Recall hearing once that if we were ever invaded by aliens (just run with this please) the worlds nuclear arsenal would be useless. How? Nuclear explosions are a the use of one of natures fundamental and most powerful forces. We would hurt them in the least.
If you have the capacity to travel across the galaxy, you have the capacity to completely annihilate an entire planet.
The RKKV argument?
It's the argument that the technology required to travel interstellar distances makes dealing with nukes trivial. At realistic travel speeds for a spaceship, any spec of dust in space will collide with the ship with the force of a nuke. If they can deal with that, they can deal with nukes.
That's not to say the aliens face tank the blast. It means they're really good at seeing incoming projectiles (no matter how small and fast) and intercepting them with lasers or their own missiles. We wouldn't be able to hit an alien spaceship with anything. It would maintain orbital superiority even over a Kessler syndrome planet.
>The Kzinti lesson is, "a reaction drive's efficiency as a weapon is in direct proportion to its efficiency as a drive."
I have my doubts. A drive wants to maintain impulse. For a weapon that'd mean preposterous amounts of recoil. The former isn't going to be terribly concerned about focusing the exhaust over long distances, the latter very much will.
>Then secondly any that arose significantly before us
The thing is that we're looking at two very different time scales here. A very insignificant difference on the scale of billions of years makes for a preposterously massive difference on the scale of our current technological progress. Take a planet that formed at the same time as Earth (and rounding that to four billion years), but where development to the current-us-equivalent takes a percent of a percent less time than it did here? Those aliens suddenly have a four hundred thousand year head start on us. They have time to fart around for a another hundred thousand years going way the fuck into "sufficiently advanced" territory, collapse back to the very beginning of their species, and do it all over again before hitting the current day.
Or, say we have a planet formed from the remains of a star slightly bigger than the one our solar system was created out of. Larger stars have shorter lifespans. We go with the "a percent of a percent" thing again for how quickly we get this planet with all the heavy elements of Earth (possibly even more of the heavier stuff thanks to the bigger supernovae even) from the beginning of the Universe, and now the aliens have almost a million year head start on us, and that's without any extra rate of progress once the planet has formed. hell, let's take the entire time from the Big Bang to our current level, but now we only speed things up by a percent of a percent of a percent. Alf still gets to reach our current technological level and then spend another 13700 years going past that. You know, over two hundred times what it took to go from Kitty Hawk's first takeoff to the Eagle having landed.
This. Comparing a nuclear bomb to a FTL starship is like comparing a stone knife to a full auto .50 caliber machine gun. If you were sitting on a fully loaded Ma Duce would you be afraid of a caveman holding a stone knife 100 feet away? Exactly.
Aliens with FTL drive could destroy Earth in countless ways. Dragging an asteroid down into our gravity well would be a simple but effective solution. How long of travel time for a missle to launch and reach the alien craft? You don't think they can just laser the bomb out of the sky the second they see it?
I don't know about all that, butthere's readily available footage of our military bases and jets engaging ufos. The little orb fucks just disable our missles and dance around our bases like assholes.
We pose no threat to them whatsoever with conventional means.
>readily available footage
Surely you possess this readily available footage then, right?
>Surely you possess this readily available footage then, right?
should still be up on youtube if you google it chief. There was also that old tether video that used to be on NASA's website that cuts abruptly, but youy can see the full video on youtube still where the space tether gets surrounded by a hundred or so white orbs that take it away or something.
Frankly I don't know what it means, but it;s out there.
Not really? You would have the capacity to travel very far very fast
You also have the capacity to throw things very very fast. World-endingly fast in fact.
Yes anon. And anything traveling very far very fast can turn a planet into molten slag on impact.
Because harnessing gravity at will means not only can you lens it for transportation faster than light or as a weapon, but it also means you can create pocket dimensions. Reconcile e=mc^2 with Ke=1/2MV^2. Since all non-electromagnetic energy is kinetic, they must reconcile. So why are they different. I’ll give you a clue, use pythagorean theorem and the math behind whirlpools.
There are no Kardashev 2 or 3 in existence
Interstellar travel is totally possible but through fusion/pulse/dfd etc
Something a couple centuries ahead of humans getting hit by a tactical nuke will still wreck them
You have to remember humans have been theoretically capable of interstellar travel since project Orion and nowadays definitely could do it.
>Thinking in terms of non-relativistic weapons
I am disappoint.
Relativistic kill vehicles could still be deflected by nuclear radiation
And spacecraft at .25c will still get fucked up by a nearby nuke. The radiation alone will deflect them and hopefully fuck their electronics and crew
Exxaxion was a good manga anon, but it was just a manga.
I didn’t know about it, but anything without gravity/space manipulation or degenerate matter will get fucked by a blast. We are almost at the point where lasers and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Fusion_Drive
Get us to proxima and it’s planet. There’s no sign of anything more advanced than us so why not ask what would fuck us a few centuries down the road over
Based on a quote from a movie that we are talking about in another thread?
"Foolish humans. Throwing yourselves out into the Void without know who...or what, is out there"
>There’s no sign of anything more advanced than us
SONAR doesn't show you what's out there until the ping bounces back. Consider that Earth would have been radio silent just 150 years ago. We popped out out of nowhere and our signals have barely reached a fraction of a percent of the galaxy. Earth's total radio emissions are decreasing as we switch from broadcasting all over the place to tight beaming our signals to satellites, or using cables. It's theoretically possible that civilisations are only detectable for a brief period. Maybe we're nearby one such civilisation that's beginning to hear our 1800s radio signals and deciding to send a signal back. We won't know for a while.
No signs interstellar engineering whatsoever. Also no sign of civilization let alone transit in our local neighborhood at least within 20LY, probably 100 we are alone. So that’s good, time to spread to the nearest stars and grow
We don’t have anything with enough resolution to accurately even say that though. It’s impossible for anyone to say with confidence what the rate of development of life on earth likes is (let alone intelligent life as opposed to a primordial soup or slime molds). Any claim we make that there’s no signs of advanced life nearby is predicated on some very narrow assumptions about what signals would be broadcast for us to pick up.
>Earth's total radio emissions are decreasing as we switch from broadcasting all over the place to tight beaming our signals to satellites, or using cables.
Counter-argument, ABM radars, HF radars, HAARP, etc have been blasting extremely focused high power radio waves directly into the fucking sky since the 1960s.
And that doesn't matter if there's nobody within 80 light years to hear them. Even if they did, it'd take 80 more years to send detectable transmissions back, long after we would all be dead. The galaxy is 100,000 light years across, think about what that implies. Fermi Paradox is fucking nonsense, the FTL barrier is the fundamental problem.
>Relativistic kill vehicles could still be deflected by nuclear radiation
this statement makes as much sense as "bullets can be deflected by my farts"
Radiation pressure can change course. Even a slight change at long distances is enough to equal a miss
nukes do not travel long distances in relativistic terms nor do they output significant radiation compared to what a relativistic vehicle experiences simply by slamming into stellar and interstellar material at high speed
I like how you didn't actually respond to the points of the people you quoted. You hamfisted your own opinion into the discussion without understanding it, like some boomer.
Aliens could easily stop nukes before the nuke reaches them? Yeah, you ignored that. Aliens could sit on Earth and shoot down anything trying to escape? Yeah, you ignored that.
You're letting how you feel get in the way of the facts. A civilisation with a 1000+ year tech advantage is going to be adapt at solving problems a younger civilisation isn't even aware of, on top of being better at everything the younger civilisation does know. Everything you know or can theorise to counter our own tech is something they've already done.
>You're letting how you feel get in the way of the facts. A civilisation with a 1000+ year tech advantage
You’re talking about a K2 civilization
There is no evidence they exist in the present. That’s a fact.
That's prerequisite for aliens invading solar system.
> prerequisite for aliens invading solar system.
It isn’t, a K1 could easily invade a star within 10 LY. Low tech wars like Turtledove’s worldwar are honestly more interesting than the more fantasy ideas.
Even K1.3+ (hundreds of years more advanced) nukes are still the second most powerful weapon after relativistic kill vehicles
>It isn’t, a K1 could easily invade a star within 10 LY
Probability of another civilization with 10 LY is extremely low. More realistic would be thousand LY and such range travels with force sufficient for invasion (we are no talking sone scout probe).
is K2.
When you think about it isn’t the Man Kizinti war basically a 1.2K vs a 1.6K, with big pauses because subliminal travel and humans are on the brink right until a K2 helps them
There's no evidence any other civilization exists, except our own. If everyone agrees that the probability of alien civilization is less than nil, then the chances of any of these potentially millions or billions of civilizations being anywhere between less than current and way the fuck beyond current human technology is also less than nil. There's probably a huge array of civilizations in different technological states, and I'm sure at least a couple have unimaginative technical prowess that would give them total mastery over us if they wanted it. I think the only reason that isn't the case now (unless we just don't realize it), is that it takes a certain level of social cognition to reach anything beyond nukes (since those civs likely blow themselves up eventually). So, they won't fuck with us because of morality, but if they wanted to we would disappear in the blink of an eye. Launching nukes would be like an ant trying to kill a human by running into their falling shoe. It's hardly worth discussing.
Statistically speaking, they have to exist somewhere. Either we can't see them because we can't look hard enough, or the signals we need to identify them haven't reached us yet. It's possible that we wake up tomorrow and start getting signals from a star 1000 lightyears away.
>Statistically speaking, they have to exist somewhere
Not necessarily if the fundamental laws of the universe are such that it's impossible.
If they were impossible, you wouldn't be here.
>It's possible that we wake up tomorrow and start getting signals from a star 1000 lightyears away.
No we wouldn't, because 1000 years ago we were in the Middle Ages, and 2000 years ago we were crucifying Christ. There would have been nothing for hypothetical aliens to detect, unless they've invented cameras that can give them Google earth resolution from 1000 light years away. If they somehow have, then they would be able to tell that we did not have the capacity to receive any kind of message, and thus would not send any.
Nobody is saying they'd be sending a signal intentionally. I was saying that maybe we start picking up the 1800s tier radio messages of a civilisation from 1000 years ago.
Interesting thoughts have been argued about some very odd supernova.
Humans have come really close to nuclear war a few times. We're super lucky that we developed nukes the way we did and decided to make them taboo. Also consider how Africa, despite being the first continent with humans, is the least developed continent with humans. Maybe some civilisations stay low tech forever even though they theoretically could progress further.
Yeah, totally plausible that some civs might just plateau for thousands of years, we did up until recently. Millions is probably unlikely, since whatever species we're talking about would be evolved/extinct in that timeframe. But, I think any civ that develops nukes will also have invented something similar to computers, then AI, then industrial print construction, space colonization, fusion, etc... You can't really get to nukes without spiralling down the technological rabbit hole like humanity has. There's too many prerequisite technologies that are necessary for nukes that also spillover into other regions of technical progress.
Imagine if nukes had been made without their context in WW2. Instead of the first 2 being dropped to end a war and that being it, we could have had multiple countries with whole stockpiles going ham with their nukes the next time a war started.
I think about this a lot. The timing alone of WW2 is almost divine. If the war had started maybe ten or twenty years later, which is nothing on the historical scale, it could have meant a much more destructive war.
>Something a couple centuries ahead of humans getting hit by a tactical nuke will still wreck them
They would be way more than a couple centuries ahead of humans.
>harnessing gravity
Gravity is a property of massive (mass bearing i.e. not photons) particles, not a force or energy. Gravity is the effect mass has on "spacetime".
"harnessing gravity" would mean controlled negative-mass and -energy materials, and harnessing gravity to a useful level would require such insane technology that aliens would get zero use from and have zero need for other species.
tldr: if it is possible, such aliens wouldnt give a shit about us
If your aliens are the kind that can sit out there at the same distance of the Earth-Moon orbit and just glass the top 3 kilometers of your entire planet's crust in 12 local hours (11 hours 30 minutes of it spent waiting on the night side because they're lazy), I fail to see how modern nukes could be of any use. Conversely if your aliens are Battle of Los Angeles-tier then yeah, you would want to hit their strategic shit with nukes if you could. I believe /tg/ has an appropriate phrase about this, "depends on the setting".
Also the PLANTs having the power to stop nuclear fission at will and only using it to stop nuclear fission was fucking amazing and retarded at the same time, with that level of mastery of atomic forces they could have peeled the Earth like an orange by the start of the series.
Nukes would work if the aliens are slowboaters, such as fungus people stuck to asteroids. Or maybe meat popsicles in cryoships.
If the aliens are gravity lensers, no material or energy weapon would have any effect. Same goes for time travelers (overlaps with lensers) or intelligences operating outside of our brane.
Note: If the slowboaters have planet sized ships.... thats gonna be a problem for nukes.
>Note: If the slowboaters have planet sized ships.... thats gonna be a problem for nukes.
I mean, Teller already designed the nuke, it's just the delivery system that needs work... "backyard" ain't gonna cut it.
Nukes are pretty shit in space
They've already rendered nuclear missiles inert. Watch that one YouTube vid with that old, white-haired guy describing how the light ball disarmed the nuke satellite missile.
We have done no greater than put one of ours on our moon and sent a few probes out. The farthest out of which took 46 years to get where it is. We can assume that they have a ship the size of 20-60km or greater that can cross that distance on its base engines in less than 2 hours. You decide.
lmao good luck sending nukes to an alien drone parked in the kuiper belt that spends all time lobbing asteroids at planet Earth.
If Grug the cave man smashes his stone axe into your face it's going to kill you.
So you don't go up to Grug and try to shank him, you use a drone to drop a sarin bomb into his cave while he and his tribe lie sleeping from five thousand kilometres away.
Now where do we sit on the technological progress scale between Grug and the Greys? Probably far closer to Grug. Space is so absolutely mindfuckingly unbelievably big that simply getting here from the very closest star makes the journey to the Moon, or Mars for that matter, seem like a minor mis-navigation when you went out for some groceries.
We will be the greys in the future. Right now, no stellar engineering exists
The universe has only existed for 12 billion years, the steliferous lasts 100 trillion. Heavy elements from novas, meters, etc have only existed for a couple billion tops. Any life that arose before our time probably didn’t have the elements to thrive.
>Heavy elements from novas, meters, etc have only existed for a couple billion tops. Any life that arose before our time probably didn’t have the elements to thrive.
Life on Earth started like 4 billion years ago. Dinosaurs went extint like 65 million years ago.
Just take another planet somewhat similar to ours and suppose that life started at roughly the same time, but something went slightly different along evolution, making intelligent, technological life appear just 1 million years before us. A fucking million years of technological advantage, just as easy.
Our time means terrestrial time, yes it took 4by to go from terrestrial to human so that’s a filter for most life: they never get sapient animals
Then secondly any that arose significantly before us are probably too poor in heavy elements to support a complex civ
sure if you think like, life took 4 billion years to get to humans on earth, then considering the universe is like 14by old, then maybe the time life started here is kind of in the earlier range for life to start anywhere since you need certain elements.
But then again, maybe you don't actually need a whole bunch of heavy elements anyway and there could be life without it.
And even barring that what the other anon is saying is that on a timescale of 4by then life elsewhere could have arose at practically the same time as us or even millions of years later and by chance have produced a civilization at our level a million years ago. or even 20 million for that matter. considering our current trajectory I'm sure any civilization that "advanced" would be gay beyond our wildest imagination though and we should have stayed in 1980 and stopped "progressing" after that.
We’ve been in a position to know or care about aliens for around .000001% of our planets history. To think an alien civilization is in a similar situation and nearby coinciding with us is profoundly optimistic, bordering on retarded.
There's no way to prove that it's more or less probable than any other situation. They could be blobs of gas or Vulcans, this is pure imagination and all we have to go on is what we can experience on Earth. Retarded optimism doesn't quite explain this; rather, it's chauvinistic to think aliens are in anyway similar to us.
The "who are we to say" argument is a bit retarded, IMO. We have enough insights into chemistry, biology and technology to assign general probabilities to certain scenarios.
Look at fire. It cannot be understated how valuable learning about fire was for humanity. Fire is a tool of destruction and creation. It's vital to so many technologies. Therefore we can conclude its unlikely a species as smart as us would have gone anywhere if it was aquatic. The world's smartest octopus is never going to research metallurgy and blacksmithing, since that's impossible underwater.
>world's smartest octopus is never going to research metallurgy and blacksmithing, since that's impossible underwater
Geothermal vents. Also, most octopi can spend time on land as long as they stay wet.
>octopi
Damn funny you mention them anons as to think back to the Killing Star.
You can't do blacksmithing at a geothermal vent. They get to around 400C max and iron melts at 1800C. The seawater won't let you take a piece of iron ore and heat it enough to smelt it. The vents also aren't reliable in their output of heat and are in fixed locations. Furthermore, one octopus learning something doesn't mean much for the species, since octopi don't have tribal behaviour and won't pass on their knowledge to others/their offspring.
It seems that you don't just need intelligence in a species for it to make technology. You need tribal inclinations, the ability to communicate complex ideas, and some body part that can manipulate the environment. Dolphins have two out of 3, but they'll never make technology with their flippers.
Civilisations won't look for their peers amongst the stars at purely random points in their planet's existence. Development going form simple to complex the presence of such civilisations will get more likely over time until the nearby star gets too perky. And once a civilisation has reached that point it may then continue to look about for a very, very long time, so that not only are those ".000001%" more likely to be near each other than far apart for planets of similar age, once the "looking for aliens"-era begins that percentage will keep rising until the civilisation collapses.
Of course, .000001% is also a number you just ripped right out of your ass, and it smells accordingly. People were talking about Schiaparelli's Martian "canal" more than a century ago. For that to be .000001% of Earth's existence our planet would have to be over ten billion years old. Epicurius "meanwhile" held other worlds as likely more than two thousand years ago...
>Heavy elements from novas, meters, etc have only existed for a couple billion tops. Any life that arose before our time probably didn’t have the elements to thrive.
Our time? Recoded history is a few thousand years, humans as we know them today have been around for ~200 thousand years. The elements of the Earth has been around for ~5 billion years or more.
That assumes they'd only send a signal if they knew there was a suitable recipient already waiting for it. You can always send a signal at a not-so advanced civilisation in the hopes of it being able to receive it by the time it gets there, or you can just shout into the void without having any clue regarding whether or not anyone is out there to receive it.
You are so retarded its unreal. The percentage number is not out of my ass, its how much time our 2000 (generous) years or civilization constitute within the 4.4 billion year span of our planet. The point is the unlikelihood that there is another species at a civilizational level on a habitable planet corresponding in time to us given how small of a window we correspond on our planet. But you are immensely retarded and could not grasp this basic reality and spouted off random shit.
The nukes aren't designed to shoot up, but rather at another continent.
This comes into play in Larry Niven's Footfall, another "slightly dim aliens on slowships" invasion story like Turtledoves. The aliens are invading the US so the Americans ask the Soviets to nuke the american heartland to kill the alien invasion beachead. Pinky promise we won't retaliate.
It was pretty kino. The climax of the book is when they build an Orion nuke-propelled battleship to attack the alien mothership
Huh, why did the spoiler tag fail, I used the hotkey
I think it only works on certain boards. TV board I believe
/tv/, /v/, /a/, /vt/, probably. more. Spoiler tags are for board with didscsioion of plots.
This is PrepHole. No fun allowed.
Also: no improvements or significant changes are going to happen. Ever.
Something similar happens in Muv-Luv visual novel where the US nukes Canada because an alien spaceship has landed there.
Actually there was another spaceship that landed somewhere in China, but the commies hesitated and tried conventional weapons at first. Because of that, the aliens had enough time to develop countermeasures, and with what countermeasures in action the entire humanity managed to stop their advance only after losing Eurasia+Korea+part of Japan.
As of shooting orbital targets, after the incidents mentioned above the UN launched several satellites with nukes onboard designed to intercept any new alien ships coming from the Moon or Mars. Those aliens turned out to be semi-sentient so they weren't smart enough to launch many ships at once
Muv-Luv aliens are autistic, when you think about it.
>literally spoils the book I just checked out
thanks IDIOT. good think I'm too drunk to even remember the spoiler I just read 5 seconds ago though. it should be a fun book
aliens are demons
The problem is that all nukes are designed to hit ground targets. If aliens are in orbit we don't have any nukes designed to hit that shit.
We did have nukes designed for air targets, like taking out a huge fleet of incoming aircraft but that doesn't exist anymore.
Only if the aliens land in an uninhabited area can we use nukes against them.
Lets ignore the possibility of aliens just dropping asteroids on earth for the sake of argument or the fact that FTL creates some really really scary fucking projectiles. The planet shattering kind.
Every single nuclear missile we have are designed to go up and fall down because they have ballistic trajectories. This makes them entirely useless for hitting anything sitting orbiting the planet. Disassembling them and refitting the warheads on a better suited missile is possible but that takes time and the aliens have the ability to strike anywhere on the planet at any time which makes time a luxury in this scenario. The logistics of having to defend every strip of land and being vulnerable to surprise landings at anywhere behind the frontline is almost impossible to defend against.
If their propulsion is any better than a flimsy solar sail we are completely and utterly fucked and no ass pulling will save us from the ayy visitors.
Nukes are useless because how are you going to deliver them? Falcon 9?
Meanwhile the enemy can freely disrupt the surface all the way back to the stone age and earlier and that is assuming precision strikes with his own nuclear weapons and not some brute force approach such as deorbiting asteroids or even throwing his garbage out at relativistic velocities in the direction of the planet.
>ayys will never disrupt us back to the bronze age so I never have to see another goddamn fortnite zoomer with a phone ever again
it hurts
making bronze requires working logistics over vast distances
I have maps from AAA and I already know the map of the world and I can get anywhere in the US basically just knowing where things are. I'll walk on a glassed out highway trail and haul bronze prerequisite materials just pay me a sack of salt or something
*fucks your entire space fleet*
What now, mammal boy?
*teleports inside you*
>part of the fleet
>no longer a virgin
Just as keikaku
The only "life" out there is the shit that grows on Planet Dirt anyway.
>dirt
>terra
>planet Earth
Mind. Blown. Are you feeling me fellow redditors? Big updoots to this based chungus.
That's not what I meant at all. Lurk more.
Pretty sure the most recent estimate was that the entire Milky Way had maybe 6 other possible civilizations at all. Planets that can spawn intelligent civilizations at this stage in the universe' evolution are exceedingly rare, and logically if the galaxy is as empty as it seems, that brings three possibilities:
1) FTL is strictly impossible even with whatever unfathomable technologies they could create, so even if they were out there, we wouldn't detect them for millions of years yet
2) They all died off before becoming space faring
3) Humanity is really, really early
In short Earth will be invaded by other humans and we would be having space wars with ourselves long before we made first contact, that is, if we don't die in a century or so like all the rest
>1) FTL is strictly impossible even with whatever unfathomable technologies they could create, so even if they were out there, we wouldn't detect them for millions of years yet
The galaxy is only ("only") ~100 000 ly across. And we're not at the edge of it, so a message from the furthest point on it to us could get here in well under 100 000 years. (Someone who fancies geometry and probability can calculate the what the average distance from us to the closest of five randomly distributed civilisations in our galaxy would be, it's going to be even closer by quite a bit.) Not exactly IRC standards, but in no way is it millions of years.
>3) Humanity is really, really early
Most likely, with fussion, solar energy collection ir energy beaming satellites, weather control sats and biotech so advanced as to seem magic to 20c humans will surely be K1 by the end of the century
That’s a good time to start spreading to the nearest stars. After we colonize Europa and ceres of course
If alpha c has very habitable super earths and humanity colonized them it wouldn’t be hard to imagine a war 1000 years from now between centauri and sol humans.
If a civilization could travel the stars that effortlessly, we'd basically be about as sophisticated as ants to them. Nukes would absolutely damage them, the problem would be getting those nukes to hit them.
They would get shot down before they could hurt them or they would just annihilate us before we even got into range.
Dual vector foil