>Any alien race with technology to reach Sol will also have superior technology to defend themselves.

Actually I was surprised to find this isn't _strictly_ true, but it is likely.

One possibility is other solar systems (far away) with a different blend of materials that make certain advancements "easier". One hypothetical example is a far away solar system having high quantities of "exotic" stable super-heavy elements that make things like FTL possible.

In such a scenario we wouldn't discover it because it's not naturally occurring in our solar system, and we wouldn't stumble on it until we built a large enough particle accelerator. So another race could be _way_ ahead of us with respect to FTL, but way behind us in things like material science or computers. Imagine if their solar system was completely missing say... silicon.

I bet the mentats never saw that AIM9X coming. See what happens when you destroy all of your thinking machines?

> Sol

It's called the solar system. "Sol" is not an official name.

That’ll change at some point, and it’s difficult to make a case for a better name.

I like Helios better.

You might be interested to know that Sōl is Latin for Sun and has also come to refer to our solar system.

Is the Sun (the actual star) not also known as "Sol"?

I've never really thought about it before, but I'm not sure if "The Sun" actually has an officially sanctioned name! I'll accept "Sol", and "The Sol System". I'll also accept "Helios/The Helios System", or the "Terran System" to refer to our entire Solar System. And I'm sure many different cultures have their own term. But in terms of science/academia, I'm not sure that it has an official name. Looks like the IAU (International Astronomical Union) hasn't given it a sanctioned designation. [0] [1] [2]

[0] https://earthsky.org/space/what-is-the-suns-name/

[1] https://www.iau.org/public/themes/naming/

[2] List of IAU Solar System Objects, Exoplanets, Starts, and Stellar Streams https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CEXGyancLRtHyPW7u0L_...

In Swedish the sun is literally called Sol (or solen in its definite form)

> Names Sun, Sol /ˈsɒl/,[1] Sól, Helios /hiːliəs/[2]

Also el sol (es), o sol (pr), il sole (it), le soleil (fr), etc.

Technically the IAU hasn't sanctioned an official name, but Sol is fairly well understood.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun

https://earthsky.org/space/what-is-the-suns-name/

Our first interstellar probes are unlikely to be able to destroy a fighter jet. They'll likely be similar to and just as fragile as the probes we use in our own solar system: https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/initiative/3

And those first interstellar probes may have arrived a long time ago.

Aliens doesn’t mean tip of the spear of an alien invasion force. Could just be some alien scientists who managed to scrape together a bit of grant money sending out cheap disposable probes to various systems to collect data.