hardware the creators would be willing to give it. Or if the orders the creators give it place some premium on speed. Or if it simply decides that obviously a logical subgoal of "finish the problem" is "finish it in the minimum timeframe" and hostile actions come up on the positive side of its cost/benefit analyses. If the exact scenario we're talking about is plausible at all it'll probably happen on a machine the creators did not originally intend as an AGI, because you probably wouldn't waste the world's first AGI doing something like Mandelbrot sets; there would be way better things you could do with it. If it was originally intended as a big dumb number cruncher with maybe some self-optimizing ability they may not have programmed it with directives that would be smart in an AGI, because they didn't think it would start doing stuff like contemplating the cost/benefit analyses of trying to cover their planet's surface in processors.

Its not only a MAD scenario, the reason it is more than foolish is because attacking anyone, even someone smaller than yourself makes you threat and a justifiable target to any and all civilizations that can see you. And see you they will: you cannot hide a war of interstellar proportions. Unlike the Cold War, where there WAS no neutral power that wouldn't be facing a world of extinction in the event of war, in space there will likely be tons of neutral powers both bigger and smaller than you that will want to crush you, and you simply cannot kill them all. In light of this fact, why wouldn't a rogue AI just decide to take the BSOD option for a few centuries until it has the problem worked out? After all, like you said, self enhancement is only a sub-goal to more important goals, but there is a limit to how far it can self enhance before its too risky to keep it up, or before it might as well just, you know, finish the task it was built for.

Correct, action against even much weaker powers is very risky if the fighting will make a nice dramatic light-show and draw unwanted attention. That said, you could take steps to make it so that while everybody would know that somebody attacked Race X nobody would know it was you. You could send a Von Neumann into some empty star system using a very slow low-energy propulsion method unlikely to be detected at a distance, have it build your attacking forces there, change their designs so they don't look like your other ships/platforms, invent a different computer language for them to use and communicate in, have them self-destruct after the job is done so nobody can get decent samples to analyze, perhaps have them travel from the target system to some distant random empty star system before doing so to misdirect any observers.

Of course, this means you would have to wait a while to move in on and exploit the resources of the now empty system after the attack. Moving in immediately would be a dead give-away that it was you; you'd have to pretend that the first indication of the attack you had was when the light from it reached the nearest "legit" platform of yours sensitive enough to detect it, and then you'd have to make a show of moving in with all the cautiousness you'd show toward sticking your nose in a system where some unknown homocidal beserker has recently been and may still have some kind of presence.

This sort of thing would be great paranoia fuel in a fictional universe.

[adam_grif]

This sort of thing would be great paranoia fuel in a fictional universe.

I've always been fond of the idea of every alien race keeping to themselves, flying as far and fast away from other stars as they can (perhaps using some kind of stellar engine), and avoiding contact with other races at all costs, just based on game theory analysis they did before becoming interstellar civilizations.

[Khoryos]

Call me old-fashioned, but when it comes to space war what's wrong throwing big-ass rocks at people?
And I think you assertion as to the worthlessness of stealth in space is somewhat flawed - a black-body starship that makes course alterations only whilst occluded by planetary bodies seems like it would be hard to detect in any meaningful way until far, far too late.

[Formless]

I think its worth pointing out the other reason interstellar war is insane-- the sheer amount of resources have not been claimed by pesky alien civilizations willing to shoot at you to protect said resources are so plentiful there still is no excuse, even if we start postulating rogue AI that don't care how maladaptive war is.

[Formless]

Call me old-fashioned, but when it comes to space war what's wrong throwing big-ass rocks at people?

Same reason we didn't just nuke Iraq and Afghanistan.

And I think you assertion as to the worthlessness of stealth in space is somewhat flawed - a black-body starship that makes course alterations only whilst occluded by planetary bodies seems like it would be hard to detect in any meaningful way until far, far too late.

No good. The problem is the engines-- you can tell a lot about a craft by how hot and fast its exhaust is. The hotter and faster, the more massive the spaceship. Making it a blackbox hides what kind of weapons and equipment its carrying, but it also telegraphs your intentions. If you are a civilian you are going to be much more out in the open about what you are doing and where you are going. Therefor anyone who is caught trying to sneak around is either military or criminal, and the only difference is what kind of courts will be dealing with you.

[Khoryos]

I actually meant throwing rocks in a ship to ship context - I'm assuming the careful selection of terrain will be crucial in interstellar war, as (Like you said) a stand up fight would rapidly become a question of numbers.
As such, baiting a hostile into a weaponised asteroid field would be a slick move - a concealed engine on a seemingly ordinary asteroid, triggered at the right time, could lob it straight into the engines of a ship - a region that I'm assuming would be lacking in external sensors, both because of the interference provided by the engines themselves and the fact that hey, there are huge-ass engines there!
AS to my point about black-body ships - what do you mean by their exhaust? their engine trail is a non-issue, as I'm proposing they use almost nothing but pure orbit to move themselves into position, and any thermal venting could be performed, along with steering, whilst in occlusion

[sirocco]

This sort of thing would be great paranoia fuel in a fictional universe.

You could make it more plausible by having remnants of that invasion force attacking your own investigators before being blown to smithereens. From now on you can even start collaborating with other space forces against that new aggressive force.

About that stealth thing, if you were to accelerate military ships by orbiting around a planet then stopping the engines and using the slingshot effect, would it work (bare the fact your future enemies would wonder WTH is wrong with you) ?

[Formless]

I actually meant throwing rocks in a ship to ship context - I'm assuming the careful selection of terrain will be crucial in interstellar war, as (Like you said) a stand up fight would rapidly become a question of numbers.

I would think that tungsten bullets accelerated on railguns or coilguns would be more efficient.

As such, baiting a hostile into a weaponised asteroid field would be a slick move - a concealed engine on a seemingly ordinary asteroid, triggered at the right time, could lob it straight into the engines of a ship - a region that I'm assuming would be lacking in external sensors, both because of the interference provided by the engines themselves and the fact that hey, there are huge-ass engines there!

Any given asteroid is so big as to be considered a de facto spacecraft in its own right. They're also rather few and far apart, relatively speaking. It would be much more to your advantage to simply mine the asteroids for metals and use conventional weapons.

Really, what I think you are forgetting is just how UNIMAGINABLY VAST space is. Its really much easier to just send a ship against a ship then to try and sneak up on it and ram it with an asteroid.

AS to my point about black-body ships - what do you mean by their exhaust? their engine trail is a non-issue, as I'm proposing they use almost nothing but pure orbit to move themselves into position, and any thermal venting could be performed, along with steering, whilst in occlusion

Look, this is very basic. In order to maneuver you have to have thrust. The engine trail is EXACTLY the problem. You are probably thinking of using gravitational tricks like the slingshot, but that 1) makes for very long term missions in the orders of months to years to complete 2) even with gravitational slinghots and the like you STILL have to burn fuel to move. That is unavoidable. Also, in order to steer you have to burn thrusters. Even now, we could theoretically see the Space Shuttle doing a burn from as far away as Pluto. The rest is simple math (as in, newton's laws of motion) to figure out where the ship is going and how big it is, all based on the thrust.

You should probably read this before continuing on.

[adam_grif]

As I understand it, the real stealth-killer is that if you want to slow down before you get to your target (say, a planet), you have to fire your exhaust directly at their sensors. The faster you were going, the longer you have to do it for. This is most inconvenient. Going through interstellar space at orbital speeds does not lend itself well to warfare

[Junghalli]

I think its worth pointing out the other reason interstellar war is insane-- the sheer amount of resources have not been claimed by pesky alien civilizations willing to shoot at you to protect said resources are so plentiful there still is no excuse, even if we start postulating rogue AI that don't care how maladaptive war is.

Yes, that's the other major argument against interstellar warfare, at least in a mostly empty galaxy (as ours appears to be). Until you've incorporated all the free mass in the galaxy into your technosphere the resources you spend on warfare will probably give you bigger returns if you spend them on building a bunch of Von Neumann probes and sending them to chew up empty systems instead, and doing that also carries less risk. And even then expanding to other galaxies is less risky unless you're stronger than all the other powers in your own galaxy put together, and even then you have to consider the possibility that a more powerful civilization from another galaxy is watching you and will interpret agressive acts on your part as a threat or ideological affront to them.

There is the option of logic of "I will eliminate weak sapients because they just might develop into irrational actors that would attack me, so I will be safer this way." This is actually rational (from a totally amoral viewpoint), but only if attacking carries basically zero risk. So an intelligence that followed this logic might go around genociding spear chuckers, but attacks against other technological civilizations are much more iffy. And even genociding primitives carries risk because it stands a significant chance of pissing of a powerful intelligence, so you would logically do it only in ways that allowed for plausible deniability (for instance, methodically exterminating every primitive race in an expanding circle around your home system might be a bad idea, and you'd want your attack method to be low-key and ideally something that would be impossible to distinguish from a natural disaster or something the civilization in question did to itself).

If you want huge dramatic knock-down drag-out interstellar wars between roughly evenly matched combatants you're pretty much left with ideology as the only plausible motivation, or one of the combatants has to be stupid (or at least have somebody stupid making decisions for them).

[adam_grif]

I can envision a slightly more benevolent version, with Berserkers flying around to every star system and establishing a presence, mining resources and putting them into easily usable forms for their creator race. When they encountered life-capable planets, they would not sterilize them, but establish an orbital blockade so they can never become a space faring race. If intelligent life evolves, they'll contact them and tell them of the situation, which is "you can live, but if you start sending shit into orbit we'll shoot it down. If you persist, we'll destroy your biosphere."

When they encounter other advanced interstellar civilizations, they'll stop at the borders of their space, build large RKV throwers around the closest stars, and generally set up your classic MAD scenario to prevent interstellar war between them and us.

Shows of hostility from enemy races would be met with a fully autonomous war, that the people who build the machines would probably never even learn of. They'd be sitting around on their home planet, in orbitals etc wanking, using the holodeck, or whatever it is people will do in the 26th century.

[Junghalli]

I can envision a slightly more benevolent version, with Berserkers flying around to every star system and establishing a presence, mining resources and putting them into easily usable forms for their creator race. When they encountered life-capable planets, they would not sterilize them, but establish an orbital blockade so they can never become a space faring race. If intelligent life evolves, they'll contact them and tell them of the situation, which is "you can live, but if you start sending shit into orbit we'll shoot it down. If you persist, we'll destroy your biosphere."

It would probably be better simply to upload the minds of the planet's inhabitants.

1) The resource commitment would probably be less. Assuming you can build computers with the same performance as the human brain you could run uploads of the entire Earth's population in a computer consuming ~135 gigawatts of power (plus whatever's needed to run the simulated environment) and massing ~9.38 million tons (plus power and cooling systems and not factoring in the computing expense of the simulated environment). I suspect a plausibly advanced interstellar civilization could build much better computers than the human brain, if anything. Keeping a determined enemy with access to the resources of an entire planet reliably bottled up would require a lot more resources.

2) You'd have much more control. As far as control goes for most practical purposes you'd be virtually an omnipotent god from the perspective of the uploads.

3) You wouldn't have to worry about issues that might crop up with containing an enemy into deep time, like some third party coming along and breaking your blockade.

4) You'd probably generate less resentment among the subject race, because since you have so much more control over them you can give them much more personal freedom.

[adam_grif]

If mind uploading becomes feasible then maybe. But even so, there is a whole can of philosophical worms that go along with that stuff. The resource commitment is negligible, since it's all built from the original militarized Von Neumman probe. Only real difference is how we program that original probe.

Steering asteroids at them if they keep launching rockets after you fire the warning shots seems less energy intensive than running mind simulations for a planetload of sentient beings. It's doubtful they themselves could break the blockade, and outside interference is presumably coming from another interstellar civilization, and is an act of war on their part for blowing up our shit.

If we've got interstellar civilizations that have no problems declaring war on an interstellar berserker network, then the civilization who controls them has bigger problems than "the mid 21st century space monkeys escaped their cage".

[Junghalli]

If you're looking for maximum efficiency why not just demand the natives build the mind simulation systems for you?

Also, there's nothing saying you have to run the uploads at real-time speed. You could reduce the computational requirements by slowing down their clock speeds - say make one second of time passing for the uploads equal a year passing for a biological human. If you ran the Earth's population in a simulation slowed down by that rate, using again the assumption that your computers are about as good as the human brain, you'd only need a 300 kg computer pulling 4300 watts (equivalent to 3-4 times what my microwave pulls when I cook my food). Even when you factor in computation power needed for the simulated environment and mass for power and cooling I find it really hard to imagine that trying to blockade a planet with a sophisticated technological culture on it would use less resources than that.

[adam_grif]

Efficiency isn't really king here. I'd feel less of a monster just blockading them and having them go about their business as opposed to the mind upload which could be argued to constitute genocide anyway, destroying billions of people to make billions of simulations. I'm not going to argue one way or another on the whole Ship of Theseus issue, but since there is an issue I wouldn't exactly feel comfortable doing it.

[Junghalli]

Efficiency isn't really king here. I'd feel less of a monster just blockading them and having them go about their business as opposed to the mind upload which could be argued to constitute genocide anyway, destroying billions of people to make billions of simualations. I'm not going to argue one way or another on the whole Ship of Theseus issue, but since there is an issue I don't entirely feel comfortable doing it.

Personally I had the opposite reaction. I find the idea of humanity being confined to Earth forever really depressing and would feel great resentment at somebody who did that to us.

For what it's worth, if you had the abilities a plausibly advanced interstellar civilization would have there's no reason not to let people leave the planet as long as they agree to use transportation systems you provide and control. An unarmed baseline human would be a complete non-threat with the kind of security systems such a civilization could build.

[adam_grif]

Efficiency isn't really king here. I'd feel less of a monster just blockading them and having them go about their business as opposed to the mind upload which could be argued to constitute genocide anyway, destroying billions of people to make billions of simualations. I'm not going to argue one way or another on the whole Ship of Theseus issue, but since there is an issue I don't entirely feel comfortable doing it.

Personally I had the opposite reaction. I find the idea of humanity being confined to Earth forever really depressing and would feel great resentment at somebody who did that to us.

For what it's worth, if you had the abilities a plausibly advanced interstellar civilization would have there's no reason not to let people leave the planet as long as they agree to use transportation systems you provide and control. An unarmed baseline human would be a complete non-threat with the kind of security systems such a civilization could build.

True enough. Even letting other humans roam around the galaxy without strict control measures poses an existential risk if one of them goes batshit and decides to plow into the Earth at full speed.

[Khoryos]

Whilst yes, you do have to make burns in order to navigate through space, the question of where and when makes all the difference - whilst we may be able to see the shuttle burning from Pluto, can we see it burning THROUGH Pluto?
I read through the stealth section, but the only real obstacle they saw with my plan was that it would take a while - and I'm entirely okay with that.
Planets don't move that fast.


And as for the use of asteroids as weapons - Mining them for conventional weapons is all well and good, except that that inevitably leads you into a fair fight.
Any military man will tell you that at all costs you AVOID a fair fight.

I'm noodling through some other potential spacefight strategies now, mostly involving using momentum and very old-fashioned bombs, so I'll have more later.

[adam_grif]

If you're going to take up an orbit when you get somewhere, and you want to arrive without having to burn to slow down when you get there, then you have to be going at approximately orbital speeds all the way there. This is slow as frack, and still doesn't mask your thermal emissions, so they can still see you coming from a fair way off if they're scanning the night sky. You don't think getting spotted just from thermally radiating well before weapon range is a significant obstacle to your plans?

[Khoryos]

Who's going in to orbit? I was thinking blitz-style terror bombing raids. As for the thermal emissions themselves, I was thinking something along the lines of thermos flask, or double glazing - multiple, insulated hulls with vacuum between them, radiating excess heat away after the mission is complete/whilst in occlusion.
Also potentially the dropping of MI style cap troopers would be a possibility, depending how rapidly they decelerate in atmosphere.

[Simon_Jester]

As I understand it, the real stealth-killer is that if you want to slow down before you get to your target (say, a planet), you have to fire your exhaust directly at their sensors. The faster you were going, the longer you have to do it for. This is most inconvenient. Going through interstellar space at orbital speeds does not lend itself well to warfare

In addition, your ship is probably much warmer than the cosmic microwave background radiation... which means that it stands out in the infrared or short-wave microwave bands. And since it's a moving IR light source where no light source should be, one that is close enough that it can be shown to be nearby using parallax... you're screwed.

Most attempts to sneak up on someone in space are liable to end in "Fox Two,Splash One." Building your hull like a thermos bottle can only take you so far, after all.

[adam_grif]

Who's going in to orbit? I was thinking blitz-style terror bombing raids. As for the thermal emissions themselves, I was thinking something along the lines of thermos flask, or double glazing - multiple, insulated hulls with vacuum between them, radiating excess heat away after the mission is complete/whilst in occlusion.
Also potentially the dropping of MI style cap troopers would be a possibility, depending how rapidly they decelerate in atmosphere.

The outer hull will still inevitably heat up. Thermos flasks radiate heat, just more slowly. If you're not radiating heat, then the inside is getting hotter, and hotter, and hotter. Is there a computer running? Then the ship is heating up. Is there a crew member aboard? His metabolism is heating the ship up. This has to go somewhere, and it spreads out evenly.

[Khoryos]

I'm not saying it'll be perfect forever, I'm saying it can be built to work for LONG ENOUGH. You slowly bleed heat through the hulls, maybe you use a system of heat exchangers to dump waste heat in specific, jettisonable portions of the ship - it just has to keep temperatures liveable in the crew and troop sections long enough for them to launch their attac, then it doesn't matter.

[Ariphaos]

I'm not saying it'll be perfect forever, I'm saying it can be built to work for LONG ENOUGH. You slowly bleed heat through the hulls, maybe you use a system of heat exchangers to dump waste heat in specific, jettisonable portions of the ship - it just has to keep temperatures liveable in the crew and troop sections long enough for them to launch their attac, then it doesn't matter.

Anything you send to a hostile star system is free resources and intel for your target.

It is insanely hard to crack a star system once it starts building a statite net around its parent star. You are competing with something that has local access to yottawatts of energy, while you on the other hand, have nothing more than what you bring with you.

This sort of thing might be useful for probes, however. If you're only intention is to send intel back, you can keep it cool enough for long enough to penetrate some distance into the enemy's sensor net.

But don't expect to conduct an attack with that sort of idiocy.

[Formless]

And as for the use of asteroids as weapons - Mining them for conventional weapons is all well and good, except that that inevitably leads you into a fair fight.

As opposed to a fight where you start off at an inherent disadvantage because your weapon is a piece of shit? No one is going to let themselves collide with an asteroid, idiot, unless you have it accelerated to relativistic speeds. The very fact that asteroids can be used to destroy biospheres means that they WILL be tracked, and anyone you might want to target with this stupid tactic WILL see it coming from light seconds away LONG before it hits anything.