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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32319 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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What would be the signs of the elites believing in aliens?

If the top of society believed in aliens, we would notice a few changes. The obvious first move if we are in real risk of an invasion would be aiming more sensors towards space. We would need far more telescopes, satellites observing other bodies in our solar systems and antennas. Astronomy is a miniscule portion of the global economy and ramping it up Manhattan project style could greatly increase capacity within a decade or two. We wouldn't even need investments that would account for 0.01% of global GDP to completely change the roadmap for telescope construction. Instead, the 30 meter telescope in Hawaii is getting delayed in endless legal processes.

Defending a solar system is far easier than attacking one. Even at relativistic speeds it takes decades to get here. There is no hiding in space, and hitting dust particles with a large ship at 10% of light speed will make the ship glow brightly. Sci-Fi often presents aliens as magical, but they would be bound by the same laws of nature as we are. Slowing down from relativistic speeds requires immense amounts of energy. Hitting a small metal object at relativistic speeds is equivalent to being nuked. At 10% of light speed, a tungsten rod is 30 000 km away one second before impact. Launching swarms of weapons at them would realistically be able to destroy an enemy ship.

If we are facing an alien invasion in the coming decades, we would see far greater investments in launch capacity. The SLS program was delayed and not exactly managed as a project critical to the survival of all life on the planet. The European Space Agency is meandering along with the Ariane 6. We aren't seeing the capacity to put large numbers of nukes in orbit. We aren't seeing a race to build a rail gun on the moon to launch volumes of munitions at high speed toward an enemy armada.

If the world leaders truly believed the aliens were here, NASA wouldn't be struggling with a budget 2.5% the size of the US militaries.

Defending a solar system is far easier than attacking one. Even at relativistic speeds it takes decades to get here. There is no hiding in space, and hitting dust particles with a large ship at 10% of light speed will make the ship glow brightly. Sci-Fi often presents aliens as magical, but they would be bound by the same laws of nature as we are. Slowing down from relativistic speeds requires immense amounts of energy. Hitting a small metal object at relativistic speeds is equivalent to being nuked. At 10% of light speed, a tungsten rod is 30 000 km away one second before impact. Launching swarms of weapons at them would realistically be able to destroy an enemy ship.

I think this is backwards.

Offense is easier than defense in space. A large tungsten rod could be lobbed at earth from outside the solar system going at 10% of the speed of light and we would have almost no chance of seeing it or being able to prevent it from hitting by the time we did see it. The Earth is on a predictable trajectory and cannot dodge. Hell if you don't want to bring your own Tungsten rods you can just use asteroids.

Spaceships do not have to be on a predictable trajectory. They can theoretically dodge lasers traveling at the speed of light.

Space is big and hitting an object that does not have a consistent velocity is basically impossible.

While throwing heavy objects at earth would be an effective strategy, Earth is large. We also have an atmosphere that would burn off some energy from projectiles. An object moving at 10% of light speed would be farily bright. The solar system isn't empty and hitting gas particles at 10% of light speed causes a sizeable bang. Meanwhile we have a whole planet full of capacity to lob stuff toward the enemy.

As for changing orbits it requires energy. Slowing down from those high speeds would require extreme energy and a large part of the enemy ship would consist of fuel and material for the rocket used to slow them down. Accelerating the ship in other directions to preform evasive maneuvers would consume additional fuel. Space ships don't fly like fighter jets. There is a reason why rockets are giant gas tanks with a tiny capsule on top.

With that said it would depend on our ability to fight back with a sizeable force, the efficiency of their engines, the size of their force and the capacity of their counter measures. We would be at a technological disadvantage.

We are not the first people to think about this topic. I've read lots of hard sci Fi, and they all agree planetary defense is near impossible.

Dodging objects is the only real defense in space battles. Even if you can spot an object it does not mean you can impart enough energy on that object to stop it in time.

If a spaceship is past Jupiter it's about one light hour away. At that distance a 1mph change in a direction means they can dodge a laser by a mile. Lasers aren't particularly effective, but they are the fastest weapon, so if you can't hit something with a laser you can't hit it with a bullet. A 1mph change in velocity is nothing for something capable of crossing interstellar distances.

But all of that is moot. If you can cross interstellar distances you can probably calculate orbital mechanics. The earth has a predictable path through space. There is no need to even enter the solar system. They could lob objects at us from light years away. And they don't have to follow the orbital plane where all the convenient gas and dust is. The north and south pole are valid targets for an object with enough mass or speed.

, NASA wouldn't be struggling with a budget 2.5% the size of the US militaries.

NASA was never the real space program.

The real space program has always been the NRO.

We aren't seeing a race to build a rail gun on the moon to launch volumes of munitions at high speed toward an enemy armada.

Minor quibble.

Were aliens real, which we could only know by having seen them up close, that'd mean it'd be already too late to resist because anyoen capable of interstellar travel would have AI and replicators, so perfectly able of outproducing Earth in material within a few years given the right minerals. Of which there's plenty out there.

Also, anyone capable of interstellar travel would have no actual reasons to conquer us unless they preserved some completely atavistic instinct for conquest or had religious reasons (enlightening barbarians?). And I don't think preservation of such instinct is likely. People largely self-domesticated themselves and gradually got less violent and adventuring due to civilization.

it'd be already too late to resist because anyone capable of interstellar travel would have AI and replicators,

No, it would be too late because they would have access to interstellar travel.

As much as rationalists like to treat them as a bogey man, fact is that AGI and replicators are a relatively trivial capability (pun intended) compared to being able to bypass fundamental laws of physics.

That said there is the possibility we're living in the Path not Taken timeline where space-time manipulation is actually really simple and humans as a species were just too autistic to figure it out and thus invented radio, radar, and nuclear weapons instead.

compared to being able to bypass fundamental laws of physics.

If you don't age, travel at 1% of lightspeed is doable, easily.

Obviously comparing a theoretical extraterrestrial species with Earth life has plenty of inherent issues, but looking at the handful of species that (at least seem to) experience biological immortality, the most complex is a jellyfish. At least in Earth life it would appear that there might be something incompatible between complex life forms and biological immortality.

There are a few higher animals whose organisms do not break down with age.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negligible_senescence#In_vertebrates

That's a very laconic 'if', and as the old SB.com gag goes, for any value of "how many X would it take to beat Y" the answer is "1 at sufficient velocity."

That's not even the point. 1% of the speed of light is achievable, but in any case people don't observe ayys in space, so the idea that they'd have to cover some interstellar void in some "reasonable" time is a mere conjecture. UFOs that figure in these reports allegedly move at tens of Ma. But they screw with laws of physics in the process – no inertia, no exhaust, no friction, no sonic booms, no apparent energy use, no nothing; routine four-figure accelerations in the course of prolonged encounters. If we could figure doing that for macroscopic objects (not to mention housing complex tools or life), it'd be even cooler than interstellar travel.

You are correct, and that right there is part of the reason why I classify AGI as a relatively trivial capability in comparison.

The real space program has always been the NRO.

The real space telescope program has always been the NRO, sure. I remember how dumbfounding it was to learn that Hubble was basically leftovers from a string of spy sats.

But those spy sats have been launched on Delta IV rockets no more exciting than what everyone else uses. If anything NRO input may have set back spaceflight in general, making Space Shuttle requirements even more complicated and underperformance more likely.

Also one could imagine interstellar travel implies FTL, which implies access to physical principles beyond our current science or at least out current and prospective technology, and to energy levels well beyond what our technology is capable of. So I don't think there would be much use in "resistance". That said, I agree that it's unlikely aliens at this point of their development would have any interest or use of conquering humans. That's like human civilization mobilizing to conquer a particular patch of lichen somewhere in northern Canadian forests. What for?

I mean, I agree that we likely have no value to a civilization that can build an Alcubierre drive, but if hyperspace/jump drives/whatever is real then it's because our physics are wrong, not because exotic technology made it that way. We might conceivably only be as far behind such as civilization as the Aztecs were behind the Spanish.

Maybe more like between Aztecs then and the Spanish now. Modern technology - and modern military - has powers that for a pre-technological person would not be otherwise appear possible, such as clairvoyance, instant communication over any distance, power of flight, ability to deliver overwhelmingly destructive strikes at any point within minutes, near invulnerability to most weapons, etc. Maybe 16th century Aztec could conceptualize many of these things - in a way that we could conceptualize FTL - but they certainly wouldn't be able to even imagine how one could achieve such feats, and certainly any resistance they could put up to somebody who can do all that would be doomed from the start. But also, modern Spanish probably wouldn't attack them anyway.

I think you’re underestimating just how extreme the tech difference was. The Spanish brought canon, steel plate, pit bulls, horses, large ships, etc, which were all more or less inconceivable to the Aztecs, much less imitable.

Not Aztecs, but other American tribes adopted horses, guns and other nice stuff pretty quickly, I think, so I don't think they had any serious conceptual barriers with it. One thing when you have a big house that floats - I'm sure they had boats and rafts on the rivers and lakes before, same thing, just bigger - another thing is when this thing flies and drops a volcano on your head. The latter would probably be much harder to deal with.

And we, too, have flying death machines that kill with fire. Not hard to figure out how to deal with.

Our machines can't do FTL. Machines of the civilization that can do FTL probably would be just as far ahead of ours as a ballistic missile is ahead of a spear. With similar chances of mounting a resistance.

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