Space lasers don’t seem as much of a threat as Jordan posits. They have to be fired from somewhere. If that’s within the solar system they’re targeting, then that system will still have plenty of time to see the object that’s going to shoot them arriving. If they’re much further out, it becomes much harder both to aim them correctly and to provide enough power to keep them focused, and the source needs to be commensurately more powerful (as in more expensive to run), and with a bigger lens, so more visible while under constructive and more vulnerable to conventional attack. Or you could just react to the huge lens by building a comparatively tiny mirror protecting the key targets in your system. Or you could build a Dyson swarm and not have any single target on which the rest of the settlement depends.
This guy estimates max effective range of lasers vs anything that can react (which, at a high enough tech level includes planets) at about one light second.
Self-replicating robots don’t seem like they have any particular advantage when used as a weapon over ones with more benign intent.
Space lasers don’t seem as much of a threat as Jordan posits. They have to be fired from somewhere. If that’s within the solar system they’re targeting, then that system will still have plenty of time to see the object that’s going to shoot them arriving. If they’re much further out, it becomes much harder both to aim them correctly and to provide enough power to keep them focused, and the source needs to be commensurately more powerful (as in more expensive to run), and with a bigger lens, so more visible while under constructive and more vulnerable to conventional attack. Or you could just react to the huge lens by building a comparatively tiny mirror protecting the key targets in your system. Or you could build a Dyson swarm and not have any single target on which the rest of the settlement depends.
This guy estimates max effective range of lasers vs anything that can react (which, at a high enough tech level includes planets) at about one light second.
Self-replicating robots don’t seem like they have any particular advantage when used as a weapon over ones with more benign intent.