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Comment by douglaswlance | Hacker News Reader

If we assume alien life in the universe is predatory and seeks to consume other life forms, and since the universe allows detection from other species over infinite distances and time scales, we would expect life in the universe to either be totally undetectable or else be consumed by life that is totally undetectable.

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That's not a great starting assumption. How would the economics of travelling hundreds or thousands of light years in order to "consume" (whatever that means) other life forms work out? What is the benefit? How would it be worth the investment?

If you are talking about a dark forest then it is more opf the idea that any other sufficiently advanced civilization would simply destroy you as soon as you are known to them rather than attempting to consume any potential resources you have as that isn't economical. The most economical thing could be as simple as sending a small object at light speed through your sun to cause a supernova.

This eliminates you as a potential threat and you have no chance to use other limited resources outside of that system.

While your main point stands, I doubt that crashing even a moderately sized planetoid into a star at any achievable speed would do much to that star. It definitely wouldn't cause a normal supernova.

You might be able to produce some nasty radiation/ionized crap/relativistic debris that would be unpleasant for that greenish scum clinging to some of the planets, but it'd be a really expensive way to do even that.

Sure, if you get close enough to C, you can deliver as much energy as you want, but you're probably going to use the energy of several stars to get a small object going fast enough to deposit a really destructive amount of energy into a single star.

Efficiency is part of finesse...

At least as far as our current understanding of physics it is probably not possible to accelerate an object to the actual speed of light, but who knows if there is some kind of universe hack that we don't know of.

maybe not a planet but a mini blackhole tugged by a small ship at high velocity to crash into your sun and turn it into a proper black-hole with accretion disc and the works would do some serious damage to you as a species.

personally I'd go for something like a nanobot gray goo thing that infects & turns everything it touches in a given gravity well. then send over a bunch of ships to wipe out remaining stragglers.

That could very well be true but it's a bold assumption indeed.

Bold and odd. I read Under the Skin. Excellent and innovative sci fi, but nobody goes that far and spends that much even for a Kobe beef burger. Even here on bloody barbaric Earth, weapons exist mainly to keep trade from being disrupted and the largest military has an environmental compliance department.

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