The End Of The Scifi Arms Race

[kerbiloid]

1 minute ago, Dragon01 said:

They called themselves various titles in various languages, but the sense was the same.

The sense is absolutely different. A chieftain is not a king, it's a tribal leader, not a tribal ruler.
Just one of the eldermen elected to lead the tribe in situations when it needs a leader (war, hunting, sacrifice).

Also many of the "kings" were sacrificial figures killed either when they got weak, or after a year or several years, or on defeat in a war, or other similar circumstances.
The idea in this case was simple: the king impersonates our "fine and lucky" tribe, so he's expendable.
Before being sacrificed he could rule the tribe or sit in a hut full of food and women, depending on local customs, and was officially a "king".

11 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

Yes, but calling them "communism" and "nationalism", building them shrines and so on is a modern invention. French Revolution, in particular (and especially Napoleon) codified the idea of dying for it. Before, people fought for money, out of duty, and occasionally for personal glory. 

Iirc, the crusades and building the shrines was in the name of the God's reign, i.e. the same idea of a perfect world.
Just "communism", "nationalism", and other "-sms" appeared when the perfect world became unpersonified, i.e. in XIX.

[Guest]

Religion was, most often, an excuse. It was only in recent history that we got our hands on weapons truly capable of making land unusable. The nice thing about land is, unless you nuke it, it's perfectly usable a year or two after . Ethnic and religious hatred caused genocides, but rarely full-on wars. As a rule, those who can fight back are rarely targeted for violence unless the attacker has a lot to gain from it, enough to offset the risk of losing the fight. This works even on a personal level, hurt a bully back hard enough, and he'll go pester someone else unless you've got something worth getting hurt over.

[Spacescifi]

5 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

Religion was, most often, an excuse. It was only in recent history that we got our hands on weapons truly capable of making land unusable. The nice thing about land is, unless you nuke it, it's perfectly usable a year or two after . Ethnic and religious hatred caused genocides, but rarely full-on wars. As a rule, those who can fight back are rarely targeted for violence unless the attacker has a lot to gain from it, enough to offset the risk of losing the fight. This works even on a personal level, hurt a bully back hard enough, and he'll go pester someone else unless you've got something worth getting hurt over.

 

Hurt a bully bad enough and he will return with friends to beat you worse... possibly ending in death for somebody involved.

I have seen it happen. In addition to what you mentioned.

Edited January 4, 2020 by Spacescifi

[Guest]

This depends on whether he's a "pathetic loser" kind of bully or "small time ganger" kind. Which type is more prevalent depends on local culture. The latter is much harder to deal with, and much more likely to get ugly (especially if you also have friends, and neither side has an overwhelming advantage). This does happen on international level, too WWI was a particularly disastrous example.

15 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Iirc, the crusades and building the shrines was in the name of the God's reign, i.e. the same idea of a perfect world.
Just "communism", "nationalism", and other "-sms" appeared when the perfect world became unpersonified, i.e. in XIX.

Religion is a far more encroaching concept than ideology. Any religion includes an ideology, but it does not present it as an abstract, but as a concrete thing, as real as anything else. To the people who built cathedrals and fought in crusades, it was not building shrines to an idea, but to a literal guy sitting up in the sky and watching them, waiting to take them up to his side when they die.

Of course, the crusades had a lot of political background including the Byzantine Empire, too. For an average knight it might've been about God, but for their leaders, not necessarily.

Edited January 4, 2020 by Guest

[magnemoe]

11 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

 

Hurt a bully bad enough and he will return with friends to beat you worse... possibly ending in death for somebody involved.

I have seen it happen. In addition to what you mentioned.

It worked very well in the schoolyard, no it does not work so well against an gang or the mob. Exception is if your are an state or similar and the mob have essentially declared war on you. 
In that case well how many jets and tanks do you have, no mob boss will put himself in that setting unless he is an idiot because it has happened. 

Religion play an minor rolle, mostly as an moral boost but can be overdone like most hard drugs. 
ISIL puling more agro than Germany managed during WW2 was not very smart, less so then you had 3-4 divisions of light and mostly poorly trained infantry, no air force and perhaps a couple of tanks. 
They lasted so long simply as none wanted to spend lots of soldiers and money while causing lots of civilian causalities to trying to defeat them fast. 

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, magnemoe said:

ISIL puling more agro than Germany managed during WW2 was not very smart, less so then you had 3-4 divisions of light and mostly poorly trained infantry, no air force and perhaps a couple of tanks. 
They lasted so long simply as none wanted to spend lots of soldiers and money while causing lots of civilian causalities to trying to defeat them fast. 

They don't critically need a battlefield victory, as well as stay as the same organization. So, I would not consider them actually defeated. They just got from the acute to the latent stage.
The terrorists burst bombs in their own cities not to cause casualties, but to show that the local authorities can't do anything with that, and that everyone should deal with them to have a peace, even if hates them.
Also they play on the ethnic and religious field with endless tribal conflicts when any group taking power starts to supress those groups who doesn't support them enough actively.
So, they have dropped the expendable units to have a legendarium for further recruiting in future when the situation changes. A good drama was more significant for them than actual casualties they caused to the enemies.
The only way to really defeat them is to make the belonging to a tribe less significant than belonging to an atomized professional corporation.
This way in turn looks also fuzzy as the more industry is automated, the less it needs individual professionals, raising the role of subjective communities, i.e. what they have now.
So, probably the only way is when fertility gets down to 1..2 children per woman, making them too expensive to recruit, when every kilometer of the Earth will be full of web cameras, and when any weapon without a biometry lock (i.e. all modern guns) will make its owner out of laws, making impossible to arm them with anything bigger than cold weapons.

Edited January 4, 2020 by kerbiloid

[magnemoe]

4 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

They don't critically need a battlefield victory, as well as stay as the same organization. So, I would not consider them actually defeated. They just got from the acute to the latent stage.
The terrorists burst bombs in their own cities not to cause casualties, but to show that the local authorities can't do anything with that, and that everyone should deal with them to have a peace, even if hates them.
Also they play on the ethnic and religious field with endless tribal conflicts when any group taking power starts to supress those groups who doesn't support them enough actively.
So, they have dropped the expendable units to have a legendarium for further recruiting in future when the situation changes. A good drama was more significant for them than actual casualties they caused to the enemies.
The only way to really defeat them is to make the belonging to a tribe less significant than belonging to an atomized professional corporation.
This way in turn looks also fuzzy as the more industry is automated, the less it needs individual professionals, raising the role of subjective communities, i.e. what they have now.
So, probably the only way is when fertility gets down to 1..2 children per woman, making them too expensive to recruit, when every kilometer of the Earth will be full of web cameras, and when any weapon without a biometry lock (i.e. all modern guns) will make its owner out of laws, making impossible to arm them with anything bigger than cold weapons.

Controlling essentially an country is very nice its that let you rake in lots of money and run training centers and other stuff. 
Then loosing it and also loosing almost all of the forces, lots killed or captured however most just ran home and is now technically deserters by ISIL, also loosing big time. So they are done, if leadership want to try to recruit again they will use another name. 

Yes making an local terrorism / resistance group is pretty easy, and not extremely dangerous as long as you just mostly play it for the press. Easier to recruit today but more dangerous to operate because of much more surveillance and police methods, you need an overall hatred for the government in populations to tap into for you to grow fast, without it you will stay small and its dangerous to recruit outside the initial group, in Europe this has been limited to ethical disputes like northern Ireland outside of WW2. 
And WW2 kind of sums this up, the French resistance was manpower rich and was openly supplied by the allies and probably had an command staff in England or North Africa. 
Its use outside of spying was an one shot strategy: Interrupt German movements towards Normandy after D-Day and try to tie down forces down the line and they would have to run for the hills within an week. However an week was the time to land an army. 

Back to current day Hamas and Hezbollah both hold land, they are also very sure to not hit other players than Israel, as they do not want to get into an fight with other major powers.
Getting into an war with say the US or Russia would be bad more so as Israel or allied group would do then joint for an clean up operation who involves artillery 

6-20 years down the lain I see China replacing the US as the enforcer in the Middle east, US probably bribes China for the joy. 
US oil and gas production increases fast while domestic use rise slowly or more lightly go down because of alternative sources. 
China ROE is kind of relaxed. the rest of this scenario is age restricted  

 

 

[Arco123]

Instead of shooting yourself, shoot the vessel you were going to be in when shot. Aka shoot vessel sized heavy almost light speed projectiles at non-friends. Or just steel balls.

Let's also get back to the topic at hand. Don't go flying into religion and stuff here. Were here to talk about sci-fi weapons.

[Arugela]

One weakness is fireing it. If enough missiles land at once they can bypass it potentially. It has ot hit them and that requires something turning. Unless there is a wide beam option or something that fires in all directions at once. If not you can always bypass it. Numerous other weakness would naturally exist in any implementation.

[Guest]

9 hours ago, Arco123 said:

Let's also get back to the topic at hand. Don't go flying into religion and stuff here. Were here to talk about sci-fi weapons.

To talk about weapons you need to know what kind of war they are to be used in. Hardware that's best against terrorists will not necessarily be best in symmetrical warfare, and vice versa. A planet killer is of little practical use against a resistance group, as a certain empire had found out (not that the lesson stuck...).  

[Arco123]

2 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

To talk about weapons you need to know what kind of war they are to be used in. Hardware that's best against terrorists will not necessarily be best in symmetrical warfare, and vice versa. A planet killer is of little practical use against a resistance group, as a certain empire had found out (not that the lesson stuck...).  

Ah, well let's just say it's two almost galaxy wide factions fighting. What would the best weapon to use here?

[Guest]

Where are they on Kardashev scale? Galaxy-wide implies Type 2 or 3, which were discussed earlier in this thread. In a surprising number of scenarios, the answer actually is "nukes" except for extra-high energy cases where it becomes "antimatter bombs" (which are a lot like nukes, just with even more bang-per-kg). Two Type 3s fighting would likely be slinging antimatter at each other for orbit to surface warfare, with high power relativistic particle beams as ship killers. Of course, with so much energy available, they might well have something capable of killing stars themselves, which are harder (though not impossible) to move out of way than planets.

[Okhin]

If those civillisation are in control of galaxies, the war might be a bit weird time wise. For instance, they probably have Dyson Sphere and Stellar Engines. The former provides a lot of energy, which enables mega computer engineering, which gives you a lot of computing power, enough to plan and plot loveed up courses and anticipate where things are going to be at some point. Mega computer have probably enough power that they can simulate a very complex and detailed model of the Universe, formation of planet and evolution of life included. I'll let the metaphysics aside, but it also means you're technically capable of emulating consciousness, and then to become a purely virtual species. Of course, your survival depends on the existence of the mega computer, so depends on one or more stars (I mean, backup strategies are viable enough, you can create a copy of yourselves running in another stellar system for instance).

So, the only thing you rely one for survival is your star. If it goes kaboom you're dead. But as long as you manage to protect your dyson sphere, and until the heat death of the universe, you are immortal and you're a civilisation of pure mind feeding on radiations to maintain themselves. So, how do you wage war ? You need to inflict enough damage to the mega computer of the opponent. Cyberwar might be in order, but the time lag between two galaxies will takes a lot of time. Which makes analysis of the opponents hard (you send a ping, wait 2 000 000 years to get an answer, you craft something, you transmit it, and you hope you have not been detected 2 000 000 years ago).

Which leads us to the second galaxy wide project that they have : stellar engine. It takes them 1 000 000 years to accelerate them to 10 km/s (theoretical acceleration of stellar engines are in the 10^-9 m/s²), but they can plot on this kind of scale since they're immortal. You can dodge your opponent, or throw galaxies at him. At a galactic speed of some meters/s, so it's going to take a while to it your opponent. But then again, you have time and you can enjoy life during this time. And create decoy, shields and stuff to deflect stars thrown at you by your opponents.

In the end, it's just a galactic game of billiard between two civilisation. And yes the weapons are "I'm smashing a galaxy in your face".

Edited January 6, 2020 by Okhin
Mistaken m/s and km/s.

[Mikki]

..."Ultimate superweapon?" hahaha... How about a local "Higgsfield disruptor". Hopefully the use of this device will end all the needs of said "Civilisation" for freedom, livingroom, biologic supremacy and ressources.

May they live further well and prosper for eternity.

Yeah... oh wait, isn`t that what...

This "Civilisation" should rather decimate themself instead others.

[sevenperforce]

I wonder if it would be possible to have a particle beam which would produce a collimated standing-wave magnetic acceleration tube. So you could fire up the particle beam, trained on your target, and use the beam itself to accelerate an antimatter slug. The beam would also have the pleasant effect of punching an initial hole in your target so you avoid a "fizzle" caused by premature detonation of the antimatter slug.

[KSK]

I agree with @Scotius - interstellar civilizations would have literally star systems worth of room and materiel. No need to fight over either since there's plenty for everybody. Regarding religion and ideology as two other sparks for conflict, again - plenty of room for everyone. If you really, really can't stand being in the same star system as the rotten heretics, then the next star system over is probably a fine place to live. And if doesn't have any inhabitable planets? That's where O'Neil Cylinders, General Systems Vehicles (pick your sci-fi megastructure of choice) etc. come into play. 

But, KSK, you say. Some folks just aren't that logical or reasonable.

Which is true enough. But I would also argue that organised conflict at any sort of scale requires organised societies to provide the combatants. And I would argue that organised societies at an interstellar level are functionally impossible. However they're constituted or organised, at some point they simply become too big, too unwieldy, with too many dissenting or contradictory opinions to repress or accommodate, to be viable. Not to mention the effective lack of any functional border control on an interstellar level.

It's often said that there's no stealth in space. There are also no effective borders. Sooner or later, refugees will escape from even the most repressive regime. More liberal regimes probably won't even try to stop the escapees. Eventually, any sort of 'Galactic Empire' will dissolve into a loose collection of individual systems, all doing their own thing and all largely powerless to stop others doing their own thing. If you want to be pessimistic about it, there probably will be sci-fi superweapons around but MAD will ensure that they're not widely deployed.

Edited January 6, 2020 by KSK

[Guest]

4 hours ago, Okhin said:

I'll let the metaphysics aside, but it also means you're technically capable of emulating consciousness, and then to become a purely virtual species.

This one assumption is not necessarily true. In particular, a computer as we know it is not capable of emulating consciousness, regardless of computing power. The reason is that a classical computer is inherently deterministic. Consciousness is not. You cannot simulate a non-deterministic process on a deterministic machine. It is, at this point, difficult to speculate about what quantum computing could do, especially on such scale. Of course, quantum computing is useful, so a Type 2 civ would likely have it, but not necessarily for the purpose of storing consciousness in a Matrioshka Brain. Just as well, it could make a Matrioshka Calculator (a deterministic equivalent, powerful, but not fundamentally different from any Turing-complete computer), or simply use Dyson Spheres for powering things directly (either through antimatter production, or building stuff on the outer surface).

Also note, the original question did not concern intergalactic warfare, though a clash between a pair true Type 3 civs would be this by necessity. I was thinking more of a pair of advanced Type 2 civs fighting over their home galaxy. 

The rest of the analysis is a nice hypothetical scenario, although it seems to conflate Type 2 (uses the energy of a star) and Type 3 (uses the energy of a galaxy). Your fighting Matrioshka Brain is an example of the former, but galaxy-throwing is the province of the latter (though multiple such brains could comprise it).

28 minutes ago, KSK said:

It's often said that there's no stealth in space. There are also no effective borders. Sooner or later, refugees will escape from even the most repressive regime. More liberal regimes probably won't even try to stop the escapees. Eventually, any sort of 'Galactic Empire' will dissolve into a loose collection of individual systems, all doing their own thing and all largely powerless to stop others doing their own thing. If you want to be pessimistic about it, there probably will be sci-fi superweapons around but MAD will ensure that they're not widely deployed.

Actually, escaping a system is hard, because of two things: there is no stealth in space, and missiles will always have better acceleration than a spaceship. Any repressive regime just has to set up enough missile station to chase after any would-be escapees, and restrict access to effective space-to-space weapons (so they can't just shoot them all down). There are effective borders in space, they just look different than on Earth. Assuming you don't have easy FTL (which can have its own restrictions), borders in space are defined by dV of a typical spaceship. In particular, if starships are hard to come by, escaping from a planet or system-wide regime is impossible. You're not going to have refugees fleeing, especially some poor have-nots, if they have no means to flee. There are no spacegoing wooden dinghies, and it's rather easier to guard a spaceport than a coastline. It would have to be a really liberal regime that provides an interstellar spaceship to everyone who wants out, too. In most cases, your poor, persecuted minority won't be able to afford it.

A major obstacle to interstellar empires is communication. If things happen at lightspeed, you have to accommodate this. Even if you can shorten the travel for travelers themselves via time dilation, for officials on planetside those voyages would still take years. However, I don't think it's an insurmountable problem, it's just that the result will look weird. Some autonomy will be a necessity, but Earth-bound empires have deal with that problem before (albeit on a scale of weeks rather than years).

28 minutes ago, KSK said:

If you really, really can't stand being in the same star system as the rotten heretics, then the next star system over is probably a fine place to live. And if doesn't have any inhabitable planets? That's where O'Neil Cylinders, General Systems Vehicles (pick your sci-fi megastructure of choice) etc. come into play. 

It doesn't work that way. In most cases, the mere existence of heretics is an offense. "Live and let live" is not what most religions preach with regards to nonbelievers. Also, why go through the trouble of building a GSV when you've got an already viable planet? If the cost of war is less than that of building megastructures, it makes economic sense to go to war.

 

Edited January 6, 2020 by Guest

[kerbiloid]

"What if they treat us as heretics?"
Isn't it a good reason for a space war?

[Okhin]

35 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

This one assumption is not necessarily true. In particular, a computer as we know it is not capable of emulating consciousness, regardless of computing power. The reason is that a classical computer is inherently deterministic. Consciousness is not. You cannot simulate a non-deterministic process on a deterministic machine. It is, at this point, difficult to speculate about what quantum computing could do, especially on such scale. Of course, quantum computing is useful, so a Type 2 civ would likely have it, but not necessarily for the purpose of storing consciousness in a Matrioshka Brain. Just as well, it could make a Matrioshka Calculator (a deterministic equivalent, powerful, but not fundamentally different from any Turing-complete computer), or simply use Dyson Spheres for powering things directly (either through antimatter production, or building stuff on the outer surface).

My bad, I just assumed that a type 2 civ will have found a way to synthetically build non-deterministic computers, ie being able to create non-deterministic machine. I do not think quantum computers escape the non deterministic space (I think they're still Turing machine). I mean, if you start upgrading your body and replacing part of it, you can end up with a 100% synthetic body (which, yes, might be flesh and blood, but engineered and not born). Which means you can extract consciousness out of its flesh part to copy it on other parts.

Anyway, yeah, I tend to blur limits between type 2 and 3. Mostly because it's probably only a difference of time between going 2 to 3 (I have issues to imagine a type 2 civilization which could not go type 3, while I can figure a type 1 not going type 2). But even for type 2, throwing stellar bodies at each other and playing galactic or cosmic billiards is, I think, the tipping point of warfare. With a Matrioshka computer ad given the relatively low speed of the stars, I'm even wondering if one civilization could perceive that a stellar body movement happened because another civ at the other side of the galaxy decided to throw that rocky planet at them two million years ago. And I wonder if they could have time to dodge if they did detect it.

How could you know that this comet that's coming to impact your Dyson sphere and shutdown your species forever is the result of another intelligence and not the result of some physics shenanigans ?

At this scale, it become difficult to differentiate arbitrary events (events resulting from a decision made by someone) from natural cosmic events. So you probably won't even know that you're at war when your species will be turned to cosmic dust and radiation noise once again.

[Bill Phil]

Warfare on any scale above interplanetary is...

Useless.

I was going to say impossible, but that isn’t technically the case. You can most certainly wage war acrocss interstellar distances and perhaps even intergalactic distances - but to do is a vast waste of time and resources.

For one thing a civilization may live in widespread habitats that are too small for RKVs to reliably hit from light years away - of course you could shoot a huge swarm of RKVs but that’s an utterly massive waste of energy. There are far more useful things to do with your time.

Antimatter is not the ultimate weapon - anything with a Lorentz factor above 2 (about 0.867c) has a kinetic energy equal to its mass energy, anything faster has more than its mass energy in kinetic energy. These constitute RKVs, and making them of antimatter is pointless since you can just make it faster and get the same effect. They’re certainly deadly but reliably hitting anything is tougher than it seems. Planets? Those could be hit reliably. But there’s nothing stating civilizations only live on planets. Any kind of orbital habitat would be fine. A billion orbital habitats seems like a conservative estimate for a mature stellar civilization. They could be easily spread out over 500 thousand cubic AUs, with about 2000 per cubic AU. Each one could be just a few kilometers in size. And these aren’t static objects. So hitting them from lightyears away, while possible, is a waste. The amount of effort to destroy 2000 habitats requires blanketing an entire cubic AU with RKVs, potentially sizable ones at that. That amount of energy is nothing to sneeze at - you could potentially lift enough mass off of a planet or asteroid to build 2000 or even more habitats with that much energy. The energy balance isn’t favorable. While you’re shooting RKVs at them they’ve expanded and might have even more habitats by the time the RKVs arrive. The only useful methods are ships that can then target enemy habitats after getting close but these ships will be easy pickings for enemy weapons.

There’s also no reason - you’d get more resources spending the energy on star lifting.

Basically - it’s useless. And a big waste of energy.

Eventually things might change as civilizations could transition into much slower forms, but at least in the near term interstellar warfare is not energetically useful - barring any crazy General Relativity tricks that let you scoot around and reach places before light would.

[KSK]

@Dragon01

All that may or may not be true but what you’re describing is hardly an interstellar civilisation in any meaningful sense.

For clarity, I’m defining an interstellar civilisation as one where interactions between star systems are easy enough that the inhabitants of one star system can participate in the affairs of another system if they choose to, either in person or less directly, for example by purchasing goods sourced from another system. Without that participation, I would argue that you don’t have a civilisation.

If communications are limited by lightspeed then the ability of a government to impose its will (political or otherwise) is similarly limited. And without that ability, you end up with a collection of autonomous star systems (or collections of bodies within a given system)  that may or may not choose to swear allegiance to, or abide by the rules of, a notional central government.

Besides, when it comes right down to it, what is the point of an interstellar government, even assuming it was feasible? What does it provide that a star system capable of participating in interstellar affairs can’t provide for itself?

On a couple of more specific points.

Regarding those heretics, okay you have a point. In which case just flip my original premise around and have the persecuted minority escaping a regime that regards them as heretics. 

Regarding megastructures vs planets - if you have the ability to build them there’s simply no contest. A tailor made, completely customisable environment without that pesky gravity well to deal that frees you from having to either find exactly the right sort of rock ball to live on or terraform (probably at even greater expense than building a megastructure) a nearly-good-enough rock ball? 

No, I subscribe to the Ian M Banks model, where a spacefaring, interstellar civilisation will live mostly in space rather than planet side.

Edited January 6, 2020 by KSK

[Guest]

5 minutes ago, KSK said:

Regarding megastructures vs planets - if you have the ability to build them there’s simply no contest. A tailor made, completely customisable environment without that pesky gravity well to deal that frees you from having to either find exactly the right sort of rock ball to live on or terraform (probably at even greater expense than building a megastructure) a nearly-good-enough rock ball? 

No, I subscribe to the Ian M Banks model, where a spacefaring, interstellar civilisation will live mostly in space rather than planet side.

Banks had a lot of things wrong, and this is one of them. Even if you can make a megastrucuture, a planet, especially one that's already habitable, will always be much cheaper to develop and settle. You have resources on hand, you have land that can be used to support habitation and atmosphere to protect the populace. A deep gravity well is not a problem if you can use an air-augmented engine fusion or fission engine to liftoff and land. Considering many megastructures require cannibalizing a planet's worth of mass, terraforming an existing one (which can be as easy as seeding it with the right bacteria) will be cheaper no matter what, and even building enclosed domes could be, thanks to much lower pressure difference, less thermal control problems and resources needed being easier to come by.

6 minutes ago, KSK said:

For clarity, I’m defining an interstellar civilisation as one where interactions between star systems are easy enough that the inhabitants of one star system can participate in the affairs of another system if they choose to, either in person or less directly, for example by purchasing goods sourced from another system. Without that participation, I would argue that you don’t have a civilisation.

Civilization=/=government. One can have interstellar civilization without a single, unified government. A confederacy is an option, or a feudal system where a planetary lord is a vassal of some more powerful, but distant one can also be a thing. The government can also enforce its will by appointing a local representative drawn from its own ranks, who then gets a set of up-top directives, like a Colonial Empire (this is the most recent and most likely form). Communication can be slow, it can be compensated for by planning ahead and having someone on site in case of a crisis.

22 minutes ago, KSK said:

Regarding those heretics, okay you have a point. In which case just flip my original premise around and have the persecuted minority escaping a regime that regards them as heretics. 

You don't see poor refugees come out of Africa in airplanes, yet in general, they are a viable means of travel, communication and shipping. I see starships as a further extension of this idea. Access would be limited in many ways, not possible to most of the public directly (you need to be upper middle class to start considering a private aircraft), but with a widespread ability to use their services when needed. "Non-legitimate" use would still be pretty hard, especially since a starship makes a pretty mighty weapon if you don't have to pay for it, even moreso than airplanes.

Another problem is where to escape. The people they're fleeing are unlikely to build them a space habitat, and I find it unlikely a persecuted group could afford one themselves. Not to mention what's the persecutors from hounding the escapees wherever they go? There is no stealth in space, so they'd have a hard time hiding their location no matter what.

52 minutes ago, Bill Phil said:

Warfare on any scale above interplanetary is...

Useless.

Pretty much, but note that this contradicts your assertion that antimatter is not the ultimate weapon.  RKVs are effectively useless (not to mention the best thing to get them going that fast is antimatter propulsion), and the most practical space to orbit weapon is a missile. This is surprising, but true on any planet with an atmosphere. The most efficient missile warhead that you can design is an antimatter one. 

In practice, the best way to conduct an interstellar war is to send a fleet to the target system, set up a forward base somewhere you can get whatever fuel and propellant you're using, and go on from there. This reduces interstellar warfare to multiple cases of interplanetary warfare, and is by far the most practical way of doing that unless you're a Type 3 civ, and probably even then.

[Bill Phil]

1 hour ago, Dragon01 said:

Banks had a lot of things wrong, and this is one of them. Even if you can make a megastrucuture, a planet, especially one that's already habitable, will always be much cheaper to develop and settle. You have resources on hand, you have land that can be used to support habitation and atmosphere to protect the populace. A deep gravity well is not a problem if you can use an air-augmented engine fusion or fission engine to liftoff and land. Considering many megastructures require cannibalizing a planet's worth of mass, terraforming an existing one (which can be as easy as seeding it with the right bacteria) will be cheaper no matter what, and even building enclosed domes could be, thanks to much lower pressure difference, less thermal control problems and resources needed being easier to come by.

This isn't the place for this debate, but we can do it in miniature.

A megastructure can be quite large indeed, perhaps on the scale of Banks's Orbitals - or very down to Earth in scale; perhaps only a few kilometers in size. The definition isn't very well established. 

Planets are not the place for an expanding technological civilization - Gerard K. O'Neill and numerous others found this result in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

"Habitable" planets are unlikely to ever be found, at least not anytime soon. By "habitable" I mean something that can be settled with little effort beyond landing on it.

While it is true that you have resources on hand, this is also true for asteroids. Simply co-orbit with an asteroid of sufficient size and untold billions of tonnes can be easily retrieved from it.

Atmosphere only does so much to protect the populace - an efficient radar and laser system can easily protect an orbital habitat from meteoroids and any orbital habitat will have extensive radiation shielding.

Deep gravity wells aren't strictly the problem when you have advanced technology, the lack of area is. Not living area, mind you. Radiative area. The principle issue with advanced civilizations is waste heat and getting rid of it. Space-based civilizations in orbital habitats can not only build more living area (thousands of times more using just asteroids) but also more efficiently rid themselves of waste heat. 

Many megastructures do require cannibalizing a planet's worth of mass - but many more do not. For example, some people might call a Stanford Torus a megastructure, others may not. In any case, it is far easier to find and station-keep with an asteroid than land on a planet - one requires a completely different system from the vehicle that crossed interstellar space, one could use the same technology. Generally reducing system complexity is of high importance (though any settlement mission will be one of high complexity).

Terraforming is an immensely wasteful and resource intensive process that requires an industrialized, if not settled, solar system - at least with current technology. It is far cheaper to build orbital habitats from asteroids.

That is to say all of the advantages you mention also apply to orbital habitats, and other advantages do as well.

Planets also make easier military targets (thousands of kilometers in diameter, predictable trajectories years in advance), not to mention a civilization may eventually desire to dismantle the planet in question in order to gain more resources. If it's suitably energy-rich then this is a more efficient use of the planet than settling it.

1 hour ago, Dragon01 said:

Pretty much, but note that this contradicts your assertion that antimatter is not the ultimate weapon.  RKVs are effectively useless (not to mention the best thing to get them going that fast is antimatter propulsion), and the most practical space to orbit weapon is a missile. This is surprising, but true on any planet with an atmosphere. The most efficient missile warhead that you can design is an antimatter one. 

In practice, the best way to conduct an interstellar war is to send a fleet to the target system, set up a forward base somewhere you can get whatever fuel and propellant you're using, and go on from there. This reduces interstellar warfare to multiple cases of interplanetary warfare, and is by far the most practical way of doing that unless you're a Type 3 civ, and probably even then.

No, it doesn't contradict my point.

RKVs across interstellar distances are indeed effectively useless.

No, the best thing to get them to those energies is not antimatter propulsion - indeed antimatter propulsion is an immensely wasteful concept. You already have the energy to create the necessary antimatter and the industry to create large numbers of particle accelerators to mass produce antimatter if you're even considering it - so why not use particle beams and magnetic sails? Some concepts enable ridiculous accelerations and there's no theoretical limit to vehicle energy, only physical ones like how much energy is available.

Jordin Kare proposed the "SailBeam" concept that can accelerate objects fast enough to reach relativistic energies in less than a second (whether or not this is the proper frame or the frame of the accelerator wasn't clear to me - though the difference doesn't matter at that point). 

Antimatter is only something an energy rich civilization would use - and by then it has better options.

Space to orbit weapons are irrelevant - as both the launchers and the targets are in space and in orbit. I suspect you meant surface to orbit weapons. Such weapons are also irrelevant to a civilization that lives entirely in space and only maintains a presence on planets to research and harvest them. Indeed attacking planets may actually help your enemy as it would disassemble it for them - unless you put enough energy into it so that large amounts of the planet's mass exceed stellar escape velocity.

Antimatter is not the ultimate weapon even as the warhead of a rather conventional missile - yes you can get large yields with small amounts of mass, but the relative expense makes antimatter useless as a weapon since thermonuclear warheads or even just fusion boosted fission warheads are immensely cheaper. Indeed bomb pumped lasers may eventually be developed. But this still only applies to planetary or maybe interplanetary warfare, once you're an energy rich civilization war becomes very wasteful and increasingly useless.

Yes, the best way to conduct interstellar war is with fleets sent to the target.

Which are then promptly destroyed by the target system's beam-launchers, lasers, or specially built defense systems. Beam-launchers and propulsion lasers also make suitable weapons. Not to mention short-range RKVs using a derivative of Kare's SailBeam. The fleet will be easily visible, with limited options to maneuver and thus easily predictable trajectories. Even just flooding the region with "stationary" particles would deal immense damage to the attacking fleet. And since the attacking fleet will always have less in terms of resources than the target system the target system will always win.

Interstellar warfare is wasteful and useless.

Edited January 6, 2020 by Bill Phil

[KSK]

@Dragon01

You’re conflating ‘repressed’ with ‘poor’. That isn’t necessarily the case and I’m sure you can think of the obvious example from WW2 without me straying into forum unsafe topics.

I disagree that civilisation =/= government. 

A civilization implies an organised society. Organisation beyond a fairly basic level requires an organising structure or body. Which is a government by any other name. Your feudalism example is still a government. 

But in any case, once your communication times and travel times between nodes of your civilization get large enough then you have a civilization in name only. How long is your planetary governor going to stay loyal to their feudal overlord when that overlord is several tens of light years away and functionally incapable of enforcing their orders? Even if the governor remains loyal, how long will the population at large remain loyal to that far-distant figurehead?

As for a Colonial Empire, please tell me you’re not serious. That hasn’t even proved to be workable on a planetary scale (see: the history of the United States) where distances and communication times made it possible, at least in principle. Over interstellar distances where lightspeed is a limiting factor, the concept is dead on arrival.

 

 

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Bill Phil said:

Jordin Kare proposed the "SailBeam" concept that can accelerate objects fast enough to reach relativistic energies in less than a second (whether or not this is the proper frame or the frame of the accelerator wasn't clear to me - though the difference doesn't matter at that point). 

Bogus. You can't apply this kind of power to a physical object larger than a particle, because it will become particles. Without more details in this miraculous tech, I don't see how such a thing can exist. In fact, I have my doubts whether you even can concentrate that much energy. Really weird quantum stuff starts happening if there's too much of it in one place.

As for weapons, you can't aim at a fleet approaching a star system, huge particle beam array or not. There isn't a turret in existence that can put a narrow beam at an object several AU away. Telescopes work because they have a field of view. A beam weapon does not. Aiming anything that isn't a missile at distances exteeding 10 megameters is a bogus idea unless you saturate an entire volume of space with enough energy to cause damage at a large distance, which is incredibly wasteful.

1 hour ago, Bill Phil said:

Terraforming is an immensely wasteful and resource intensive process that requires an industrialized, if not settled, solar system - at least with current technology. It is far cheaper to build orbital habitats from asteroids.

With current technology megastructures are straight-out impossible, so planets still win.

1 hour ago, Bill Phil said:

Antimatter is not the ultimate weapon even as the warhead of a rather conventional missile - yes you can get large yields with small amounts of mass, but the relative expense makes antimatter useless as a weapon since thermonuclear warheads or even just fusion boosted fission warheads are immensely cheaper. Indeed bomb pumped lasers may eventually be developed. But this still only applies to planetary or maybe interplanetary warfare, once you're an energy rich civilization war becomes very wasteful and increasingly useless.

Bomb pumped lasers are bogus, the concept was tested in IRL and the best they got was an ambiguous result that was most likely just the nuke itself. Antimatter has the highest energy density of all power sources. Nukes work, too, but if you're already making antimatter, you can cram more boom in a single missile (and more missiles on a single ship).

Just now, KSK said:

...and functionally incapable of enforcing their orders?

Pretty big assumption right here. He's not incapable of enforcing orders. He's just gonna take his sweet time about it. Only timescales shift. It might be so that the overlord's fleet will take 25 years to arrive, but if it is powerful enough, it's sufficient. Human lifetime is a problem here, but I think this could be extended. Yes, things will happen with a large delay in such a system, which is why having someone capable on site to handle things that can't wait is paramount. 

3 minutes ago, KSK said:

Organisation beyond a fairly basic level requires an organising structure or body. Which is a government by any other name.

It doesn't. Organization can arise from custom and culture. Civilization does not require a single government. It's a wider (and somewhat less precise) term than a country or state. It can also be religious (see the concept of Christiendom, though that one did have a government of sorts). Or the Greek city-states. They were all Greek, they waged wars with each other, but they were a single civilization, with similar religious beliefs, somewhat common culture, and one language. If anything, a language overlaps with a civilization more than a government does.

3 minutes ago, KSK said:

As for a Colonial Empire, please tell me you’re not serious. That hasn’t even proved to be workable on a planetary scale (see: the history of the United States) where distances and communication times made it possible, at least in principle. Over interstellar distances where lightspeed is a limiting factor, the concept is dead on arrival.

It worked as long as there was a will and military power to keep dealing with the locals. The US only got its shot at freedom when France got involved, if it hadn't, the rebels would've been crushed sooner or later. For a nastier but more successful example, see the Boer War. Of course, a major war with another superpower is an easy way to lose the colonies, which is a major weakness of the system. 

15 minutes ago, KSK said:

You’re conflating ‘repressed’ with ‘poor’. That isn’t necessarily the case and I’m sure you can think of the obvious example from WW2 without me straying into forum unsafe topics.

Most of those repressed are poor, especially if people doing the repressing are after their money. Even in your example, most of these people weren't all that rich (not to mention they mostly ran overland, or hid). Puritans are a better example, actually, in that they actually bought a ship. This, however, depended on the oppressors wanting them gone as opposed to wiped out. In the former case, this can work, although I don't think this would be a common occurrence. However, it would be less about government persecution and more about a group being hated by the ordinary people.