/sci/ - Science & Math

>>2719969
More advanced technology doesn't stop a relativistic kill vehicle from hitting your planets. The position of an object moving faster than 0.12 C cannot be determined by a stationary observer, physics says so. So they cannot be intercepted.

You would program probes to seek out life bearing exoplanets and crash into them an top speed, which for nuclear pulse propulsion is .15C if you burn all the fuel and don't plan on decelerating. And if you programmed those same probes to accelerate toward any repeating, terminating radio signal and crash into the source body you could all target intelligent species. For that matter you could have them detonate there bomb stockpile before impact to scatter relativistic shrapnel cones at space habitats.

When probes or colonists arrive at a new stellar system they should create several thousand non-replicating rvks and launch them at any non-human derived transmissions they detected in salvos of ten thousand or so. That would ensure there are enough rvks to soften up the civilization being targeted. Then you could just invade with colonization ships. And if those vessels used confined reaction engines they could use the engine exhaust as a weapon to attack enemy forces as they decelerated into the system. Now it will probably take hundreds of years of relativistic bombardment and several waves of invading colony ships to invade a stellar system. But a stellar system is worth the effort, and better in the hands of men than aliens.

>>2689503
Rise up sons of Man! For your Gods! For your Empires! For yourselves! For your Blood and your children yet unborn!

Use the spear of science to piece the heavens and stab at those who would deny you your rightful and central place in the universe.

Burn the natural, purge the animal, kill the alien!


All things will know and follow the will of mankind, for we will give them no other option.

>>2158155
I detect soft scifi bullshit. Where to start?

>RACIST
Oh boy. The reason racist does not work is because there are variations in physical an mental capabilities within each general race of humans at least as great as an difference between the average of any two races. Basically any differences differences between to races of humans are not great enough to affect there comparative utility to society.

And as for transhumans and machines, if you are descended from homos sapiens sapiens you are phylogenetically human. More over they are designed with human prides and prejudices in mind, and hence would display human behaviors and thought patterns if only because we would want them to.

But this is not the case among different species. Aliens may be stronger or weaker, smarter or dumber than humans. But even more than that they are evolved from completely different bacteria with alien biochemistries, aliens physiologies, and alien behaviors. There brains would literally be constructed differently than our own. There would be no thoughts like our thoughts in their heads, no feelings like our feelings in there hearts. Alien minds are alien. We would be monsters to one another. And given that only aggressive species are likely to spread to other stars, now you have two aggressive alien beings coming into conflict for resources. War is inevitable. Just as animals are below moral consideration. Aliens are above it. Morality does not apply to interspecies conflict, only survival matters.

>>2066056
All this culminates in the ultimate plan for species survival, to completely disassemble the all the rocky planets of every stellar system we can get access to and us that mass to build Dyson Swarms of space habitats around the local stars. That way we can continue to survive around those stars until they burn out, which in the case of the lowest mass red dwarfs would be about 120 trillion years. The largest lofstrom loops possible with current engineering can lift 500 million tons a year and you could only fit about 1000 on earth it would still take nearly 10 million years to disassemble the planet. But it can be done only with proven technology, no super materials or new energy sources needed. You could power them using huge convection towers that contain liquid halite, which would be heated by the hot lithosphere you are uncovering. And of course the job would only get easier as the planet is taken apart: less gravity, more heat being radiated, more materials for building and maintaining the loops. That said you still have to use nuclear pulse propulsion to move the material for the first loop into orbit, about 2 million tons of it. But with nuclear pulse propulsion that is doable. We can conquer the cosmos with only what we know today, no soft scifi stuff needed. It will just take a very, very long time. Now of course you can't disassemble stars, or for that matter high mass objects like gas giants. But the earth sized planets or at least large portions of their lithospheres can be consumed. So any species that begins ruthlessly expanding could pull a Stalin and crush all the pacifist space hippies into oblivion with the weight of our own corpses if need be.

>>2036458
Footfall is the name of the novel. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footfall

Micheal is the ship.
One thing I that always bugs me about scifi is that none of the scientists act like most other scientists I know. There are far fewer Carl Sagans and Oppenheimer in my circles than there are Edward Tellers and Strange Loves.

One day we were talking about this very thing and we ended up calculating the total yield of the largest hydrogen bomb that you could send in a 100,000 ton payload orion, then deorbit onto a target. We came up with something like 800-950 teratons. Essentially nine times the yield of the Chicxulub impact. Of course someone else said it would take the whole world ten years to make enough deuterium for it.

Of course we are mostly Geologist so our lives are all "You must acquire more vespene gas."

Yeah for humanity and space imperialism.