If resource are scarce, destroying stars and planets seems counterproductive. Why not just colonize as the Trisolarans made steps to do to Earth?
All of this kind of sci-fi is just projecting earthbound colonialism/imperialism motives built around the profit motive and resource scarcity and power out into a universe where none of that makes sense. They're good stories by analogy but have nothing to do with the "reality" of the future-worlds they purport to describe.
In living memory a gig internet plan would have seemed like an effectively unlimited resource in a world of 56k modems. YouTube and Netflix couldn't have even been a PoC when everyone was using AOL 2.5. I fully expect there to be ground breaking changes in my lifetime to the Internet if we get for instance speeds capable of downloading the equivalent of the entire Internet today.
We don't know what other forms of life might do, but when humans have the ability to effectively consume a resource we push and find new ways to consume it all to make our lives better. Today we are only thinking of slowing progress (but definitely not stopping )on Earth because we seem to be making the planet unliveable eventually. If we begin colonizing other planets I don't see why we wouldn't continue the trend and end up in a galaxy where every liveable planet is populated and used like in Foundation eventually if there isn't some other form of life pushing back like in 3 Body. If we don't need to actually live on the planet we would likely accelerate the resources usage.
The estimate for gold in the universe is 50B tons.
There's 550B tons of organic matter on earth - I'm assuming most of that being plant mass.
And that's if you're certain Earth is the only planet in the entire universe that has organic life.
That is a wild underestimate. Our galaxy alone has around 100 million Earths worth of gold [1].
[1] https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/astronomers-ta...
But I see there's an estimate that there's more gold than that just in our Sun.
> It is estimated that the amount of gold present in the entire universe is about 50 billion tons, with about one ounce for every 150 billion tons of Earth.
According to Alexander Budianto on quora[2] the earth is ~6.58310^21 tons ~ 710^21
710^21/(15010^9) / 10^9 = 46 billion
So that is ~46 billion ounces of gold on earth, rounded up 50 billion. Maybe that is where they obtained 50 billion from?
[1] https://www.zmescience.com/feature-post/natural-sciences/che...
[2] https://www.quora.com/How-much-is-the-mass-of-the-earth-in-t...
This estimate is off by many orders of magnitude.
50B tons seems like a suspiciously low number even just within our own galaxy.
My layman understanding of Astrophysics is that we understand things up to Iron pretty well. Beyond that there is a lot of conjecture.
I've never heard it explained very well, the best I can find is a 40 year old PBS show. Thanks to Virginia Trimble.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/did-neutron-stars-or-supernov...
...one supernova can produce 7.4e22 kg of gold (the moon's mass), while a neutron star to neutron star collision can produce 1.9e27 kg of gold (a Jupiter's mass worth). 50e9 tons is 4.6e13 kg.
The issue of course is that most of that gold is at the center of the Earth, not accessible to us.
So that's not 50B tons per universe, but rather, per rocky Earth-type planet.
That's the claim in the linked article.
Just stick with destroying life bearing planets. Over 99% of the matter in the Solar System is in the Sun.
Why not just colonize as the Trisolarans made steps to do to Earth?
If one is technologically advanced enough to move to the next star system 4 LY away in a huge generation ship fleet, one is advanced enough to build O'Neil cylinder space colonies and dominate the solar system. Going after Earth makes no sense.
And that was just one possible weapon, used by one possible species, I think?
You're right on the rest, which makes me wonder why bother going through any of the rest of this instead of just making everything two-dimensional the moment you invent the technology in order to wipe everyone else out from the get go. I guess the reason not to is that this wouldn't stop new 2D species from evolving and eventually threatening you, so it's better to only use on an as needed basis. But if that's the case, then it's better to actually look into whether a species is capable of threat (physically or psychologically) or not before striking them.
There was a lot in those books that wasn't fully thought out, imo. In general, I thought the first book was good and interesting, especially the bits about Chinese history & culture, but overall I think the concepts have been done better, by better authors.
It feels a little bit like Harry Potter. It was a lot of people's first exposure to something (for HP, reading, for DF, science fiction) and so it'll forever have this nice feeling of nostalgia, and I'm glad they got to read something and enjoy it - but if you start looking at the details, things begin to not quite add up, things don't quite make sense, and the internal world-building begins to show its seams quite heavily.
> why bother going through any of the rest of this instead of just making everything two-dimensional the moment you invent the technology in order to wipe everyone else out from the get go.
My understanding from the book is that life is impossible in two dimensions; the people using these weapons are permanently poisoning the universe, presumably under the assumption that their species won't last long enough to deal with the consequences.
I recall that alien species specifically talking about making the transition to 2D. And that the gunner who used the weapon against Earth speculated that this is what their own government figures had decided to do (otherwise the gunner's superior wouldn't have signed off so readily on use of the weapon). I.e. it takes an advanced technology to make life possible in 2D, but it isn't impossible.
It may have been slower, but I'm not sure why it would be or what the mechanism was. Regardless, it had the effect of consuming the entire system didn't it? As you say, it was deployed with reckless disregard for the fate of spacetime itself as it was irreversible and unstoppable, that's the important part.
Could be that other species had more targeted tools, but to me the implication was that Dark Forest Theory basically encourages an overwhelming and rapid response, so taking more time/effort to specifically target a planet is disincentivized on pain of extinction.
I think the books obliquely addressed this by having one of the major civilizations mention a comparable civilization that was its antagonist. But even so, subjugation or incorporation of other intelligent species shouldn't have been impossible.
Resources aren't scarce, they're just finite. If there are 19 uninhabited systems for every inhabited one, it may seam reasonable to obliterate 5% of systems if it helps you control the other 95%.
The theory is that any civilization can become as powerful as you are and then you are at constant threat of first strike attack.
So you need to first strike before they will ever get that chance.
You cannot make an assumption about other side. They can be pacifists or a hive mind with no morals.
> Why not just colonize
Why bother, you are already star destroying apex species.
Trisolarans were relatively low tech civ in the book.
In the book and theory of dark forest only most ruthless civs will survive. Civ that will make contact with others might thrive for a while, until they get discovered by ruthless civ.
The other issue is you could meet a perfectly sane looking alien civilization, but lose track of them, and before you check in again (say after 100 years) they could be a completely different civilization. Just imagine if the USA can go from far Obama to Trump in a year (or a day), how far you might get in 100 years.
Combine the high latency communications and impossible defense against a good offense (near light speed weapons) leads to the dark forest hypothesis.
If your civilization can annihilated in a single strike, the only civilizations that survive have the strategy to a) avoid being detected and b) destroy anyone who has detected them (which results in destroying everyone, to eliminate uncertainty).
The idea being that assuming the actual survival of your species is at the top of your moral pyramid, all kinds of atrocities in its defense are justifiable.