Slashdot Mirror
Canadian Ex-Minister Calls For Serious ET Study
Nom du Keyboard writes "A former Canadian Minister of Defense and Deputy Prime Minister wants Canada to hold public hearings on Exopolitics - relations with Extraterrestrials - to avoid the possibility of intergalactic war. Unfortunately he also proposes starting a 'Decade of Contact', which seems to mean spending a whole lot of public money on UFO education. Is he on the right track here, that we can't afford to ignore the rest of the Universe any longer?" From the article: "The United States military are preparing weapons which could be used against the aliens, and they could get us into an intergalactic war without us ever having any warning ... The Bush administration has finally agreed to let the military build a forward base on the moon, which will put them in a better position to keep track of the goings and comings of the visitors from space, and to shoot at them, if they so decide."
All sci-fi geeks should read it. Considering it's around 60 years old, you have to forgive a bit of old technology, but the story holds up really well.
It's a very interesting "what if" story about first contact.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
If you've never read "Ender's Shadow" then I highly suggest it. The biggest problem in defending yourself against an enemy in space is that it can come from virtually any direction (on earth you have to defend yourself on a 2d surface... slighly more complicated with aircraft are involved but still essentially a 2d plane of attack). In space the planet is mearly a dot and an attack can from any angle.
So if you intend to protect the planet, you have to protect the entire sphere. If you want to take the attack 'away from home' as would be advisable if using a huge nuke as you suggest, then you have to move the defence sphere outward. As you move it out, you increase the surface that you must protect exponentially. It's virtually impossible (virtually... don't hop down my back about a general statement) to defend yourself against a space offensive due to this feature of battle in space. The only way to win is to be on the attack.
Trip I don't think I can agree with you enough .
I served in the US military on a weapons test platform built on a
old DLG destroyer renamed a CG cruiser class, think vietnam era .
The ship was nearly 25 yrs old and in bad shape .
Needless to say we are not anywhere near a 100% target rate .
Taking it a step further, if we have had more than one shuttle blow
up just trying to fly we are in VERY sad shape if a alien race
did decide to take us out .
I think what you see in "War of the Worlds" would be a friggin joke compared to
pinpoint strikes from space by a Instellar Battleship with multiple fusion reactors .
Cloaking technology maybe ??? I think if they didn't want us to see them they
could do that as well, even our gimp tech has stealth .
We have a weak version of the cloak due to a US general wanting the predator tech .
I think the might just bombard the earth with short lived radiation that affects certain
DNA strands and leave the planet completely unscathed but devoid of humans .
What they "could" do is so far and beyond what we can imagine, we would be stunned .
Hell one guy in scooter could fly by and release a bio weapon and we wouldn't even know,
imagine what their molecular biologists could design .
Poof bye humans !
We better hope that so called aliens that can wormhole across the universe are friendly or else
we are so very very screwed .
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Actually, this last one is significant even if there are no aliens within contactable distance of Earth. There are extremely few positive cases of advanced human societies mixing with less advanced societies. The response has ranged from "cargo cults" to extermination campaigns to the utter collapse of native culture, followed by extreme chemical dependencies and other addictions. More than a few of the troubles in the Middle East, for example, have been due to extreme, prolonged culture shock. Many of the islands visited by Captain Cook, described as paradise at the time, are now little more than brothels with an ocean-front view for the rich.
So, whilst I don't regard the call for an Interstellar protocol to be particularly useful in and of itself, IF we take this opportunity to look at how to communicate with others without causing damage, I would consider it a worthy investment of time and effort. If it leads to the undoing of the mindless destruction inflicted in the past, so this world can be the richer for the cultures that still exist, then it will have paid for itself many times over.
If all it does is deter people from questioning how they treat others, then we'll keep paying an absurdly high price from something only a tiny handful will ever get anything from.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Oh hell, you don't need to image any of that weaponry. All they'd have to do is fling rocks at us from orbit and pretty much wipe us out. You know what kind of bang rocks make when they hit at 28,000 miles an hour?
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
But, even in trench warfare, there were multiple rows of trenches, right?
Yes. But only a few miles thickness of trench was manned, iirc. See my earlier comment about this. There's no point manning a trench 200 miles away from the actual warzone.
There were also troops and hospitals and such behind the trenches.
Yes. But their prevalence was a function of the area of the trenches, not of the area the trenches were protecting. And, as I already mentioned, the area of the trenches was approximately a linear function of the length of the defended area's perimeter. There were occupation forces inside cities in there. Couldn't one view planets as being equivalent to such cities, only stragegically far more important because of the difficulty of the intelligence task of analyzing a planet's stragetic stance?
There's no good short-term military reason to hold cities. The main short-term reasons for attempting to hold them are a) it makes for bad PR to lose them and b) it's a bitch to win them back (city warfare 0wns). Neither of these reasons apply to dead planets (no-one cares even if you do nuke the bastards). Planets with a large population will be able to support their own defence force. The only slight complication is lines of supply, but planets would tend to be far more self-sustaining than cities. Obviously in the long term cities are essential sources of high-tech products, but shipping raw materials to, and finished goods from, another planet is not terribly plausible (and unnecessary if the planet is dead) so this reason evaporates.
Planets are not the cities of space, they're the lush valleys. Wonderful places to live, but relatively indefensible and not worth fighting over if they're not occupied.
At that point, you'd have to argue that your occupation expands as a band across your holdings, or am I still missing something here?
On the whole, the concept of "holdings" in space isn't very useful. Yes, you could build bases on asteroids and the like but, if you made it too difficult for enemies to drive you off, they could just nuke the hell out of you with no real repercussions.
Given the cost and time lag of transporting stuff in space (assuming no warp drives, which would open up an entirely different tactical bag of weasels), the areas you'd be defending would be a limited number of high-density, almost entirely self-sufficient population centres which would be extremely remote from each other. Rather than defending these as a group (i.e. trying to protect the entire solar system) it makes much more sense to defend them individually, in which case the problem reduces to the 2D defence previously discussed.
The only exception I can think of to this approach is stuff like asteroid belt mining and so on. With these, you'd effectively just have to accept that your operation was indefensible and attempt to move with extreme stealth, relying on the massive volume of the belts to protect you.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!