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by thisguy47
1683 days ago
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My personal favorite take on this is the Dark Forest concept (probably because I just finished reading the book). It makes sense to me that unless there were some way of ensuring mutually assured destruction, any advanced alien race would simply eliminate any sentient species they became aware of that could possibly become a threat in the future (whether that's hundreds, thousands, or millions of years). |
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Without FTL communications it's likely to be more of an organization than a single government, think NATO for space. Agreements for unified defense for a small fraction of the GNP or similar.
They might for instance require all ships have transponders (like ships and planes do today). Have a self replicating robot sensor that maintains the ideal density of sensors for say 1000 light years around their space (much like the current submarine sensor networks and sats monitors earth and it's oceans). Said sensors would track all ships within range, and any energy expenditures capable of accelerating mass up near the speed of light.
They would of course track their competition, but it would be far from easy for a small upstart to seriously annoy such a civilization. Even for two civilizations that each have 10% of the galaxy it wouldn't make particularly sense for them to go to war, much like today's MAD uses nukes to prevent (so far) WW3.
Not to mention hitting a planet isn't that easy unless it's on a pretty short timescale, any civilization that can launch ships at a decent fraction of light speed could likely change their planets orbital speed by 0.01% if they thought there was likely a extinction level event was heading their way in the next few decades.