24 Jun 01:54
--Oh yeah and i met david farland and the vp of virgin galactic lol. Hollywood.
Shout Box archive
24 Jun 01:51
--I really liked the premise of eulogies being done with brutal honesty, not the bullshit you usually hear about how wonderful everyone is after they are dead
24 Jun 01:49
--the polish nationalism permeating the whole story was a interesting touch also xD
24 Jun 01:49
--It's hilarious we know a tiny measure of the boundless limitless nature of our universe that our puny minds can't even begin to fathom with all the possibility, and all we can come up with in our mass imagination is fighting insects in space :)
24 Jun 01:43
--very interesting yeah, but flawed. It also assumes that other alien civs might be similar to our own, it find more probable to find life so alien that we probably couldnt recognize each other as lifeforms like enders game or eureka seven
24 Jun 00:25
--The idea is a teeny bit flawed because even if we assume that such xenophobic civilizations exist, they will have just revealed their location to any other xenophobic civilizations that might be watching when they launch those missiles–and proved themselves a credible threat.
24 Jun 00:23
--The idea is that relativistic rockets can be used as deadly kinetic weapons that we can't intercept, because they arrive just after their light signature reaches us. An alien civilization fears such an attack, so it launches such weapons at any civilization that develops relativistic flight.
24 Jun 00:22
--Oh, yeah, I think you are referring to "The Killing Star", one of the guys who wrote that designed the Valkyrie antimatter rocket for interstellar missions.
24 Jun 00:20
--To kill a ship, you had to keep pumping energy into the Langston Field until it couldn't handle any more, at which point it exploded and the ship inside the field died.
24 Jun 00:19
--Yeah, there are people who think it might be like that–that your ship would be killed in one hit. That is why Niven and Pournelle had the "Langston Field" that soaked up laser and nuke hits and radiated the energy into space in the Codominium stories.
24 Jun 00:16
--there was a book about it, but i dont remember the name, in wich all alien civs always attacked first all other species they encountered, to avoid being targeted themselves
24 Jun 00:14
--yeah thinking about it, wars in space would probably be like nuclear war here, either you manage you hit first without retaliation or MAD
24 Jun 00:05
--But it is an interesting issue, we can't just assume that detection is super-easy under all circumstances. You have to have the right kind of a detector, and the fainter the signal the bigger and more delicate it will be.
24 Jun 00:03
--I don't see why we can't just deploy some drones with infrared detectors though. XD
24 Jun 00:03
--Infrared space telescopes have to be cryogenically cooled for this reason.
24 Jun 00:02
--There is a spacecraft engineer who disagree with Whinchell on heat signals being great. See, the problem is that your OWN heat interferes with seeing someone else's.