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Comment by SideburnsOfDoom | Hacker News Reader

The article says

> it conceives of every civilization in the universe as a hunter hiding in a moonless woodland, listening for the first rustlings of a rival.

How about

> it conceives of every civilization in the universe as a hunter hiding in a moonless woodland, listening for the first rustlings of another. The hunters are strangers who do not trust each other (or even have a language in common), so can respond with long dangerous negotiations to establish good intent, or with a swift bullet. Everyone knows this, and acts accordingly. The stable state is pre-emptive strikes, zero trust, maximum hostility.

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This is a very "me vs them" individual bias vision. It assumes every individual civilization can take another with a "single" obliterating bullet like some street gang conflict.

In practice we are ant colonies in that dark forest. Unless you can understand enough the rumblings of another civilization, you don't know how far they've expanded. They may have fully functional, fast replicating colonies in one of the trillions of Oort cloud objects and you just pissed them off by trashing their historical sites.

We could go insane hypothesizing destruction on light-years bubble scales, but then you can rest assured other civilizations are now aware of your existence and will take note of your undesirable quality as neighbor.

A good answer, though I am merely summarising what I understand of Liu Cixin's argument.

Yes, across interstellar distances, a single strike with a very high velocity object might take out a planetary civilisation before they could react. But as you say, that might not be enough.

It's even worse than "you don't know how far they've expanded", even a fast strike from nearby on the cosmic scale can take hundreds of years, and you can't know how far they will have expanded by then.

Same (I'm GGP)

I think it also makes a lot of assumptions about the nature of interstellar warfare - mainly that against a single-system enemy, attacks are quick and destructive enough - and hard enough to defend against - to destroy all ability to retaliate with high certainty. A sort of MAD gone wrong, with an attacker not having to even worry about the possibility of a second strike by the more resilient elements of enemy forces.

The addendum is that Liu believed it would be very difficult for, if not impossible, for a civilization to hold together across a long enough distance. This was shown when the original interception ships floated far enough and started attacking each other, throwing out pre-emptive strikes when communications broke down and resources were needed.

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