As much as it pains me to say this, but I think we have to invent some more advanced weapons before we start poking our heads out of our galaxy. Don't get me wrong, this is fantastic and I'm all tingly from excitement (this is the first time I've read about warp drives in the context of real science) ... but like I said, taking a stroll trough the galaxy with our bombs and finding a hostile alien world. Well we'd be screwed.
Just food for though here; this is from the Halo universe, where the timeline goes something like this: humans invent "warp drives", they colonize other worlds, soon this colonies start to rebel which leads to a massive space civil war. Later the aliens arrive and set to destroy all of humanity. Now, if it waren't for the civil war, humans would have no experience in space combat, and they wouldn't have developed more advance weapons which would later allowed them to defeat the alien threat.
1000 years is the blink of an eye compared to the lifetime of our galaxy or the amount of time it took life to evolve intelligence on Earth. There's no good reason to expect that humanity's age will be within 1000 years of an alien race's. Consider how little chance an army behind 1000 years technologically would stand against a modern army.
Computer strategy games (I'm specifically thinking of Master of Orion and Galactic Civilizations) often make the assumption that all the races that are going to come into contact with each other have the same technological starting point. This is for the good and simple reason of game balance: Nobody would want to play the game if one race started with a game-winningly huge technological advantage due to random luck.
Many other games and science fiction settings make a similar assumption: That alien and Terran technology are on roughly equal footing, because a situation where everyone has a fighting chance simply makes a better narrative.
It's absurd anyway. Advanced tech will(and already has, to an extent) put extremely destructive power in the hands of normal people. If we haven't learned to get along by then, we will certainly kill ourselves off.
> [With] Advanced tech...we will certainly kill ourselves off.
If the normal developmental pattern of technologically advanced races is T ~ a few thousands of years of continuous population increases due to technology [1], followed by a technology-caused extinction, it would neatly explain why we haven't met any aliens: Since T is a drop in a bucket compared to the time required for evolving intelligence, with high probability all the aliens close enough to us to send signals or spaceships gained intelligence more than T years ago, and have already killed themselves.
[1] The exact timing of the beginning of our technological development depends much on how you define "technological development." But it's fairly safe to say that T < 1 million years.
It takes two to tango, so to speak. No matter how peaceable we are as a race, if the other guy has bigger weapons and is itching to use them, it might not make any difference.
Theoretically, it isn't possible to stop an advanced alien race that has mastered ftl travel from being able to destroy earth. There is this concept called relativistic bombardment - your "artillary" is set to travel so fast, that the light that comes off it only arrives moments before the actual shell, and thus, there is little to no warning. The only way to stop this sort of attack is a shield that is impenatrable. However, such a thing cannot exist, since the attacker has all the time they need to devise a shell that can penetrate the specific shield you intend to use.
Hence, the only safety you can guarentee is if you know your enemy don't know where you are, and thus can't aim the weapon. Otherwise, its impossible to stop an attack.
Now, conversely, humans knows this too, so it makes rational sense to attack first. Its MAD on a galactic scale!
If my (admittedly rough) understanding of relativity is correct, there's a problem with this weapon: From the recipient's perspective, the shell would never arrive.
Basically, as the shell accelerates to C relative to the target, time in the target's reference frame expands relative to time in the shell's reference frame. A shell traveling at C would instantaneously travel from origin to destination (from the shell's perspective) but would take infinite time (from the target's perspective).
Of course, an impact at 1% C would still make one hell of a bang.
> would take infinite time (from the target's perspective).
this doesn't sound right - the shell does arrive, and arrives exactly X light years after being launched, as measured by the alien. Its just that from the perspective of the people in the shell, heaps of time has passed on the outside.
But my knowledge of relativity is cursory at best, so im not sure if i m right.
Seeing how if we use our warp drives to 'colonize' space, other creatures would have far more to fear from us than we from them (think Independence day with roles reversed). If a space faring species encounters non-space faring species, the one with warp is probably (not necessary) in the better position. Even without the weapons, FTL drive implies a magnitudes greater technology than anything a non-FTL race would have. In fact atm we might be the most dangerous creature out there, so in future (if we get that far) I probably see human species branching out into several subspecies and then waging endless war against each other.
Halo is a work of fiction, not a real life based drama. We'll probably be lucky if we find anything more interesting than a microbe. First encounter will probably be more like Solaris than Halo. We'll most likely find an organism that we can't even perceive as one.
So no, we don't need guns in space. Best weapon in space is Newton's second law (i.e. Kinetic bombardment). Cheap and easy to set up, hard to defend if your target is in a gravitation well.
> If a space faring species encounters non-space faring species, the one with warp is probably (not necessary) in the better position.
I read a fun science fiction novella once about a interstellar space faring species that invented their warpdrive whatchamacallit before their industrial revolution, no electricity, machines, etc. Flying medieval space galleons. And they were going about successfully conquering a bunch of similar or more primitive species. Then they encountered 20th century earth...
You're assuming the other species is non-spacegoing. It seems more likely to me, and at least hypothetically possible, that they've been in space as long or longer than us. And probably if you can bend space enough to make a warp drive, deflecting an incoming piece of matter isn't that hard.
But I agree we're more likely to end up at war with each other.
> It seems more likely to me, and at least hypothetically possible, that they've been in space as long or longer than us.
Statistically, that's a near certainty. In the timeframes of galaxies and evolution, the chances that all the other intelligent species are also just a few hundred years into the industrial revolution is essentially zero.
Yes, rules of cinematic narrative outweight the need to tell a faithful story. I.e. in Stargate universe it would be really boring if the Goa'uld just came, slaughtered everyone and take the rest prisoners for experiments within the first 5min-1hr.
Exept all humanoid life in the modern galaxy was the result of an Ancient experiment, when they seeded their genetic code through a wave traveling through the stargate network. I am not aware of any research on the topic, but I suspect that would scew the odds of humanoid civilizations being at a relativly equal level. Then, it could be argued, that the Goa'uld only get their technological advances from the host species, humans, so they cannot be that far beyond us.
There is of course the (admittedly astonishingly unlikely) chance that we're first. I mean someone has to be the first ones up, and since life on other planets is looking more and more factual other intelligent life should be around and other intellegent life if it was more advanced than us should be MUCH more advanced and we'd see evidence of them changing the galaxy. Since we don't well, maybe we're first.
One thing that doesn't really get brought up enough is the transition from intelligent life to advanced civilization. Due to our sample size, it is impossible for us to even make a rough guess at the odds of a successful transformation from one to the other. It is possible that we are significantly overestimating the odds of intelligent life successfully making the transition.
And keep in mind we are only part way there as well. It is possible that something like climate change (or some other natural/man-made disaster) ends our society before we ever achieve sustainable colonization.
> a space faring species encounters non-space faring species
Any non space faring species either lives on a very boring neighborhood (one where rocks never fall from the sky and other kinds mass-extinction events never happen) or is extinct and we may find their fossil remains.
As far as we know, dolphins, cockroaches, and platypuses are not space faring species. Whether their neighborhood is boring is a matter of opinion, of course.
I think that developing "advanced" weapons in isolation would be an exercise in futility. If there's a race that's experienced in interstellar war out there, their weapons would be much more refined than ours. You can't create any product independent of its context.
If we were to meet a hostile alien race, unless they were at a similar developmental stage (which seems unlikely), we'd be at their mercy either way due to the extent of the other side's settlements.
Such an investment would almost certainly skew the probabilities in the other direction. So far we know of exactly one species that has both taken the initiative to develop weapons that could exterminate humanity and has made threatening gestures with said weapons: us.
If the human race gets destroyed by mega-weapons, it'll almost certainly have been a human that pulled the trigger.
There are a lot of challenges we have to overcome to travel to the stars, but this is certainly not one of them.
What weapon system would be "good enough" anyway? A potential other civilization could be completely primitive, or it could have faster-than-light travel for millions of years by now.
To me it seems entirely absurd to consider this as one of the major problems.
Maybe not weapons development. But doesn't the whole problem bear some thought?
The strategic problem postulated here would be defending planets, presumably from collisions with masses moving faster than light. Warheads aren't more than an afterthought, right? I don't see how anyone spots the inbound attack, never mind puts enough energy on it to change its vector.
Which suggests that the only balance comes from deterrence. But how would any actor know who originated such an attack? Or where they come from?
If that's the battlespace, then "here I am!" might not be a great opening move. And given the importance of information in this battlespace, deliberately avoiding knowledge of who lives where might be the only way of signalling you won't be a problem.
It's all speculation but it's one plausible scenario. Maybe we should have this figured out before we start wandering around.
Of course it may happen that becoming more visible in the universe would provoke impossible to defeat enemies against us. But the argument for this is purely hypothetical and one could similarly make an argument that sitting around on our rock and not expanding could end in us being wiped out (cf.: Every primitive culture on Earth ever wiped out by explorers/settlers).
It seems impossible to decide which way is safer with our current information, so I'm for expanding/exploring till we know more.
For anyone interested in the (just for fun) topic of technological advancement, weaponry, and encounters with other civilizations, you should check out Vernor Vinge's Zone of Thought novels, a Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. I can't recommend them enough.
In particular, he assumes that all civilizations will follow roughly the same arc of technological discovery, and that once they hit their information age, it's all about computational power and software. Which, of course, expand in power exponentially with time.
As for us explicitly preparing for that kind of encounter, sorry but if we run into hostiles we're screwed. Take any tech of your choosing and extrapolate. For example, a civilization a few hundred years more advanced than us could easily hit Earth with a custom-made virus or nanobots and wipe out humanity in a day. And if they were a few hundred thousand years more advanced? Impossible to say, but I think our only hope is think that we're too low-level for them to bother messing with.
Was AI accounted for at all? If super-intelligence can be achieved then technological advancement becomes more or less an issue of logistics, not time.
Yes, in fact AI of super-human intelligence plays a central role. To go into much detail would spoil one of the books, but needless to say Vinge supposes that exponential improvements in computing power will inevitably lead to that happening, and he does as good a job as I've seen anywhere in exploring the ramifications.
Interesting thoughts you bring up there, and if we ever did colonize other planets, I've absolutely no doubt they would all start warring and civil warring and fighting each other. All one needs for evidence of this fact is a quick look at how we behave on planet Earth, and what we do with just one planet...
Fear not. Despite the science behind the OP, faster than light travel will not turn out to feasible. Those who think it will be, haven't really thought through the ramifications of what a world in which causality is routinely violated would be like.
Just food for though here; this is from the Halo universe, where the timeline goes something like this: humans invent "warp drives", they colonize other worlds, soon this colonies start to rebel which leads to a massive space civil war. Later the aliens arrive and set to destroy all of humanity. Now, if it waren't for the civil war, humans would have no experience in space combat, and they wouldn't have developed more advance weapons which would later allowed them to defeat the alien threat.