Fox obtains value from hunting a rabbit (food).
What value is there to get from going into interstellar war (provided such a thing is even practical).
What value is there to get from going into interstellar war (provided such a thing is even practical).
If you are the first one and want to make sure to prevent all future advanced civilizations from evolving, you send out von Neumann probes. You can tell them to build relativistic kill missiles and destroy all planets. No planets = no new civs, probably.
You don't know that. Maybe our planet once had some amazing high-energy isotope/mineral that was completely mined out.
If these aliens can not only travel but do resource extraction at interstellar distances, that implies having highly advanced fusion or annihilation reactors.
Minerals are just chemical reaction products, and therefore necessarily cost negligible energy to synthesize compared to interstellar travel. It's easier to just make the minerals you need.
Isotopes are finite in number, and we already know and largely understand all the ones are likely to ever be useful. "Island of Stability" nuclei may or may not be possible beyond that, but even if they're not only possible but also useful, they will almost certainly have halflives short enough that they will also have to be synthesized rather than mined. So, there's no competing over planets either way.
At the lower end of the tech levels where you can have interstellar industry, the only "amazingly high-energy isotope/mineral" is hydrogen fusion fuel. There's nothing in the Earth's crust or core that could be useful for them, because terrestrial planets are made out of spent nuclear detritus. Though maybe they can bring a big fusion candle and just run off with Jupiter, if they forget about their own gas giants and stars.
At the higher end of the tech scale, even hydrogen stops being a resource. Matter annihilation (e.g. via microscopic black holes) means that it doesn't matter what element or chemical your fuel is made out of when you're converting it directly to energy.
I think any resource competition argument for "dark forest" exopolitics really undersells how vast space is, and how abundant resources are. A single Jupiter with basic fusion reactors could easily sustain quadrillions of humans in enormously inefficient utopian living conditions for trillions of years. [1] It's going to need to get a lot more crowded before fighting over minerals is something that any sane interstellar civilization would worry about.
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1: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%28jupitermass%2Fpro...
No, it doesn't. You don't know what you don't know. Aliens can have tech based on some rare isotope/mineral/whatever.
> Minerals are just chemical reaction products, and therefore necessarily cost negligible energy to synthesize compared to interstellar travel. It's easier to just make the minerals you need.
Unless these minerals require special rare isotopes or some other material we're not yet aware.
> Isotopes are finite in number, and we already know and largely understand all the ones are likely to ever be useful.
No, we do not. Google "island of stability".
> At the lower end of the tech levels where you can have interstellar industry, the only "amazingly high-energy isotope/mineral" is hydrogen fusion fuel.
That statement isn't a fact. Unless you magically synthesized all possible isotopes and materials. Which you didn't.
> There's nothing in the Earth's crust or core that could be useful for them
But maybe there was, that's the argument.
> Matter annihilation (e.g. via microscopic black holes)
Again, you're talking about known science. Not everything. You don't know what you don't know.
> A single Jupiter with basic fusion reactors could easily sustain quadrillions of humans in enormously inefficient utopian living conditions for trillions of years.
Yes, but that has nothing to do with the argument we're having. It doesn't disprove that there might have been some rare resource (or maybe it's still here, we just didn't get to it).
You can only put so much strain on a chemical bond before the electrons decide to stop sticking together anymore. You can only get as much energy out as the mass change from splitting an atom. You can only store as much energy in a heavy nucleus as was originally put into it by the supernova that created it. Anything else would violate basic laws of physics, to such a degree that everything in our universe would presumably immediately cease to exist.
> No, we do not. Google "island of stability".
I already addressed the hypothetical island of stability in the sentence immediately after the one you quoted. The term is relative. They are expected to have longer halflives than the instantly decaying superheavies like ununoctium, but even the longer predictions of their decay properties have them disappearing far too quickly to be mined as minerals.
I'll add now that there's also no reason to believe that island of stability substances, if they even exist, will have any more particularly useful or powerful properties than any other heavy metal. When was the last time you needed to use Mendelevium for something?
> Yes, but that has nothing to do with the argument we're having. It doesn't disprove that there might have been some rare resource (or maybe it's still here, we just didn't get to it).
It disproves the idea that there might be some useful resource which you would want to go conquering for. The resources available in any star system are already more than any conceivable civilization could ever use.
The other side of this is the difficulty of interstellar travel. Reaching relativistic speeds implies turning a significant fraction of your vehicle's mass into energy. With the ability to create and manipulate such power densities, you're better off just synthesizing whatever you need.
> No, it doesn't. You don't know what you don't know.
> But maybe there was, that's the argument.
> Again, you're talking about known science. Not everything. You don't know what you don't know.
If the argument for suggesting a complete break from the known laws of physics can be summarized as "You don't know what you don't know", then you may as well argue that the universe is secretly controlled by a giant space cat which will reward us with salmon if we all shine laser pointers in our retinas every third Thursday.
"Maybe there was" is not actually an argument, in the sense that there is neither anything specifically substantiating it which can be examined, nor any falsifiable conditions which may disprove it.
And then you engage in obvious logical fallacies like talking about mendelevium, as if it's exactly the same as hypothetical stable isotopes from the island of stability. You have no idea what you're talking about, you have not produced those isotopes, no human did.
And then you engaged in completely dishonest straw man with the space cat. I never claimed that there are such isotopes or other used yet unknown natural materials, I just suggested that there may have been some.
Considering how dishonest you are, I won't respond any more.
The entire point of "science" is that you can and should make reasonable predictions based on past observations. E.G. Mendelevium. Calling that a "obvious logical fallacy" is… Disturbing, frankly.
You know, I've yet to see you make a single point that's based on anything more than "Maybe", "No, it doesn't", or "How dishonest you are". Lots of rhetoric. Not much else.
It is your choice to interpret disagreement and contradictory information as "dishonest". Have fun with that.
"I never claimed… I just suggested." Ffs.
Better to strike first than gamble.
Much harder to wipe out a civilisation that's dispersed among hundreds or thousands of smaller space colonies. Especially if many of those colonies are hidden in an asteroid belt of millions of rocks.
Whatever scattered remnants that are left of humanity hanging out in the asteroid belt are going to have a hell of a time finding food to eat or oxygen to breathe.
Do you think they'll be reliant on planets for food an oxygen? That's daft — they will be growing their own food and mining their own oxygen.
Also, I doubt they will be "scattered remnants" — there's likely to eventually be a far larger population off-planet than on.
When discussing aliens you have to consider that their reasoning, their culture, their motivations, their technology, their customs, their values are all _alien_ to us. You have to be open minded, for every excuse we can come up with for "why not" there are infinite explanations for "why so".
Yet on a cultural level, I think the "food/slaves" narratives of alien invasion are actually failing to be open-minded enough. Mechanical labor and physical nutrition are the kinds of things that our newly industrialized post-colonial societies worry about. It's not actually a particularly "alien" idea. Thinking a much more technologically advanced society would come to Earth for the same reasons comes across to me as projecting our own anxieties and sins.
People still eat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ortolan_bunting despite the illegality, low nutritional value, and the ready availability of other options.
If you are a civ who is able to do it, surely you can grow whatever food you need at home and have advanced AI/robotics that can provide labour.
That being said, Harry Turtledove wrote a great story about interstellar travel being easy and humanity somehow missing that branch of the tech tree.
Road Not Taken: https://www.eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf
> If you are a civ who is able to do it, surely you can grow whatever food you need at home and have advanced AI/robotics that can provide labour.