More or less today’s technology could not accelerate tungsten to speeds that would obliterate a planet.
And you say it’s trivial? Who told you this?
Just run some calculations it doesn’t make sense.
(just one example, 10,000lbs of tungsten hitting the earth at 99% of light speed would not destroy it)
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it is trivial for us to end their civilization. If we decided to, with more or less today’s technology, we could accelerate a chunk of tungsten to comical speeds and obliterate their homeworld. It would cost a fortune and it would take awhile, but we could do it.
0.99c of blueshift coming from a specific star's direction? Weird. Shoot a couple relatively slow BBs at it, and the projectile will vaporize itself around the Kuiper Belt.
Poor guys. They've now announced to the universe that they're an aggressive threat to all life around them…
I mean, the planet would exist, but it wouldn’t exactly be capable of sustaining life any more.
The ecosphere will be fine. You'll probably vaporize a small patch of ocean, and they'll get colorful sunsets for a couple days. But that's about it.
By contrast, assuming "more or less today's technology", we're now out of petroleum reserves because we used them all in our magic instant-acceleration kinetic-energy-converter.
And my example was only 99% light speed.
At the link below you can see simulations at 99.9% light speed. An entire Egyptian pyramid, hitting Earth at this 10x higher speed, might kill off life, but it’s still not obliterating the planet.
We are not capable of accelerating any macroscopic object to .999C. Let alone a huge piece of tungsten, which still wouldn’t be powerful enough.
This includes near-term technology like fusion reactors. You could take Jupiter along for fuel but still not reaching 99% of light speed. For stationary launchers, they would be super long or require enormous amounts of energy. Giant arrays of lasers aren't "possible with current technology".
Relativistic projectiles probably requires antimatter. Which are pretty far beyond our technology. There is big question is antimatter rockets are possible, they require producing and containing a lot of antimatter. Although, it instead of accelerating super fast, it is probably easier to send the antimatter.
So, why would we go so blindly for option 3 and risk it all by being the first ones to defect in an interstellar prisoner's dilemma? Especially if we have good reasons to suspect that they've known about us for long and have remained neutral so far. After all, Proxima Centauri is quite close, and our atmosphere gives ample signals of there being life here. And we haven't been particularly quiet either.
I haven't delved deep into this, so there might be some much more tight logic to it. But my first impression is that the dark forest hypothesis seems a bit forced; sort of constructed backwards in order to explain a cool idea (that space is full of civilizations but everyone is quiet).
For example, one of the assumptions it makes is that obliterating another space-faring civilization is easy. And, at the same time, that we (and everyone) have very little information of other civilizations. I don't see how these two assumptions can hold at the same time.
And it’s just like, that’s such a colonizer mentality, trying to game out a completely unknown society and immediately focusing on threats, technology, and destruction.
I wonder, what are they like? What could we learn from them? Why are we assuming all beings are violent like us? Does it really make sense to immediately obliterate a culture you’ve never even seen? I seriously doubt it. You could send probes, spies, and try to covertly learn about them. You could send envoys, without revealing your origin, and try to gain knowledge from first contact. You may learn there is no threat, and a great deal to be discovered.
What if they had medicine which could cure every disease? Energy generators which could save our planet? What if they were simply peaceful beings with a rich beautiful history, and no desire or capacity to harm us?
The threat/destruction paradigm feels so simplistic, impoverished, and brutal.
Of course I wonder these same things. But when the consequences of becoming known to the wrong civilization are inevitable destruction, what are your alternatives?
We very nearly killed ourselves (we still might!) with nuclear weapons because we thought the other side might shoot first. This is that taken to an even further extreme: we won’t even know if we’ve been shot at until it’s far too late to do anything about it. We likely wouldn’t ever even know who sent the damn thing in the first place.
The balance of things is that silent civilizations with caveman-level technology are more than capable of wiping out noisy and naïve technologically-advanced civilizations.
You can wonder all you like about who and what these beings are and what wonders they must know of, and absolutely none of that will matter when a tungsten rod turns the planet into a fireball because you made the mistake of sending up a signal flare without having any idea that it was safe to do so.
One in a thousand civilizations could be paranoid enough to sterilize other spacefaring civilizations and it would be reason enough to be very, very quiet.
This is the presupposition that seems entirely baseless to me. An explanation has been constructed that comes to this as the only conclusion, but the assumptions in the explanation seem themselves to come from nothing. I think this is what often called "projection". Human beings are a violent creature that destroys others, so we assume these alien creatures must be. But they are aliens. We presently know nothing about aliens. My view is that we should interrogate the assumptions that lead us to your brutal conclusion. Projection of our own fears is insufficient to make the right choice.
Another question to reflect on: Why do you not destroy every person you come in contact with? They could likely kill you if they tried. But more so than legal consequences, you simply feel no desire to do so. There are reasons for your feeling that way.
PBS Space Time discussed these 3 options and more recently.
We wipe out their planets, then the 99% of their civilisation that isn't living on planets wipes out our planets. Now we have two very angry civilisations (without planets) in a protracted interstellar war. Great.
Many of these arguments seem to work equally well for France nuking Britain.
How is that energy expenditure going to be not noticeable to aliens?
For the sake of argument let’s say we become aware of another intelligent civilization on a rocky body orbiting Proxima Centauri. They are, virtually by definition, apex predators on their homeworld. We cannot know their intentions should they learn about us.
Meanwhile, it is trivial for us to end their civilization. If we decided to, with more or less today’s technology, we could accelerate a chunk of tungsten to comical speeds and obliterate their homeworld. It would cost a fortune and it would take awhile, but we could do it. Certainly it would be orders of magnitude easier than getting humans there, setting up any sort of interstellar trade, or working to understand each other’s language and culture. And nobody at the receiving end would be the wiser until their planet essentially ceased to exist one day.
I’m not saying we want to. But we could. And importantly, they could do the same to us.
Do we:
1. Loudly announce ourselves, gambling our entire civilization that they aren’t aggressive, paranoid, misunderstand us at some point and take grave offense, realize we have a nicer planet than they do, or find some other reason to become openly hostile.
2. Shut the fuck up and hope they don’t catch our leaked radio signature from before we knew any better.
3. Strike first, just to be safe. Better us than them.
If we think that any other civilization might decide to open door number three, the calculus tilts sharply in favor of doing it first ourselves. Or at the very least going with the second option and investing a hell of a lot of money into figuring out how to detect, intercept, and redirect relativistic kill vehicles.
It doesn’t even have to be the Centauris in this scenario who are evil or paranoid. They could be just as hopelessly naïve as us and happily engage in a mutually beneficial back-and-forth. Meanwhile the Sirians (who have been quietly observing from the sidelines) one day fire off a pair of surprise care packages to the both of us, before we can get big enough to potentially threaten them and their way of life.