I haven’t seen so much effort put into a set in years. This would decent if it wasn’t so damn propogandistic. Of course the message is “communism hates science”.
From the Netflix science-fiction series Three Body Problem
I haven’t seen so much effort put into a set in years. This would decent if it wasn’t so damn propogandistic. Of course the message is “communism hates science”.
From the Netflix science-fiction series Three Body Problem
What really maddens me about Dark Forest is that it absolutely is not easy. You’re trying to build a machine with enough energy to glass a planet that you’re somehow going to launch interstellar distances, with enough delta-v to catch another planet, and enough delta-v for course correction and terminal manuevering, and some kind of hardened control sytems that can survive decades, centuries, or millenia in the deep black, and some kind of power system that can run all of this presumably using magic bc idk what other power system could do all that.
Stembros talk about how they expect to find megastructures like dyson swarms lying around all over interstellar space totally ignoring basic materials science problems like “the materials to do that don’t exist” and basic logistics problems like “why would you ever need or want that much energy?”. They assume everyone is going to decide to strip-mine their solar system to build power generation facilities on a titanic scale, but they never ask what you would do with those facilities or why you would want them. It’s a totally unconsidered faith that people will just do it bc it’s what they think is cool. And they don’t think about what they’d do with it, either. Like great, bro, now you’ve got a Kardahsev One economy. What are you going to do with the entire energy output of a star? And then it’s just star trek babble bc for the most part there isn’t anything to do with it. Maybe if you were trying to run some inconceivably large number of microwaves, but with simple interventions like birth control you won’t arrive at a situation where you have inconceivable numbers of people who need inconceivable numbers of microwaves to heat up inconceivable numbers of burritos.
Soory, went a bit off course. But there seems to be this assumption with techbros that somehow these enormous challenges - how do you keep a space ship functional and intact over the course of years, decades, centuries, or millenia as you fling it at another planet? - will turn out to be trivial. It’ll turn out that balling up some enormous amount of mass an energy and sticking a guidance system on it that will either function without repair or flawlessly self-repair for an indefinite period of time isn’t a big deal.
And by the same notion, the “problem” of the Fermi Paradox is that obviously everyone else would want to do what I, a 20th century Euro, wants to do and conquer the entire universe by sending small robots to build small robots to build small robots forever, for no real reason, that would never benefit me or anyone else.
It’s like “well, these things are technically feasible (debatable) so obviously people will do them!” Never stopping to consider if the things are practical or desirable or what they would accomplish.
Even asteroid mining and planetary colonisation right now is like that. Why? What are you even going to do with a billion extra tons of iron and platinum? We don’t need it for anything, and anything you did build with it would probably be a complete ecological disaster. No one actually wants to live in space. It sucks up there, and it’s all dead rock with nothing to see or do.
I sincerely believe that the way modern westerners look at space - “The Last Frontier” , a literal frontier for colonial and imperial expansion, is silly cultural bs that obscures not only how difficult space exploitation is, but how utterly useless it is.
People just grossly underestimate how much energy it would take to legitimately blow up a planet. Like, launching a moon-sized asteroid straight to the Earth isn’t enough to blow up the Earth. And there’s a flip side to this where people also underestimate how much aliens would have to do to end (vertebrate) life on Earth. All they have to do is nuke a critical mass of metropolitan areas for a massive firestorm that blankets the Earth with smoke to form. They don’t really need sci-fantasy tech to end (vertebrate) life.
I feel like people assuage their very rational fears of nuclear holocaust by coming up with fanciful how-Earth-can-be-destroyed scenarios (what if a giant space station shoot a giant laser, what if a mass of self-replicating nanobots reach Earth, what if a parasitic species that can mind-control humans invade Earth, what if the Earth gets sucked into an artificial black hole) and assuring themselves that since these are all obviously fantasy, there’s no real way for humans to be wiped out.
But even with nukes - You can’t just shoot a bunch of hot off the shelf nukes hundreds of years through space. By the time the nuclear material arrived it’d be massively degraded. You’d have to shoot your entire nuclear weapon production infrastructure to the Sol system, then process the nuclear material and assemble the nukes when you were only a dozenish years away. So now you’ve got not just a couple of hundred or thousand missiles, but the facilities to manufacture and install the cores for all of those weapons, the materials necessary to manufacture all the unstable fuel for those weapons, all kinds of things. So many of these ideas are premised entirely on fanfciful hyper-tech or just completely forgetting that stuff falls apart over long periods of time being bombarded by gamma rays.