Hacker News Reader

In what way are they potential civilization destroyers?

Reactionless drives allow for fairly trivial civilization ending kinetic weapons.

So does any other source of thrust.

Energy in space is nearly free, due to solar. The rocket equation makes reaction mass incredibly expensive.

If you get rid of the reaction mass requirement, accelerating a superheavy object to a horrendous velocity takes time instead of a steady stream of resources.

Here's more from someone with way more citations than me: https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/reactionlessdr...

If this becomes widespread we will just Iron Dome the whole Earth. But it's worth noting that we could have already ended civilization but haven't.

And the people in charge of not having done so are pretty stupid in other areas, so there's that.

Dark Forest?

To explain: That book had a civilisation ending kinetic weapon

Reply on news.ycombinator.com