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Very interesting read.
A few points I would like to make though:
-RKV's are expensive to make, why make them when you can just remain silent? Other civs have buckley's chance of detecting you unless you respond, so just stay quiet and you are completely safe!
-RKV's aren't completely undetectable. The faster and/or heavier they are, the easier they are to detect from relativistic effects.
-And over such large distances we would have plenty of time to intercept the "missile", A lot of time, in fact, millions of years at the very least to prepare from when we first detect it from gravitational lensing.
-As far as I know we are completely undected by the rest of the univers because, as others in this thread have pointed out, our electromagnetic transmissions dissipate into background noise within 50 light years. Even if we wanted to be detected we would have to go to great lengths to make that happen
So yeah I think any other civilizations out there probably wouldn't bother with RKV's, although they would stay quiet just as a precaution.
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Simple oversight by you.
There are two problems with the OP.
First, the difference in technology is going to be great between the two civilizations (either for us or against us) in the sense that it isn't really going to matter wtf we do, one side will have all the chips.
Second, most rational and curious people would rather form some sort of relationship with them, game theory be damned. I know earth would not just wipe out an alien species unless it's survival was knowingly at risk. We'd want to learn from them, study them, attempt to form some sort of symbiotic relationship. Attack would only happen after this. There is no reason to think that an alien race would be any different.
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On January 06 2012 15:07 Mercy13 wrote:Show nested quote +On January 06 2012 14:50 sviatoslavrichter wrote:On January 06 2012 14:44 Mercy13 wrote:On January 06 2012 14:12 Cascade wrote:On January 06 2012 14:03 Mercy13 wrote:
Interesting read, but I think you made at least one big error:
"but if you assume all aliens choose their initial actions upon finding other intelligent life from an equally likely basket of hostile and not-so-hostile actions"
You state this is an assumption but then treat it as a given. It is certainly possible that the portion of aliens choosing the non-hostile portion of the basket significantly outweighs the hostile portion of the basket.
according to the OPs approach it doesnt matter much what proportions there are. Even with a million pacifist hippie civilizations, and only a single shoot-first civilization, evolution will take care of the hippies. All the hippies will encounter the shoot-first eventually, and will die once they do. The shoot-first will expand unhindered, and will eventually take all the universe. So in that case we (earth) may be lucky and run into one (or even several) of the hippies first, but we will always hit the shoot-first eventually, and we are doomed the second we send out strong enough signals to be seen by the shoot-first. edit: oh, now i understand what you refer to. you mean that the statement "first contact will most likely be a RKV" depends on the distributions of strategies among the civilizations. That is ofc true. sorry.  Actually, I think your first point was close to what I was arguing.... I think the OPs approach is wrong in that he/she assumes the proportions don't matter. Using your example, if there are 1M hippy Civs and only one shoot first Civ, it is more likely that a hippy Civ will make first contact with another hippy Civ. And what do hippies do when they first meet? They hook up! As more hippies band together, it becomes more and more difficult for the 1 shoot-first Civ to survive, b/c eventually even hippies will defend themselves. Now, I FULLY realize that this is just blind speculating based on highly imperfect information and many assumptions. However, I would never presume to couch it in game theory : ) How are the hippie civs supposed to talk to one another if each message takes tens of thousands of years to transmit? They are a peculiar species of space plant that lives for 1 million years on average. To them, ten thousand years is naught but the blink of an eye. This is a frivolous example which demonstrates why it is silly to try to apply logic when you are working with highly imperfect information. I did find the OP an interesting read. I just think that if you're going to say that it's logical you're going to have to add a lot more assumptions. Like that there's no long-lived space plants that are perfectly happy to wait 10K years to recieve a message. It's illogical to assume that, by looking at something logically when you have virtually NO information, you will come up with anything approaching an accurate result. Edit: slightly off topic, but I just remembered something the OP might want to discuss. We actually have some evidence of what happened the last time humanity encountered a new species it couldn't communicate with : ) Neandertals anyone? Def. not a reliable proxy for two advanced Civs encountering each other, but still...
Imagine a brain, but instead of nodes in a skull sending electrical signals to each other, you have planets in a galaxy sending signals! A galaxy would be a huge brain, and a single thought would take a million years. The Andromeda galaxy, being only 2.6M light years away, would be close enough to have a chat with the milky way without any communication problems. 
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On January 06 2012 15:02 Cascade wrote:Show nested quote +On January 06 2012 14:44 Mercy13 wrote:
As more hippies band together, it becomes more and more difficult for the 1 shoot-first Civ to survive, b/c eventually even hippies will defend themselves. as I understood it, the point was that speed of light limits also communication speed, so by the time you get the "OH, SHIIIII-" message from your hooked up fellow hippie civilization that is 2 hours from being hit by a RKV, you will have one 2 hours from yourself. Which wont give time for teaming up. But all this is assuming a (near) speed-of-light entire-civilization insta-gib weapon commonly available. So this would be the difference from nuclear war and the OPs model: in nuclear war before you launch (and even after you launch) there is plenty of time for the two sides to talk and make their intentions clear. while with the OPs assumption about almost-light-speed entire-civilization insta-gib, it is enough to say "hi, is anyone out there?" and you will make yourself a target that you can kill without any risk to yourself. In nuclear war, if you fire missiles, the other side sees it and have time to shoot their own, which is a very different scenario. Show nested quote +Now, I FULLY realize that this is just blind speculating based on highly imperfect information and many assumptions. However, I would never presume to couch it in game theory : )
hehe, I wanted more hardcore game theory in the OP. Like coming up with a large set of strategies, and then theorycraft how they'd do vs each other and do Nash equilibrium of it.
Haha, I actually wasn't referring to your long post ealier. After reading the entire OP I didn't feel like reading another lengthy opinion, sorry : ) Tbh I'm not that familiar w/ game theory. I know about the prisoners dilemma, how to find the Nash equilibrium in a simple example, and the rest of the basics. My understanding is that the analysis gets exponentially more complicated for each new variable that is added, so that in a situation like the one descibed by the OP (or for most real world situations for that matter) game theory isn't all that useful. I may be incorrect though.... like I said, I'm no game theory expert. My apologies if you have already addressed this point.
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On January 06 2012 15:17 Mercy13 wrote:Show nested quote +On January 06 2012 15:02 Cascade wrote:On January 06 2012 14:44 Mercy13 wrote:
As more hippies band together, it becomes more and more difficult for the 1 shoot-first Civ to survive, b/c eventually even hippies will defend themselves. as I understood it, the point was that speed of light limits also communication speed, so by the time you get the "OH, SHIIIII-" message from your hooked up fellow hippie civilization that is 2 hours from being hit by a RKV, you will have one 2 hours from yourself. Which wont give time for teaming up. But all this is assuming a (near) speed-of-light entire-civilization insta-gib weapon commonly available. So this would be the difference from nuclear war and the OPs model: in nuclear war before you launch (and even after you launch) there is plenty of time for the two sides to talk and make their intentions clear. while with the OPs assumption about almost-light-speed entire-civilization insta-gib, it is enough to say "hi, is anyone out there?" and you will make yourself a target that you can kill without any risk to yourself. In nuclear war, if you fire missiles, the other side sees it and have time to shoot their own, which is a very different scenario. Now, I FULLY realize that this is just blind speculating based on highly imperfect information and many assumptions. However, I would never presume to couch it in game theory : )
hehe, I wanted more hardcore game theory in the OP. Like coming up with a large set of strategies, and then theorycraft how they'd do vs each other and do Nash equilibrium of it. Haha, I actually wasn't referring to your long post ealier. After reading the entire OP I didn't feel like reading another lengthy opinion, sorry : ) Tbh I'm not that familiar w/ game theory. I know about the prisoners dilemma, how to find the Nash equilibrium in a simple example, and the rest of the basics. My understanding is that the analysis gets exponentially more complicated for each new variable that is added, so that in a situation like the one descibed by the OP (or for most real world situations for that matter) game theory isn't all that useful. I may be incorrect though.... like I said, I'm no game theory expert. My apologies if you have already addressed this point.
No worries, I wasn't referring to my long post either (and I didnt talk about game theory there anyways). I'm not really sure about applications, but I think some versions of game theory can be used in economy for stock market analysis, but I'm not sure... There will for sure be a lot of model dependence if you try to apply game theory to an actual real-word problem.
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On January 06 2012 15:16 Cascade wrote:Show nested quote +On January 06 2012 15:07 Mercy13 wrote:On January 06 2012 14:50 sviatoslavrichter wrote:On January 06 2012 14:44 Mercy13 wrote:On January 06 2012 14:12 Cascade wrote:On January 06 2012 14:03 Mercy13 wrote:
Interesting read, but I think you made at least one big error:
"but if you assume all aliens choose their initial actions upon finding other intelligent life from an equally likely basket of hostile and not-so-hostile actions"
You state this is an assumption but then treat it as a given. It is certainly possible that the portion of aliens choosing the non-hostile portion of the basket significantly outweighs the hostile portion of the basket.
according to the OPs approach it doesnt matter much what proportions there are. Even with a million pacifist hippie civilizations, and only a single shoot-first civilization, evolution will take care of the hippies. All the hippies will encounter the shoot-first eventually, and will die once they do. The shoot-first will expand unhindered, and will eventually take all the universe. So in that case we (earth) may be lucky and run into one (or even several) of the hippies first, but we will always hit the shoot-first eventually, and we are doomed the second we send out strong enough signals to be seen by the shoot-first. edit: oh, now i understand what you refer to. you mean that the statement "first contact will most likely be a RKV" depends on the distributions of strategies among the civilizations. That is ofc true. sorry. Actually, I think your first point was close to what I was arguing.... I think the OPs approach is wrong in that he/she assumes the proportions don't matter. Using your example, if there are 1M hippy Civs and only one shoot first Civ, it is more likely that a hippy Civ will make first contact with another hippy Civ. And what do hippies do when they first meet? They hook up! As more hippies band together, it becomes more and more difficult for the 1 shoot-first Civ to survive, b/c eventually even hippies will defend themselves. Now, I FULLY realize that this is just blind speculating based on highly imperfect information and many assumptions. However, I would never presume to couch it in game theory : ) How are the hippie civs supposed to talk to one another if each message takes tens of thousands of years to transmit? They are a peculiar species of space plant that lives for 1 million years on average. To them, ten thousand years is naught but the blink of an eye. This is a frivolous example which demonstrates why it is silly to try to apply logic when you are working with highly imperfect information. I did find the OP an interesting read. I just think that if you're going to say that it's logical you're going to have to add a lot more assumptions. Like that there's no long-lived space plants that are perfectly happy to wait 10K years to recieve a message. It's illogical to assume that, by looking at something logically when you have virtually NO information, you will come up with anything approaching an accurate result. Edit: slightly off topic, but I just remembered something the OP might want to discuss. We actually have some evidence of what happened the last time humanity encountered a new species it couldn't communicate with : ) Neandertals anyone? Def. not a reliable proxy for two advanced Civs encountering each other, but still... Imagine a brain, but instead of nodes in a skull sending electrical signals to each other, you have planets in a galaxy sending signals! A galaxy would be a huge brain, and a single thought would take a million years. The Andromeda galaxy, being only 2.6M light years away, would be close enough to have a chat with the milky way without any communication problems.
Good one! How about this:
A passive aggressive race has mastered the power of quantum entanglement, which allows them to communicate instantly over extremely long distances. They send a Doomsday Probe to the newly discovered planet Earth, and use it to send real time data back regarding its civilization so they can evaluate whether or not humans are a threat.
The Probe continuosly gathers information relating to such topics as technology, politics, and, unfortunately, popular culture, and sends it back to its alien masters. The human race survives for ~11 milliseconds subsequent to the Probe relaying the latest Justin Bieber song.
I'm not sure what the Nash equilibrium would be in this case, but it would probably involve a preemptive strike against Justin Bieber by US Navy SEALS.
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On January 06 2012 15:15 Selendis wrote:
Very interesting read.
A few points I would like to make though:
-RKV's are expensive to make, why make them when you can just remain silent? Other civs have buckley's chance of detecting you unless you respond, so just stay quiet and you are completely safe!
-RKV's aren't completely undetectable. The faster and/or heavier they are, the easier they are to detect from relativistic effects.
-And over such large distances we would have plenty of time to intercept the "missile", A lot of time, in fact, millions of years at the very least to prepare from when we first detect it from gravitational lensing.
-As far as I know we are completely undected by the rest of the univers because, as others in this thread have pointed out, our electromagnetic transmissions dissipate into background noise within 50 light years. Even if we wanted to be detected we would have to go to great lengths to make that happen
So yeah I think any other civilizations out there probably wouldn't bother with RKV's, although they would stay quiet just as a precaution.
Small asteroids are quite difficult to detect...
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On January 06 2012 15:31 Mercy13 wrote:Show nested quote +On January 06 2012 15:16 Cascade wrote:On January 06 2012 15:07 Mercy13 wrote:On January 06 2012 14:50 sviatoslavrichter wrote:On January 06 2012 14:44 Mercy13 wrote:On January 06 2012 14:12 Cascade wrote:On January 06 2012 14:03 Mercy13 wrote:
Interesting read, but I think you made at least one big error:
"but if you assume all aliens choose their initial actions upon finding other intelligent life from an equally likely basket of hostile and not-so-hostile actions"
You state this is an assumption but then treat it as a given. It is certainly possible that the portion of aliens choosing the non-hostile portion of the basket significantly outweighs the hostile portion of the basket.
according to the OPs approach it doesnt matter much what proportions there are. Even with a million pacifist hippie civilizations, and only a single shoot-first civilization, evolution will take care of the hippies. All the hippies will encounter the shoot-first eventually, and will die once they do. The shoot-first will expand unhindered, and will eventually take all the universe. So in that case we (earth) may be lucky and run into one (or even several) of the hippies first, but we will always hit the shoot-first eventually, and we are doomed the second we send out strong enough signals to be seen by the shoot-first. edit: oh, now i understand what you refer to. you mean that the statement "first contact will most likely be a RKV" depends on the distributions of strategies among the civilizations. That is ofc true. sorry. Actually, I think your first point was close to what I was arguing.... I think the OPs approach is wrong in that he/she assumes the proportions don't matter. Using your example, if there are 1M hippy Civs and only one shoot first Civ, it is more likely that a hippy Civ will make first contact with another hippy Civ. And what do hippies do when they first meet? They hook up! As more hippies band together, it becomes more and more difficult for the 1 shoot-first Civ to survive, b/c eventually even hippies will defend themselves. Now, I FULLY realize that this is just blind speculating based on highly imperfect information and many assumptions. However, I would never presume to couch it in game theory : ) How are the hippie civs supposed to talk to one another if each message takes tens of thousands of years to transmit? They are a peculiar species of space plant that lives for 1 million years on average. To them, ten thousand years is naught but the blink of an eye. This is a frivolous example which demonstrates why it is silly to try to apply logic when you are working with highly imperfect information. I did find the OP an interesting read. I just think that if you're going to say that it's logical you're going to have to add a lot more assumptions. Like that there's no long-lived space plants that are perfectly happy to wait 10K years to recieve a message. It's illogical to assume that, by looking at something logically when you have virtually NO information, you will come up with anything approaching an accurate result. Edit: slightly off topic, but I just remembered something the OP might want to discuss. We actually have some evidence of what happened the last time humanity encountered a new species it couldn't communicate with : ) Neandertals anyone? Def. not a reliable proxy for two advanced Civs encountering each other, but still... Imagine a brain, but instead of nodes in a skull sending electrical signals to each other, you have planets in a galaxy sending signals! A galaxy would be a huge brain, and a single thought would take a million years. The Andromeda galaxy, being only 2.6M light years away, would be close enough to have a chat with the milky way without any communication problems. Good one! How about this: A passive aggressive race has mastered the power of quantum entanglement, which allows them to communicate instantly over extremely long distances. They send a probe to the newly discovered planet Earth, and use it to send real time data back regarding its civilization so they can evaluate whether or not humans are a threat. The probe continuosly gathers information relating to such topics as technology, politics, and, unfortunately, popular culture, and sends it back to its alien masters. The human race survives for ~11 milliseconds subsequent to the probe relaying the latest Justin Bieber song. I'm not sure what the Nash equilibrium would be in this case, but it would probably involve a preemptive strike against Justin Bieber by US Navy SEALS.
:D
FYI: quantum entanglement doesn't work that way. You can't use it to send information. You know that they will measure the same thing you measure, but there is no way to affect their measurement, so no information can be sent. Quantum field theory is not at conflict with special relativity. Actually, consistency with special relativity was a big reason to why it got introduced. But it's getting a bit too far off topic now maybe....
It is indeed very possible that the day "baby" was transmitted the first time was the day we doomed earth to destruction by aliens acting for a greater good. I think that must be regarded as the final conclusion of this thread.
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On January 06 2012 15:46 EtherealDeath wrote:Show nested quote +On January 06 2012 15:15 Selendis wrote:
Very interesting read.
A few points I would like to make though:
-RKV's are expensive to make, why make them when you can just remain silent? Other civs have buckley's chance of detecting you unless you respond, so just stay quiet and you are completely safe!
-RKV's aren't completely undetectable. The faster and/or heavier they are, the easier they are to detect from relativistic effects.
-And over such large distances we would have plenty of time to intercept the "missile", A lot of time, in fact, millions of years at the very least to prepare from when we first detect it from gravitational lensing.
-As far as I know we are completely undected by the rest of the univers because, as others in this thread have pointed out, our electromagnetic transmissions dissipate into background noise within 50 light years. Even if we wanted to be detected we would have to go to great lengths to make that happen
So yeah I think any other civilizations out there probably wouldn't bother with RKV's, although they would stay quiet just as a precaution. Small asteroids are quite difficult to detect...
Not when they are travelling at 0.5c!
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Call me a skeptic, but isn't it a little naive to assume intelligent alien life will even be matter based?
/heads asplode
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Hey, I read these books. The last one being "Star Marines". the Destroyers of the Dawn (or something like that) Go around killing all life. the Humans send a huge starship filled with sand at 99% the speed of light to wipe out one of their planets.
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On January 06 2012 14:52 KaBoom300 wrote:Show nested quote +On January 06 2012 14:41 sviatoslavrichter wrote:On January 06 2012 14:29 KaBoom300 wrote:On January 06 2012 14:12 Cascade wrote:On January 06 2012 14:03 Mercy13 wrote:
Interesting read, but I think you made at least one big error:
"but if you assume all aliens choose their initial actions upon finding other intelligent life from an equally likely basket of hostile and not-so-hostile actions"
You state this is an assumption but then treat it as a given. It is certainly possible that the portion of aliens choosing the non-hostile portion of the basket significantly outweighs the hostile portion of the basket.
according to the OPs approach it doesnt matter much what proportions there are. Even with a million pacifist hippie civilizations, and only a single shoot-first civilization, evolution will take care of the hippies. All the hippies will encounter the shoot-first eventually, and will die once they do. The shoot-first will expand unhindered, and will eventually take all the universe. So in that case we (earth) may be lucky and run into one (or even several) of the hippies first, but we will always hit the shoot-first eventually, and we are doomed the second we send out strong enough signals to be seen by the shoot-first. of course, this is assuming that the hippies do not believe in defending themselves and do not communicate with one another in the slightest, a problem the OP overlooks entirely. A shoot-first civilization might encounter another civilization and attempt to destroy it. But in what is a more likely scenario (there are several hippie civilizations who can and will defend themselves and are allied with each other), after this occurrence the hippie civilizations will immediately begin searching out this hostile civilization and eliminate it. I mean, if you are a super advanced civilization, allied with other super advanced civilization, and you know that somewhere in a certain vicinity of the galaxy is a super advanced civilization who wants to screw with you, you go find them and blow their faces off. Tell me, how do you coordinate when each message you send between each other takes thousands of light years? Alright, let's play this game. How did the civilization firing the RKV even find out about their victims? From some sort of radio transmission that took thousands of years to arrive? And now you are firing an RKV at a planet many light years away, which will take even longer to arrive because the RKV isn't actually travelling the speed of light? Alright that makes sense. There are so many holes in this theory. You talk about how evolution would dictate that civilizations would eliminate each other as they encountered each other, forgetting to apply the argument you just used against me to your own theory. If this civilization encounters another by some sort of transmission, it's guaranteed that by the time you receive that transmission and launch the RKV, and the RKV arrives, that civilization will be incredibly different than it was. If it's a direct encounter (i.e. LOOK AT THAT SPACE SHIP OVER THAR!) Then each civilization is instantly alerted to the other and we now have a stalemate of mutually assured destruction. And remember, all of this is assuming that advanced civilizations have the exact same understanding of RKVs that we do now and don't know how to stop them (LOL)
Actually, a spaceship would show the other species absolutely nothing that can hurt the spacefaring species as a whole. A spaceship does not give away the location of a home planet, nor does it give away the number and position of key colonies. On the contrary, if a spaceship crew does sight another species, standard protocol should be to take note of the position of that planet and relay a message home for immediate RKV launch, then cloak your spaceship and head in the other direction. (Or possible stick around in the outer edges of the star system to go into stasis until the attack is done, then go in and kill all the survivors.)
For the defending civilization, detecting alien spaceship should send it into hyper-alert mode. If your MAD approach is what you want the other side to believe, you will need to broadcast to every civ in your vicinity the ability and willingness of your planet defenders to torture the crew and hack the systems of the incoming exploration craft for the location of the other race's home planet.
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On January 06 2012 15:16 BluePanther wrote:
Simple oversight by you.
There are two problems with the OP.
First, the difference in technology is going to be great between the two civilizations (either for us or against us) in the sense that it isn't really going to matter wtf we do, one side will have all the chips.
Second, most rational and curious people would rather form some sort of relationship with them, game theory be damned. I know earth would not just wipe out an alien species unless it's survival was knowingly at risk. We'd want to learn from them, study them, attempt to form some sort of symbiotic relationship. Attack would only happen after this. There is no reason to think that an alien race would be any different.
The other assumption here is that technological evolution will always follow an exponential progression. What if it doesn't? What if you can't get more high-tech than, say, antimatter rockets and Jupiter brains?
Second, the reason to think they'd be different is that the violent, silent species will, on hte long run, outsurvive the peaceful species...
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On January 06 2012 15:55 Selendis wrote:Show nested quote +On January 06 2012 15:46 EtherealDeath wrote:On January 06 2012 15:15 Selendis wrote:
Very interesting read.
A few points I would like to make though:
-RKV's are expensive to make, why make them when you can just remain silent? Other civs have buckley's chance of detecting you unless you respond, so just stay quiet and you are completely safe!
-RKV's aren't completely undetectable. The faster and/or heavier they are, the easier they are to detect from relativistic effects.
-And over such large distances we would have plenty of time to intercept the "missile", A lot of time, in fact, millions of years at the very least to prepare from when we first detect it from gravitational lensing.
-As far as I know we are completely undected by the rest of the univers because, as others in this thread have pointed out, our electromagnetic transmissions dissipate into background noise within 50 light years. Even if we wanted to be detected we would have to go to great lengths to make that happen
So yeah I think any other civilizations out there probably wouldn't bother with RKV's, although they would stay quiet just as a precaution. Small asteroids are quite difficult to detect... Not when they are travelling at 0.5c!
How would that change things?
EDIT: I'm not a physics expert, I'm sincerely curious
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On January 06 2012 15:15 Selendis wrote:
Very interesting read.
A few points I would like to make though:
-RKV's are expensive to make, why make them when you can just remain silent? Other civs have buckley's chance of detecting you unless you respond, so just stay quiet and you are completely safe!
-RKV's aren't completely undetectable. The faster and/or heavier they are, the easier they are to detect from relativistic effects.
-And over such large distances we would have plenty of time to intercept the "missile", A lot of time, in fact, millions of years at the very least to prepare from when we first detect it from gravitational lensing.
-As far as I know we are completely undected by the rest of the univers because, as others in this thread have pointed out, our electromagnetic transmissions dissipate into background noise within 50 light years. Even if we wanted to be detected we would have to go to great lengths to make that happen
So yeah I think any other civilizations out there probably wouldn't bother with RKV's, although they would stay quiet just as a precaution.
Ooh. What's the gravitational lensing effect? And how does it apply to small objects? I thought it only applied to large objects like black holes.
As for the other points--that's quite true. We are silent right now. But once we set up our first, second, third, Nth space colonies, we, being the liberal, social society that we are, will have to talk. And what then? When we're beaming out comms across light-years, our leakage envelope increases exponentially. How will we protect ourselves?
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On January 07 2012 00:27 sviatoslavrichter wrote:Show nested quote +On January 06 2012 15:55 Selendis wrote:On January 06 2012 15:46 EtherealDeath wrote:On January 06 2012 15:15 Selendis wrote:
Very interesting read.
A few points I would like to make though:
-RKV's are expensive to make, why make them when you can just remain silent? Other civs have buckley's chance of detecting you unless you respond, so just stay quiet and you are completely safe!
-RKV's aren't completely undetectable. The faster and/or heavier they are, the easier they are to detect from relativistic effects.
-And over such large distances we would have plenty of time to intercept the "missile", A lot of time, in fact, millions of years at the very least to prepare from when we first detect it from gravitational lensing.
-As far as I know we are completely undected by the rest of the univers because, as others in this thread have pointed out, our electromagnetic transmissions dissipate into background noise within 50 light years. Even if we wanted to be detected we would have to go to great lengths to make that happen
So yeah I think any other civilizations out there probably wouldn't bother with RKV's, although they would stay quiet just as a precaution. Small asteroids are quite difficult to detect... Not when they are travelling at 0.5c! How would that change things? EDIT: I'm not a physics expert, I'm sincerely curious
When a mass travels at relativistic speed (I think 0,1c to c is considered relativistic speed), it curves spacetime. This is easier to detect than the object itself.
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I have a hard time believing a warlike species is capable of reaching that level of technology before they destroy themselves. Just look at Earth, we're nowhere near any kind of advanced space technology, why? Because we're too busy killing ourselves and our planet.
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On January 07 2012 00:46 Thorakh wrote:
I have a hard time believing a warlike species is capable of reaching that level of technology before they destroy themselves. Just look at Earth, we're nowhere near any kind of advanced space technology, why? Because we're too busy killing ourselves and our planet.
ironically, competition is necessary for development. what better competition is better than war?
evolution by natural selection has creatures developing in specific ways to counter its threats. There were far more innovations during the 50 year Japanese Civil War Period (rise of the peasants, the merchant class, free-market economy, defeudalization) than there were during the peaceful 200 year Tokugawa Shogunate.
Without war, man does not develop: instead they merely stagnate.
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On January 07 2012 00:37 FranzP wrote:Show nested quote +On January 07 2012 00:27 sviatoslavrichter wrote:On January 06 2012 15:55 Selendis wrote:On January 06 2012 15:46 EtherealDeath wrote:On January 06 2012 15:15 Selendis wrote:
Very interesting read.
A few points I would like to make though:
-RKV's are expensive to make, why make them when you can just remain silent? Other civs have buckley's chance of detecting you unless you respond, so just stay quiet and you are completely safe!
-RKV's aren't completely undetectable. The faster and/or heavier they are, the easier they are to detect from relativistic effects.
-And over such large distances we would have plenty of time to intercept the "missile", A lot of time, in fact, millions of years at the very least to prepare from when we first detect it from gravitational lensing.
-As far as I know we are completely undected by the rest of the univers because, as others in this thread have pointed out, our electromagnetic transmissions dissipate into background noise within 50 light years. Even if we wanted to be detected we would have to go to great lengths to make that happen
So yeah I think any other civilizations out there probably wouldn't bother with RKV's, although they would stay quiet just as a precaution. Small asteroids are quite difficult to detect... Not when they are travelling at 0.5c! How would that change things? EDIT: I'm not a physics expert, I'm sincerely curious When a mass travels at relativistic speed (I think 0,1c to c is considered relativistic speed), it curves spacetime. This is easier to detect than the object itself.
Could you determine the trajectory and source of an object using this technique?
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On January 07 2012 01:10 sviatoslavrichter wrote:Show nested quote +On January 07 2012 00:37 FranzP wrote:On January 07 2012 00:27 sviatoslavrichter wrote:On January 06 2012 15:55 Selendis wrote:On January 06 2012 15:46 EtherealDeath wrote:On January 06 2012 15:15 Selendis wrote:
Very interesting read.
A few points I would like to make though:
-RKV's are expensive to make, why make them when you can just remain silent? Other civs have buckley's chance of detecting you unless you respond, so just stay quiet and you are completely safe!
-RKV's aren't completely undetectable. The faster and/or heavier they are, the easier they are to detect from relativistic effects.
-And over such large distances we would have plenty of time to intercept the "missile", A lot of time, in fact, millions of years at the very least to prepare from when we first detect it from gravitational lensing.
-As far as I know we are completely undected by the rest of the univers because, as others in this thread have pointed out, our electromagnetic transmissions dissipate into background noise within 50 light years. Even if we wanted to be detected we would have to go to great lengths to make that happen
So yeah I think any other civilizations out there probably wouldn't bother with RKV's, although they would stay quiet just as a precaution. Small asteroids are quite difficult to detect... Not when they are travelling at 0.5c! How would that change things? EDIT: I'm not a physics expert, I'm sincerely curious When a mass travels at relativistic speed (I think 0,1c to c is considered relativistic speed), it curves spacetime. This is easier to detect than the object itself. Could you determine the trajectory and source of an object using this technique?
I don't know. I'm not an expert in general relativity either :D . I'm interested but not an expert.
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EPT
