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Comment by codeflo | Hacker News Reader

Boyajian’s star is 1470 lightyears away according to Wikipedia. As a sci-fi concept: Imagine we detect an expanding civilization at this distance, and they travel at a significant fraction of c. We have a few millennia, at most, what do we do?

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Use the millenia to develop as best as we can, and try to spread out in the opposite direction from them. A few millenia are a long time for a technologically advancing species. No knowing what we might accomplish within that time.

Although movies like to portray a hero doing something completely unexpected and saving the day, with odds like this (a species that is technologically advanced as they are, and they will keep advancing in the intervening years), I very much doubt we could do anything. Rig the world with nuclear bombs and detonate if they do something we don’t like? We just don’t have much leverage.

Asteroid mounted railguns (unmanned,) and on the moon, and on picket platforms. Massive kinetic projectiles moving at a significant fraction of c should be effective unless ftl or force fields are possible. 1000 years of collective effort to prepare could riff off of technology we've got at hand. Nuclear power and building material could be lifted from earth, but it'd be far more effective to mine asteroids.

Of course, if we mine asteroids, things on earth would be possible that are too expensive now, and we could see exponential technological progress.

That’s all true, but unless you assume technology peaks, the aliens would have passed those points and counter acted all of that a 1000 years earlier. Maybe they have million mile wide EMPs that destroy all our electronics. It’s very hard to catch up when the other side is advancing at a similar rate. The situation already shows they are very bright and motivated.

This is a large part of the plot in The Three Body Problem

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