Pellegrino's Pre-emptive Prophylactic, or Planetary Suicide

Pellegrino's Pre-emptive Prophylactic, or Planetary Suicide

Anyone read Flying to Valhalla, Charles Pellegrino? In it he and others list Pellegrino, Powell and Asimov's Three Laws of Alien Behavior:

#1: Their survival will be more important than our survival.
#2: Wimps don't become top dogs. [Or, any chance we can wipe them out is too big a risk for them to take.]
#3: They will assume the first two laws apply to us.

It's fairly easy to use big solar arrays to accumulate enough anti-matter to propel a smallish
spacecraft/missle to 92% or so of c. As soon as anyone with space capacity hears radio signals, they can, should and will set about building a relativistic missile as fast as possible and send it on an intercept course. At .92 of lightspeed, it is too fast to detect in time, and too energetic to stop or intercept. It penetrates the atmosphere in about a millisecond, leaving a 20-200 mile diameter vacuum hole, and tosses crustal debris 1000+ miles up. That column collapses and scours the surface, and leaves black skies for a few months or years...everywhere. The impact is a few hundred million megatons, or about 10,000 times the total nuclear arsenal of Earth at its peak. Some thermophilic bacteria might survive its effects.

So that's the answer to Fermi's Paradox ("Where are they?") Every race careless or naive enough to broadcast, even briefly and by accident while developing radio, has targetted itself. As a result, all techno-societies have been destroyed by others. (With the time lags involved, mutual destruction is both likely and easy.) All we can conclude from our own survival so far is that none are left within about 35 ly of Earth (turnaround time for signal out, missile back.)

Treasure each millisecond, it may be your (our) last!

P.S. Charles Pellegrino did not use the term "Prophylactic"...it's just my summary of the philosophy/strategy which requires prevention and forbids communication.

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There's just this one problem.
There is no use to think your theory is correct or not. The signal has been sent and voyager is on its way. We can not stop the signals we sent and thay with c speed are distancing from us.
So if any alien race decides to destroy us, astalavista baby.

But I think that thay won't do that. If they can build anti-matter rocket or smth like tht, they must be far more intelligent thn us. They will first go to us[ wormholes, dimension drive, hyper drive or smth we haven't thinked of]. Examine and only then destroy it if they want. From what we have seen, the more we evolve the less wars we create.
And how can they think of self-protection if we are primitive compared to them. You won't destroy a small tribe in Africa with thermo-nuclear explosion.
And why do you think thay will consider our signals ie. us as threat. If we had the ability, would we destroy new found intelligent life-forms in Alpha Centaury system, if we go there. No we wouldn't. Of course we may have and have different psyhology and views thn aliens, but still I consider tht their intelligence is reasonable.

 

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FTL dreams

Faster Than Light transport or communication solves all problems. But that would likely be centuries of development after near-c travel. Who could afford to wait? Especially since it may not be possible at all.

In the universe of light-speed limits, there is no way to investigate or prepare. All you can do is blast away immediately.

 

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the main question was. if we vere in oposite position ie. we caught the signal and we had near-c speed technology, would we without questionig destroy the source.
and take in mind tht then we would probably be much more "intelligent" than now?

I would appreciate a honest answer.
BTW. nice discussion point.

 

Would we or Wouldn't we

Well, you have to figure the odds.

If they saw us first and have sent an RM (Relativistic Missile) on its way, then nothing we can do will save ourselves, so blasting them has no particular value except revenge.

If we saw them first, and it's going to take longer for them to see us &/or get to the RM-capable level than our RM will take to hit them, then we have a possibility of hitting them before they can "shoot." So blasting them saves us the chance of them getting us.

If we saw them first, but it's at all likely that they'll have RM capability before our RM gets them, then blasting them has no point except revenge for a possible/probable RM heading our way.

And so on. The trouble is there's no way to know who saw who first. So it's possible that we can save ourselves by shooting first, and possible that not shooting will give them a chance to hit us.

So we are smarter to shoot as soon as we can. And so are they. In any case, we might as well, because if we don't get them, someone else will.

The only way I can see for our (or any) civilization to survive is to establish a distant colony before getting blasted and warn them never to use radio or other EM transmission or emission. It's too late for us, probably. But since Alpha Centauri hasn't blasted us, and is only 4 ly away, it would likely be safe for us to go there and keep very quiet until we could jump to another star.

 

Not more intelligent

One more thing; you say that if they have anti-matter propulsion they must be more intelligent than us. Not at all. We could do it in a couple of decades, and that is a tiny fraction of an eyeblink cosmologically. Civilizations could be anything from thousands to millions to billions of years older than us. So they need only be slightly more advanced in physics and engineering.

 

But there is another catch.

If we by tht time could have a colony in other star system close by, they could too. And when we nuke down their home-planet, little guys frm tht other planet won't hesitate to send us a reply.

And what if they are more advanced thn we think. Lets say some 200K years. They have made a perimeter in star systems close by and can atomaticly recatch our missle. [quantum computers and light speed laser weapons[c speed not near-c, like our missle]
They destroy our missle en route and then you could be sure that our planet is nuked. So yes it is a good idea to establish colonies in near star systems and keep quiet. Maybe use a different kind of communication, but I still do not beleive tht they will destroy us by the first signal.
And one more thing. It is quite funny.
They recatch on of our sci-fi movies like Aliens, or Stargate, Startreck. And they don't have movies in their ulture. They would think tht there is a civilization more advanced thn theirs. With endless flotils of spaceships and colonies all over.
How do you think, how will they react to it

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A most unusual discussion and subject.

Here we run into what drives the alien. Self-interest and survival. I would think that the issue of maybe the "target race" would be looked at from the perspective that all must be gotten at the first strike or no action taken until that is a sure thing. To do otherwise is an invitation for a return answer. Almost a demand. A topic that must be considered by the species that contemplates such action.

For the paranoid species, they may well consider this radio transmission as an invitation for others to knock on the door with a response as outlined in the thread. So, would they bury their transmissions in the noisy hydrogen band of interstellar radio noise? Is this the key to why SETI has had no luck in producing evidence of another species in existence in the universe? For us it is too late to say, “We are not here”, for we have been announcing our presence for nearly a hundred years, or since the appearance of radio technology introduced into our lives. We know of no way to retrieve those announcements, if they could be retrieved. Further, we have purposely sent out invitations for a response. In another thread within this forum is one such message that has been sent. http://www.sciforums.com/t4581/s/thread.html Another is the Voyager Space probe, with golden plaque, which says we are here and we look like this. All did with the idea of how to get the message across to anyone with technology and the ability to do basic math. While the probe could be retrieved, the messages can not. So what if there are more than one species with such mentality? Does the target race receive a double whammy at different spaced intervals as both respond to such a message? Is this a What have we done?, too late the realization of what we have committed ourselves to?

In that thought it might be possible to do the thing that is the basis for some of the WWII submarine movies. The scenario that a destroyer is dropping depth charges to destroy the sub. The sub sends out the tubes some rubbage to leave the indication that they got them. In reality we would have to do something like sending out all the worlds nuclear missiles into space and explode them and then go silent to the electromagnetic spectrum. This in hopes that we could fool any listening ears to the idea that we had eliminated the threat our existence posed.

I am of the opinion that the distances are simply to great for such answers. That any such missile would require a race that has advanced far beyond us. As such they must also realize this, as technological discoveries must follow a basic guide rule. You may not develop radio before you discover metal working, for instance. And further that you must develop the ability to make a vacuum and combine the two to make a tube or valve as some of our oversea members would call it. They would also know by this general guideline at about where we were by the messages they receive. If this is the case then they would also know that even if we know they existed that we could not do more than send a signal beamed in their direction. No answer to that signal would leave us no other option as far as contacting them. As such we would be of no threat to them.

As to the thought of a RM sent, and another sent because of revenge motive. This is exactly what we have been living with in the nuclear age with the MADD policy.

Just a thought in response to the topic of the thread. Welcome to Sciforums, Brainz0.

 

To Blast, or Not To Blast....

Good response, wet1. But you may be overlooking the two big catch points.

1) Fermi's Paradox: "If all this is going on, they should be here by now. Where are they?"

2) Even the chance that they may be able and inclined to blast us is too big a risk to take.

The result of these considerations is that (a)there are no surviving civilizations, because they immediately blasted each other as soon as they showed up in the radio band; (b)if you hold back, you are wagering your species' survival on the good will or stupidity of every other species that can or will ever hear you.

So we must blast, and the first species that will hear or has heard us will send or has already sent an RM missile. We are doomed, no two ways about it...unless every species has already been blasted. Then all we have to do is keep our eyes and ears open for new species arising in the future, and have our RMs ready to go on a moment's notice.

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Re: To Blast, or Not To Blast....

but did you consider tht they have ,ore thn one inhabitable planet they live in.
If we nuke them and do not destray all of their colonies, they get very pissed and destroy us for sure.
So I think tht on our top priority list is c+ speed communications.
We have to keep in mind the threat and establissh outer solar system colonies, but not nuke thm. And one more thing. What if it was their spaceship sending tht signal. How can we predict the orbit of their 200lyear away planet. If there are not 9 but 15 planets in their star sistem. Too big is the chanche tht we would hit another planet. Like Jupiter for us. And if they see then tht their moon or smth is destroyed again it is strike back quarnteed.

Maybe we should consider tht fake planet destroy signal, wet1 suggested. tht should work best.

 

We'll all Fry Together When We Fry....

A spaceship can't emulate a whole planet's babble. Anyway, all sources are blasted. And the RM is equipped with enough smarts to spiral in refining its trajectory, and pinpointing actual inhabited planets. Maybe it's MIRVed, able to split into a half dozen submissiles some distance away from a solar system.

Anyway, don't forget: the skies are silent, so everyone out there has already BEEN blasted, or almost. So it's a fact that it works. All we can hope is that there are none left. If SETI hears someone, then we're f'ed, for sure.

 

and one more

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why do you think tht they have researched radio communications.

evolution may develop differently[very very differently] on other planets. mabe consider thelepatic communications, laser communications, where signal is directed strictly to the target.

If they have thelepatic communications there is no need for developing radio wave technology. Or maybe some kind of technology we haven't thinked of.


BTW. I prefer tht SETI will not hear smth up too, or at least till then, when we have evolved enough and have colonies in about 10 other star systems and of course The United Armed Forces Of Solarian Federation.

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When we are smart enough and equiped with super-tech weapons, then is the time to seek for others out there, but not earlier.

 

Being as the Fermi pardox has been mentioned prehaps you might be interested in a previous thead from not long ago.

http://www.sciforums.com/t4811/s/thread.html

In this thread are some of the same answers given here. There is other stuff there that might apply here too. Such as the technological gap effect between communicating species.

While Brainz0 lays out a particulary damning scenario for the justification for shoot first and answer later it goes against the grain to assume this to be the case. I know, personal feelings do not stand up to species genocide. I am of the opinion that intellegence follows the same basic rule of thumb everywhere. It is learned somewhere along the line in each individuals life that the possibility of helping ones fellow may be returned by being helped at a later time. This and co-operative hunting and farming encourages a society type condition. Societies of any nature tend to empathize the ideas of helping ones fellow and in doing so help society, which then helps the originator of the action.

I know that one of the responce will be that we can not judge what an alien would think or feel. But we must start somewhere and lay basic ideas from which to start any discussion. We truely do not know that any life exists outside of our own little sand grain in the woods. We have no proof and must guess that maybe...maybe other life could exist because we do. This is a supposition in itself. One that Drake tried to cope with in the Drake equation. But when all is said and done there still remains no firm proof that any other life exists. Maybe our first indication will be that RM knock on the door....

 

Fermi & Pellegrino

None of the other arguments are very persuasive. Here are some numbers:

If a star-travelling-civilization (stc) creates one new colony each 1000 years, and that colony does the same, and so on, it would take less than 1 million years to SATURATE the galaxy with their colonies. Since the galaxy has had suitable stars and probably planets for perhaps 7 billion years, and it takes about three billion to evolve a smart species, that leaves 4,000 million-year periods for any stc to spread through the galaxy. So the only answer to Fermi is, "There aren't any ... left. They've all been blasted, except for the few that are hiding really, really well." We aren't hiding, so we will be blasted.

Don't forget the second PPA rule: "Wimps don't become top dogs." That implies that you don't take chances that some other top dog MIGHT be out there ready to blast you, so you keep your RMs hot and ready to fly.

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And should this be the case we are not prepared to even defend ourselves. Maybe not in the next century will we be able to do so. At present the only thing that might save us is getting out of this one basket of eggs.

If this is the case and some else has a RM with our name on it, I would think that there would be a follow up of some kind to ensure that there were no stray pockets left. After all one can not be to careful with this kind of thinking and action because the end results in not being through is a retaliation of some sorts down the road.

 

Presactly !!

There are all sorts of spin-off issues and considerations here.

Also, I think that any RM should be sent in on an irregularly spiralled course, so that its origin and present position were undetectable and unknowable to the target.

Pellegrino's book, BTW, deals with a society on Alpha Centauri that wiped us out 33 MY ago, and degenerated in the meantime so that when we get there they are barely technological.

 

The Ultimate Long Distance Call

By Seth Shostak
SETI Institute
posted: 07:00 am ET
27 December 2001
http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_long_distance_011227.html

It's one thing to search for intelligent aliens, but it's another to
actually talk to those we might find. This isn't just a matter of what language (if any!) to use, or even how to encode the information. Encoding for mutual understanding is merely a daunting technical challenge. For example, should we broadcast messages using pulse code modulation, AM radiospread-spectrum techniques, or something we don't have a name for yet? Until we pick up a signal, we really haven't a clue.

Go to SETI' related SPACE.com stories

Decoding E.T.: In Search of a Cosmic Rosetta Stone
The key to decoding ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics was found
in a slab called the Rosetta Stone. This stone contained the same text written in three languages. And because European linguists were extremely familiar with one of the three languages, they could draw links between the three versions and thereby translate the writing system they hadn't previously been able to crack: Egyptian hieroglyphics. Untunately, if we get a message from extraterrestrials, we can't count on them laying out direct
translations between one of their languages and, say, English or Swahili.


Decoding E.T.: Ancient Tongues Point Way To Learning Alien
Languages.
The modern Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is
based on the premise that a systematic search of the cosmos may reveal artificial signals, transmitted either intentionally or, somewhat like the leakage of TV and radio signals from Earth today, as electromagnetic noise.

SETI@home: Signal Crunching Yields Little So Far
More than a dozen "candidate signals" have been snagged by a
global network of volunteers in a search for extraterrestrial intelligence called SETI@home. But one by one, the prospective SETI "hits" have been downgraded to misses and tagged as radio interference.

How Far is ET?
How many light-years is it to the nearest alien civilization?
In 1960, when Frank Drake made the first modern effort to eavesdrop on radio signals from ET, he trained his antenna on two relatively close stars, Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti: respectively 10 and 12 light-years from Earth.

TODAY'S DISCUSSION

What do you think of this story?

Uplink your views.
As for what language to use, better minds than mine are wrestling with that particular adversary. Personally, I vote for pictures.
But aside from these difficulties, there's another problem that's as
obvious as Mae West: it takes time for signals to traverse interstellar distances. The speed of light, fast as it is, is finite. Watch as CNN news anchors talk with their correspondents in Afghanistan. There's always a bit of a delay between question and answer. This isn't because the correspondents are slow-witted, but is simply a consequence of the time it takes the signals to ping-pong up to the communications satellites and back
down to Earth. Annoying, but not devastating.

Of course, conversing with extraterrestrials is going to be more
than merely annoying. The nearest star, Alpha Centauri, is roughly 4 light-years distant, as every school child can remind you. That's an 8 year delay between query and response. Three exchanges into the conversation, and your kids have already graduated from college.

But the aliens are unlikely to be hanging out at Alpha Centauri
(which has been fairly carefully scanned for signals already). We've noted in a previous article that if there are 10,000 broadcasting civilizations in the Galaxy, then the nearest one will be 500 to 1,000 light-years away. The resultant conversational delay will be measured in millennia. That's tedious.

But it leads to a provocative thought. If the aliens are altruistic
(they just want to beam information into space, and don't care about chatting), then the long turn-around time doesn't matter. But if they are "pinging" nearby stars with a giant laser in the hope of waking up their galactic neighbors, then it's reasonable to assume that they won't blast away at targets that are so distant that they can't expect a response within an alien lifetime.

This prompts a simple, but interesting calculation: for any given
lifetime, how many star systems can an alien reasonably ping?

To make the computation, we need to know the average space density of stars. Big stars, those heftier than the Sun, have a density of 0.0004 stars per cubic light-year. Smaller stars, the ones we believe are better candidates for hosting sophisticated life, are (thankfully) more plentiful, checking in at 0.001 stars per cubic light-year. Wielding that number and a bit of middle school geometry, you can work out the following:

N = 0.0005 t3,

Where t is the lifetime of an alien broadcaster, and N is the number of stars that can be pinged with the hope of having an answer before death.
Readers who have misplaced their pocket calculators can use the table below to look up N for various alien lifetimes.

t (years)
N

50
65

100
520

200
4,100

1,000
500,000

5,000
65 million


For example, if your lifetime is a hundred years and you want to
chat, then there are 520 good stars within range.

What can we conclude from this? Optical communications are more
likely to be deliberately targeted. But there's no point in flashing the neighbors unless you believe there's at least a decent chance of getting a reply. Even being relatively optimistic about the number of savvy societies in our Galaxy, most astronomers suspect that only one star system in a million or so is likely to host thinking beings. Bottom line? If we find flashing lights in the sky, then it's probable that the guys behind the high-powered lasers at the other end have managed to engineer themselves to
have lifetimes of thousands of years or more.

It's a speculative thought, but an interesting one. If we hear from
ET, not only can we expect his civilization to be an old one, ET himself may be quite long in the tooth.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

SETI = death

Banshee;

That cut&paste is interesting, but kind of off topic. The question here is whether, as Pellegrino postulates, the first communication we or any planet is likely to get from an alien culture is a relativistic missile which destroys all higher life on the planet.

Read the other posts and let us know if you have a relevant comment.

 

Wet1

To go back a few posts, you suggest that they would know that we are not advanced enough to be a threat. You forget the time delays. Say they are 50 ly away. Any info they have is 50 years old, and their RM would take about 55 years to arrive. That's a total of 105 years, and by that time our technology would likely have easily advanced to the point where we would have detected them and prepared and sent off our own RM to them. So they don't wait for proven advancement. The INSTANT they know where we are, they blast us.

 

Yes I understood when I wrote it what that would imply.

In our case we have yet to develop such weapons. In the time it would take to make such a weapon reality you could bet that all transmission would continued to be monitered. We can not actually speak for another civilization. Maybe as you suggested they already have such weapons and are ready to use them. But what if they don't? Or what if those who have already used them are now nonexistant because they missed a total kill?

Once you start down this road of Johnny Fast Draw, you had better be sure you get them all first shot. The next one is likely not to be your shot but the return answer.