[Balgair]

But the reverse it true too. You can't be sure you got every one of the other species. Especially with the transmission times at light speed. In the books, they use these dimension collapsing bombs to eradicate everything, but, um, those don't actually exist. Even in the books, humanity still survives in little groups, some bent on vengeance.

Much safer to make friends or coinvestors, slaves at the very least. Get them all to buy in and police themselves. Better yet, you take that one rare thing, life, intelligence, and put it to work for you. Make the aliens you've just contacted be a part of the pyramid scheme

[freefrog1234]

I didn't consider dimension collapsing bombs realistic either. It is the objects sped up to a fraction of light speed which were more scary. The cylons carpet bombed the planet with nuclear bombs which was plausible.

[thyristan]

Nuclear carpet bombing is only sensible for short-range attacks. On longer ranges, fast projectiles are the way to go, because you need to accelerate your weapon anyways. And by just putting all the energy and resources into acceleration, you do recycle the motion energy as destructive energy.

[Nevermark]

> slaves at the very least

If you think that's a relevant upside, then some of them think so too. Well we better just start shooting up all the exoplanets as soon as we can. Not take any chances.