From: Billy Brown (bbrown@conemsco.com)
Date: Tue Jan 19 1999 - 13:37:39 MST
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> Billy Brown wrote:
> > and one mega-nuke per comet is a cheap
> > trade - I can easily take out as many comets as you care to throw.
>
> I'm curious. What keeps me from throwing a mega-nuke at the planet?
> Why can't I use that to defend the comet?
Ah. Now comes the interesting stuff.
Nothing keeps you from using a mega-nuke on the planet, of course. Good
missile defenses can make it a challenge, but a determined attacker is bound
to land one eventually (and this ignores the terrorism problem). That's why
you either need to move into space, or live very deep underground.
You can put anti-missile systems on the comet, but its hard to protect - one
hit will take it out, and a near miss will take out your defenses. Add
energy weapons to the equation, and the comet becomes pointless - you're
better off just building a fleet.
> Also, how would you defend against a laser the size of a small moon, or
> even a system of mirrors focusing 50x normal solar intensity onto
> Earth's surface? As near as I can tell, the only defense is to prevent
> it from being built.
The mirror system is no threat - we just tell everyone to stay inside their
diamondoid homes while we blow it up. Besides, you can hardly build it in
secret. :-)
Moon-sized weapons are a different ball game - they imply much more advanced
technology. IMO, you can't build such things unless you have SIs doing the
engineering, in which case who knows what they'll come up with.
If humans are still in charge, then all the mass in the solar system is
likely to be claimed well before such things can be built - which means you
convert the planets into overgrown space fortresses. We don't have any
energy sources handy that could blow up something that big, so aggressors
would probably be reduced to staging physical invasions - bombard the
surface with mega-nukes, then send in a few billion war bots to try and dig
the defenders out.
> > If both sides have the same tech base, there is no obvious way to tell
> > whether attackers or defenders will have the advantage..
>
> As far as I can tell, the largest mass wins - BUT:
Having more mass in a nano-war gives the same kind of advantage as having a
bigger economy does in a conventional war. That is usually decisive, but
not always. The Eastern Front in WWII is a good example of this - the
Germans were routinely outnumbered 10:1 or more, with even more lopsided
disparities in heavy equipment, yet they came within spiting distance of
winning.
> 1) The defender has to keep a living, fragile populace safe.
In the early phase, yes. By the time you start tossing moons around, expect
virtually everyone to be uploaded, cyborged, distributed, or otherwise
non-fragile. Of course, you still need to have a secure rear area - but it
could easily be deep underground.
> 2) The attacker has a whole solar system to hide in.
You can't hide an economy. Individual units could easily hide in the outer
system, but large-scale nanofacturing will produce huge amounts of waste
heat that would be very visible even at large distances. Besides, combining
future sensors with even primitive AI would let us build a system capable of
tracking every drive flame and macro-scale spacecraft in the system, which
pretty much rules out hiding large-scale movement.
> 3) You'd better control the entire mass of the solar system, especially
> Earth's core, if you don't want someone to take it away from you.
Absolutely. You'd also better do constant training and spend heavily on
R&D, because yesterday's defenses are useless tomorrow.
Billy Brown, MCSE+I
bbrown@conemsco.com
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