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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

I think a civilization that intends to wipe out all others would be more proactive.

Pre-seed any nearby system that looks like it could develop life at all with doomsday devices preprogrammed to activate the moment a technosignature is found.

That's a lot of stars, depending how far out you want to build your safety zone, but you only need to send a seed craft that builds the rest of the device.

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Suppose one such probe malfunctioned or was damaged, what would the results be if it crashlanded on a lifeless primordial planet? This probe must be capable of some degree of self-replication. It might not actually diminish the possibility that some out-of-control self-replicating system comes back to destroy you. (Worse, you've explicitly designed it to replicate systems that cause barely discriminate destruction.) How much might you change before it no longer recognizes you?

Nice plot for an interesting novel. Imagine your society having all but forgotten about the destructive seed-probes and coming to colonize the system it crashed in and malfunctioned.

Check out Greg Bear’s Forge Of God and Anvil of Stars 2 book series . Not exactly the same plot you mentioned but covers an interesting variant plot including fall out of a situation where Earth is killed by killer probes and remnants of humanity painfully search for the Killer’s system. What they find is different than expected

The Stargate SG-1 TV series has a similar, although not exactly identical, recurrent plot point (replicators). The show is well worth watching IMHO.

It seems to me that if a civ with high technology is going to expend the effort to seed large numbers of solar systems with xenocide devices, it might as well spread itself through the same space instead

See the "inhibitors" in Alastair Reynolds' "Revelation Space" universe.

What if the rest of the lifeforms in our universe look and work nothing like us? What if they can’t detect us as lifeforms and we can’t detect them as lifeforms?

Then we have nothing to worry about

Are you familiar with rhetorical questions?

(Fingers crossed that readers have a sense of humor…)

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