Universal weaponry

Hi Veeky Forums. I'm developing robust acausal trades for minimally violent first contact with extraterrestrial alien races. I've been able to successfully deescalate in most situations, but I'm starting to run into a particular recursive problem.

Supposing that you can demonstrate that there's a tactical need for every sovereign species to be able use everything short of it, is there any reason we shouldn't also assume that any given entity, faction, or polity shouldn't also be able to use the universe as a weapon against itself? That is to say, if you can use everything short of the universe as a weapon to defend yourself from the entire universe, is there any moral, logical, rational, tactical, or metaphysical reason that you shouldn't just be able to make the leap to using the entire universe as a weapon against itself?

If you need any background or context I can explain it. You can assume that any hypothetical faction that opposes your argument would at the very least be able to fully understand it.

what the everloving fuck are you on about

>using the entire universe as a weapon against itself
Why are you hitting yourself?

start explaining the background and context plz

We'll meet aliens some day so I'm preparing for it. Ideally, we'll never see war in space. I'm treating peace like an invention, and treaties as something we can create in advance. It's not that we'll agree enough with an alien race to prevent war, but that by forming acausal trades, we can signal a hope for initially cordial relations.

One of the situations I've supposed involves being the commander of a multi-faction series of planets who have a long-standing history of interplanetary trade, and don't want to risk their entire collective way of life for the sake of some random upstart galactic authority. They'd have the status to weaponize against galactic consensus and a reason to fight, given that nobody has as-of-yet been able to successfully claim to represent the galaxy. Failing to prevent a galactic government from forming would risk failing to achieve a seat in an eventual hypothetical universal parliament. They'd have to make their stand at the advent of a potential galactic control structure, and in doing so could end up being pushed into a corner where they feel they have to do Really Stupid Shit to protect themselves.

Even if it seems naive and stupid now, over time this situation is apparently becoming ever-more likely in my simulations.

I have a recursive interface I use to simulate possible outcomes of interplanetary politics. The distances between stars are the primary factor in preserving peace, but I have to factor in FTL travel and embedded exofactions so we can't always assume draconian anti-reactions to every species that wants to make a play for galactic influence.

If everything "short of" the universe is already contained within the universe, then aren't those already examples of the universe being used as a weapon / defense against itself? There wouldn't really be a "leap" to begin with.

But really wtf are you talking about

No civilization is "born" with hyperweapons. It takes every civilization a long time to reach the level of technology where they can realistically have a weapon that destroy planets. Asteroid colonies are far easier to destroy in comparison; ordinary sabotage of vital life systems works fine.

The thing is, it's hard to "hide" the potential danger of any weapons you develop. At some point in megascale engineering, it becomes impossible to "hide" your intent without equally monumental cloaking technology. There is no default universal authority for any civilization to have right to claim any kind of physical or tactical advantage over any other. Without an inter-civilization contract, everyone has every right to suspect every activity of every other civilization. Thus, because of either physical or distance limitations, certain scales of weaponry aren't possible without interplanetary cooperation. There's no "galactic destroyer," even if you can weaponize black holes. You have to manually go around destroying each civilization in turn, at which point you've lost any capacity to hide what you're doing.

It's a huge metatactical hypothetical game, and every space-faring civilization is a player. The "right" to use any scale of weaponry is the key factor in obtaining any dominion beyond your home world.

It is 2018 check your time travel shit

The only thing time travel really changes as far as I've found is the nature of universal consensus on the value of predictive technology. In models where time travel is possible, time traveling factions outpace and merge with predictive technologies far faster than "traditionalist" factions. All it really does on a political level is normalize embedded exofactions permanently.

It also allows for tricky things like universal and even multiversal authorities to form, but the non-interventionist parameters hold, for the most part. Eventually every civilization reaches a stable point of peace from which acausal negotiations can be mounted. Peace, you could say, is the only unavoidable outcome.

Hi / sci /。我正在開發強大的因果交易,與外星人首次接觸外星人最低限度的暴力。我已經能夠在大多數情況下成功排除,但是我開始遇到一個特定的遞歸問題。

假設你可以證明每一個主權物種的戰術需要都能夠利用一切事物,那麼是否有任何理由我們不應該假設任何特定的實體,派別或政體都不應該也能夠使用宇宙是對自己的武器?也就是說,如果你可以用宇宙中的一切東西作為武器來保衛自己,那麼是否有道德,邏輯,理性,戰術或形而上學的理由,你不應該能夠跳躍使用整個宇宙作為對自己的武器?

如果您需要任何背景或環境,我可以解釋它。你可以假設任何反對你的論點的假設派別至少能夠完全理解它。

人類為什麼要爭論如何命名在天上的星星?

如果你可以計算出一顆行星,軌道,太陽的大小,為什麼國家在誰可以命名晚上白光打?

This will only work with mutually assured destruction and we are no way near that capability even on the interstellar stage, let alone in the terms of galactic powers.

On a technological level, planetary desolation isn't all that difficult. The hard past is getting close and delivering more than one blow, without being identified as the instigator. It's reasonable, on a certain level, to assume that every space-faring civilization will have gone through its own cold war period and be intimately familiar with the reasons why that sucks. Even if it's just extremists that caused it, whatever culture was willing to tolerate that sequence of events and overcome it from either a population-wide or administrative level is liable to remain the dominant culture as the species transitions to space. Things that can't make it that far, planets that we make first contact with when they are too primitive to be a threat, or even to begin cogitating interstellar negotiations, aren't relevant for the continued future of the simulation. Civilizations that die off, times of peace that stretch for thousands of years, and any civilization that loses a dominion-class war are all null data in the simulation.

Through conquest or contract, we end up with an interstellar standoff that's more of a risk for each civilization in turn to be the first to fire than to just wait out. We're already physically divided by literal space, ignorance of each other's language and culture and technological advancement, and for some period of time I don't yet have the data to calculate, advance knowledge of universal physics.

I'm working to predict what I can, now, that will allow us the most freedom to develop without triggering a flag for interstellar war. Ideally I'll eventually be able to break the future into sections so we can be aware of our contact level as we pass through every stage of the development of our civilization. We're certainly not space-faring yet, and there's no indication that we'll be left alone long enough to become one under our own power of autonomy and authority, but in case we do, hopefully my work will help seed peaceful relations.

bap

Cringiest role-playing I have seen on Veeky Forums.

Roleplay is literally the only tool we have to prepare for eventual contact. We have no idea what we'll eventually encounter, so running simulations of millions of possible outcomes is the only reasonable solution. I obviously don't have the resources to run that many simulations, and the ones I do run probably aren't very realistic yet, nor do I have any way of calculating how likely any given scenario is, but I'm not aware of anyone else doing any research like this.

I initially modeled three different types of contact. The first was us being met now (or early into the 20th century) by an interstellar race with technology far surpassing our own. The second is meeting civilizations in interstellar space when our civilization are on par with one another technology wise. The third is us discovering/contacting alien civilizations when their species is still very primitive. Even with hypothetical technologies to escape gravity well, it doesn't pay to have the first contacters unaware of the concept of contact protocols. I haven't gotten to the point where I feel I can confidently predict/run a simulation of what ET might do if they find us this far along in our development without having developed contract protocols to go along with it, but for the most part I don't expect them to be irrationally violent about first contact. It might seem a naive assumption to you to assume that other species will come up with the idea of acausal trade and preemptive peace talks and treaties, and perhaps it is, but my analysis from assuming several different configurations of first contact show that there's a very good chance that there's actual value in having them. It certainly doesn't hurt to have them early, especially if we'll be punished for not having them.

(I haven't been able to find a sufficient acausal justification for punishing a species for not developing contact protocols by a certain point in their development, but maybe I just haven't gotten that far yet.)

Because of the rapid acceleration of technological progress due to positive feedback loops, it is very unlikely that an encounter between two civilizations will ever be on equal footing. You're practically guaranteed to have one far more advanced than the other, up to some physical limit on technology which we have no way of determining. So scrap that scenario and you're left with two others: we're more advanced or they're more advanced.

Regardless of whatever contact protocols either party may or may not have bothered setting up beforehand, the fundamental issue is trust. Assuming both parties are space-faring, both are aware of the fact that the other is aware of the fact that the universe possesses limited resources for the continued survival of their species, and both parties are aware that survival is a likely ultimate goal of the other party given that they've made it this far. In short neither party has any reliable way of verifying the intentions of the other, no matter what they might say or do. What's more, you are both aware that of the fact that the other is likely doing this mental exercise in their heads as well. You end up with an infinitely long chain of suspicion and effectively an extreme version of the prisoner's dilemma, and since one is more advanced than the other, the most likely outcome is that the least advanced civilization is wiped out.

>no matter what they might say or do
This is correct, and you may be right that there's no way of verifying intentions. Most of my models rely on analysis of what the other civilizations builds. Regardless of survival, the tools for interstellar-class survival have specific and identifiable engineering traits, as do scalar weapons. Spoken intent means little when languages differ significantly and share no common roots whatsoever. Intent is measured primary by what is built, not what is said. We can also guess what they might be planning to build based on their import patterns. We're not really discussing civilizations so primitive that they haven't solved every conceivable resource dilemma that could occur under known physics.

>an infinitely long chain of suspicion
Right, and if we can remove even the smallest fraction of those suspicions, we can move forward and try to work together. I tend to think physics is a limiting factor, and the sheer distance between stars makes it hard to justify specifically attacking a planet when there are so many uninhabited ones to terraform.

I'm researching primarily to determine where it ends if it turns out to not be infinitely long, and what we might all collectively assume as future acausal trade partners. If there's an end to the road, I hope to find it and eventually publish my work.

>the least advanced civilization is wiped out
In my models, when assuming a commander's position, I've felt no particular need to wipe out lesser civilizations when they can just as easily be controlled. War takes resources, and doesn't give back as readily as overt contact manipulation does. War in general, from every angle I've analyzed it, is evolutionarily unsustainable.

At first I was going to say but now I'm not sure if or are better.

This is not a thread about science, it just barely qualifies as science fiction.

the odds of an alien species meeting us in space and being technologically similar is extremely low. they'd either see us as very inferior or highly superior. I'm comfortable with the stance that aliens either have no interest in establishing relations, are waiting for humanity to progress into space colonization, or have no real ability to contact us without contact being a net negative for them. We should have been conquered before civilization started and bred into a similar to modern state if the aliens are malicious and if they are benefactors then their presence is invisible and not identifiable.

Nah, they will find humanity very valuable regardless of our technology because of our art. We will become the anime and pornography dealers of the galaxy.

Thanks, I hadn't thought of using /qst/. I might be able to run sub-scenarios through there, if I can figure out a proper disclaimer for the threads. (I don't want to Ender's Game anyone, including myself, if this ever goes on to influence our own contact protocols.) Still definitely potentially useful given how far reaching some of my scenarios are.

It all bleeds together in time travel-capable models. Once a timeline is stabilized into a state of relative peace, it remains more or less tactically irrelevant from the standpoint of a superior civilization. It just makes the "shadows" deeper, and gives them more flexibility to control breeding without necessarily reaching "contact" levels of intervention. Your concept of "conquered" and theirs have no specific reason to look even remotely similar.

I've been modeling cultural integration as mutually beneficial for the most part. I haven't been able to find any decent reason to make one civilization culturally superior or inferior to another. Every species has its nuances that have to be accounted for on a per-planet basis. (I've been modeling one species per planet just for simplicity, but if I can get a clearer picture of inter-species cultural eventualities, I can add a model for multi-species planets.)

I prefer a universe full of hungry space molluscs to a universe where we are alone.

Isn't the assumption that we'll be culturally similar a bit of a stretch? Perhaps this is human bias here, but I can't imagine a civilisation much more culturally enriched than what we have on Earth, and so imagine that the average alien we meet will be far more culturally deprived, especially since their local population that comes into contact with us through advanced spacecraft will be significantly smaller than Earth's at the time. Though to what extent our cultures are compatible is another important question.

I'd like to believe that our computer technology will be some of the most valuable and advanced from the perspective of aliens, since many of our other innovations such as the very gradual perfection of combustion engines will be useless in space. But again, whether our computers are compatible with theirs is another important question.

>culturally similar
Not similar in any sense.

By "culturally" superior, I mean the complexity of their culture with respect to another. I can only guess in so much detail how culture will or can evolve for the members of a species who volunteer for a space program, or even to what degree any given space colony recalls or keeps in contact with its home world. The cultural information that goes into informing the decisions of the simulated commanders is the part I look at most, and that tends to stay with a civilization regardless of how much they herald home. In all cases, post-contact civilizations trade cultural information along with technical information, but not so much actual resources like food or factories. Gravity wells are a huge problem regardless of how many microgravity resources you have at your disposal.

I tend toward modeling their technology as computationally equivalent in terms of computing power, just because I assume physics to be the same on all worlds and the requirements for recreating their biosphere in space to be about as complex as it will be for us.

>I mean the complexity of their culture with respect to another
That's also what I meant by "similar".

How does the possibility (or lack thereof) of FTL transport and communications effect your model? Does it just change the scale of the interactions, or does it have some fundamental impact on their nature too?

>acausal trade
holy shit that is one fucktarded nonsensical term. i can only assume some severely mentally impaired brainlet jews came up with it.

>In my models, when assuming a commander's position, I've felt no particular need to wipe out lesser civilizations when they can just as easily be controlled. War takes resources
"Controlling" a lesser civilization also takes resources, and every moment you wait to wipe them out is another moment for that positive feedback loop of technological progress to jettison them to a level of advancement where they pose a serious threat to you.

You must also understand that at a certain point, wiping out another civilization is not particularly difficult or costly. Simply sending a relativistic kill vehicle at their planet or even their sun would be fairly straightforward compared to the difficulty of "controlling" them in whatever manner you envision.

...

FTL just affects the rate of political reactions and other information sharing. There isn't a significant tactical difference until you assume freeform portal technology. (Which is distinct from wormhole tech, which is a megascale engineering feat.) Then again, I'm not a (real) theoretical physicist and I've easily overlooked some important point of the underlying technology.

The main factors in cultural complexity are density and size of populations. Time doesn't even necessarily move things forward as much as you might expect. From an evolutionary standpoint we really haven't changed all that much since Greek and Roman culture, especially from a political angle. I don't know if this is just how our species is or not, but I've been modeling culture as based on physiology just because it certainly plays a role in the development of any alien culture.

Yeah it's straight from the rationalist community. It doesn't make much sense outside of ET contact.
Destroying the resources you plan to use isn't a valid solution to the conquest problem. Terraforming nanites take time in any model, even time travel models. And there's no reason to terraform an already habitable planet. Devastation is easier in a sense, but you're also destroying the resources you wanted to procure. What I meant was more that it's not hard to manufacture a robot army to control a non-advanced civilization. You can pretend to be gods, influence their culture in pretty much any way, and even sterilize them before anyone's realized what's happened. The concept of "salvageable genes" and DNA as a resource is very relevant to terraforming disputes.

Granted, you can get most of the same genes from the non-sapient population, by why splice in animal DNA when there's perfectly good sapient DNA available.

>Destroying the resources you plan to use isn't a valid solution
You're not necessarily attacking them solely because you want their resources, but because of the present and future risk they pose. If you've detected them in the first place then it means they can conceivably detect you, and might themselves be in a position to initiate a first strike within a few centuries/millennia. Assuming that both of you want to continuously expand across the universe, future encounters are inevitable, and there might never be such an easy opportunity to take them out again. In this sense you'd be sacrificing at most a few planets for potentially thousands of star systems in the future. From a game theoretic perspective it's an incredibly obvious decision to make. The other things you mention simply don't weigh very heavily if you take this long term view.

>It's a schizo thread
>again

>Assuming that both of you want to continuously expand across the universe
That's not an assumption any alien race can make about any other alien race, even if it's true for each race in turn. In other words, even if it's true for every species, we all stand to gain from not assuming it's true, because it gives each of us a chance to evolve and develop technology of our own. The purpose of the acausal trade is to show that we're aware that our actions have consequences, and to try to show that we're willing to avoid those consequences, even if, for now, it's just for the sake of bargaining for eventual rights to self defense.

The thing is, there's no way for them to deliver a first strike if you detect them first. You can literally afford to watch them develop for millennia before ever making contact or trying to pilfer the resources of their world. If you do it right and catch them early enough in the development of their civilization, you can even erase their knowledge of you through "mythification." So long as you keep away long enough, the new citizens have no reason to believe that you ever existed. Aggression does nothing to preserve any kind of resource, including the cultural creativity each species expresses. If it's just as easy to destroy them, then it's just as easy to destroy them five years before the development of their first interstellar weapons as it is to snipe them 100,000 years before they even develop their first iteration of the scientific method. So long as you've discovered them, you can instantly gauge what type of threat they'll ever pose, and when they're likely to pose it.

I'm not ignoring the long view at all, I'm looking at it from a state of superior technology. There's no reason to use a planetary decimator when it works just as well to use a couple thousand self-destruct-capable killbots. The question is whether or not you can develop the technology for killbot factories or other megascale weaponry without detection.

>So long as you've discovered them, you can instantly gauge what type of threat they'll ever pose, and when they're likely to pose it.
This is where that positive feedback loop of technological progress comes up again. Imagine trying to predict little coincidences in history like if the Romans had discovered arabic-style numerals allowing them to scale their civilization better and prevent a collapse of their empire or something. That small coincidence alone and others like it could have put us a few centuries or even a millennium ahead of where we are today. Now imagine trying to do that for a completely alien civilization. Technological progress simply happens too rapidly and with trigger points that are too subtle to accurately predict when a civilization will represent a threat with a margin of error better than a few centuries -- a time scale which can easily see a relatively primitive civilization become a space-faring one colonizing its solar system (now you have to send multiple relativistic kill vehicles). Not to mention that your relativistic kill vehicle, although fast, still takes time to reach its target. Simply put, you really cannot afford to wait very long past detection to make your move.

Clearly you're very into the idea of aliens influencing and manipulating culture and I get that. I think it's an interesting idea too but ultimately it's too inefficient and too risky to be anything more than the subject of a sci-fi novel.

A change in numerals wouldn't have that kind of recursive effect.

Supposing it did, or that some other factor had led to the industrial and then technological revolutions earlier in our history, even if it put us 1000 years ahead, the only way such a scenario is relevant if we'd already been detected at the Roman stage of our development. At that point they can look at our language (which is the most advanced form of "technology" we had at that time), and either use it to seed a model using their advance knowledge of what emergent technologies will have the most impact on any civilization (which they know because they're already space-faring and have gone through each and every technological upheaval that is to us now unpredictable) or use it to influence our culture directly. Whether you choose to stay and observe or stay and influence, you still stay. They're not "coming back to check," the moment you make contact, you've secured contact. There's no reason to ever leave a species unattended once discovered. (Or if there is, the acausal reasoning is well beyond what I've currently developed.)

The moment you can build relativistic weapons without any other civilization seeing you do this and intervening for that reason, you can as well built mobile killbot factories. It's still an utter waste of resources to destroy a star or a planet. Plus, if you're expansionist and kill every species you find anyway, then you're not using contact protocols and would just kill the dominant form of life on every planet you find. It would be pure conquest all the time, and it would be about resources more than anything. You're mixing up all kinds of motives without any regard for how the tactics of that level of technological development actually shake out.

We're talking civilizations that have mastered AI and their own biosphere. They can as well send out probes with AI whose sole purpose is to terraform every planet they find. That AI can then be arbitrarily ruthless.

Heaven is a location, not a "concept" or "theory". Its about perspective, not "intelligence or knowledge". Follow me, live forever!

:3

Someone just read the Dark Forest series.

Thanks, I'll give it a look. I periodically scan for new material including developments in science and innovative science fiction, but I always find myself pleasantly surprised by the quality of the classical materials.

>I'm developing robust acausal trades
Nice.

Yeah that's a good example of what happens when someone publishes contact protocols in an unfiltered median state. Everything listed there is a cultural premise that would necessarily vary between species, and trying to dictate any one outcome top-down would require a declaration of war. The type of survey necessary to determine which way the future should morally swing on any of those issues has never been conducted.