LogFAQs > #949780655

Aristoph posted...

No, of course we couldn't remove our already-sent signals. They're out there, and there's nothing we can do about it. At this point, our only hope is that either nobody notices them or the dark forest theory is wrong. The RKM doesn't have anything to do with the signals. They're for killing the planets/systems the signals are coming from. If somebody spots us and wants to shut us up, they just send a small hunk of mass in our direction, slowly accelerating the whole way. By the time it reaches us, it's going a significant fraction of light-speed. It'd be too small and dark for us to see it on approach, and when it hits Earth we're just gone. Simple, cheap, and should be relatively easy for a proper interstellar civilization. Pretty much zero defense against it, too.

Nobody noticing our signals is more likely than you might think, though. The further away they get from Earth, the weaker they are and the higher the signal-to-noise ration becomes. At some distance, it would become pretty much impossible to discern our radio signals from just random background noise.

That's an interesting and good point about the radio signals.

Gotcha. So it's like the Heinlein's Starship Troopers approach to galactic battle? The only problem with that, and this was the only problem I had with the Heinlein book, is that "a small hunk of mass" would take hundreds if not thousands of years to get here so it would take an extreme amount of forethought and ungodly precision to attack us that way. Like you said, space is fucking huge.


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There is no good. There is no evil. There just is.