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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

I think he's thinking along the lines of Charles Pellegrino in _The Killing Star_. When we can command the technology and the vast energies it would take to travel to other stars, wiping out planetary or solar-system wide civilizations in a single bombardment becomes relatively easy.

Other starfaring intlligences may well decide to do unto us before we do unto them.

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relatively easy

You could do it with 1960s computers and whatever Sci-fi Magic propulsion system your probe needs to get from system to system. Find a big asteroid. Accelerate it into the orbit of the planet at, oh, .01c should be plenty. What is the planet going to do, roll a natural twenty to dodge?

Couldn't they just manage a simple rocket to knock the fucker out of orbit? Like you said, .01c should be plenty to avert disaster.

There's no conventional or nuclear way to generate enough directed energy to push a decently sized asteroid, on a straight course for the planet and within a reasonable distance of it, away.

An asteroid with a diameter of 2 km and a density of 1 ton/m^3 weighs ~410^9 kg. Travelling at 0.01c, it has a kinetic energy of ~410^22 J, or ~100 times the current worldwide energy production per year.

Of course deflecting it doesn't require you to fully stop it, but it's closing in fast and you need a strong sideways push to accelerate it fast enough to end up with enough speed to miss the planet. If we ever see an reasonably sized asteroid with reasonable speed on a collision course, we're as doomed as if we hadn't seen it.

"Ever" is a long time!

Actually there is - like most technology it all scales up, and if it happens you bet we'd all be in factories churning out nukes/rockets if we had to. If you do the numbers, sure it comes out big, but 4 billion kg is not really that much - especially compared to the production capacity of 6 billion people over a couple of days. We could produce the required energy to move it by collectively winding handles let alone manufacturing nukes.

Besides that impending death is an excellent motivator.

Yeah but the real problem is spotting it in time. The sky is really big.

If the projectiles are relativistic, then warning could only be a few days or even a few hours ahead of time. Even relativistic impactors are unnecessary. Low albedo impactors coming in from angles far off the ecliptic would be exceedingly hard to spot.

It's not a question of mass but velocity.

.01 * the speed of light = 2,997,924.58 m / s

1kg traveling at 2,997,924.58 m / s = 6,706,166.29 mph. At that speed it has the same kinetic energy as ~10,000,000,000 kg traveling 67mph.

In _The Killing Star_ advance probes locate almost every settlement in the Solar System and every one is hit with relativistic projectiles. Earth itself is blanketed with an entire grid of such impactors -- from opposite directions, so the whole surface is bombarded. 99.9% of humanity dies in the space of several hours.

Since the projectiles are relativistic, there is no warning.

Of course aliens could do that, but would they? The evidence so far says that humans in possession of a superweapon, at least, don't annihilate one another simply because of the possible threat of superweapon acquisition posed by the other - otherwise we would have annihilated the Russians and/or Chinese in the 40s and early 50s.

At any rate one would think that aliens would at least understand the concept of mutually assured destruction and realize that we would not destroy them if they were capable of retaliating in kind...

The premise of _The Killing Star_ is that relativistic weapons wielded by star faring civilizations can make first strike the only viable opition. If you can't see them coming, and if they can wipe you out with the first strike, then there is no Mutual Assured Destruction. There's only a first mover advantage of apocalyptic proportions.

No warning + no survivors = no retaliation = no MAD.

Also, the historical evidence is that we've been dangerously close to nuclear war on too many occasions for comfort.

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