Thanks! It seems to me that we should be cautious about assuming that attackers will have the advantage. IR scholars have spent a lot of time examining the offence-defence balance in terrestrial military competition, and while there’s no consensus—even about whether a balance can be identified—I think it’s fair to say that most scholars who find the concept useful believe it tends to favour the defence. That seems particularly plausible when it’s a matter of projecting force at interstellar distances—though if space lasers are possible it could be a different matter (I’d like to know more about this, as I noted in my original post).
If, moreover, attack were possible, it might be with the aim not of destruction, but of conquest. If it succeeded, so long as it didn’t lead to outright extinction, this could still mean astronomical suffering. That is a problem with Thorstad’s argument which I’ll pick up in a subsequent post—it treats existential risks as synonymous with extinction ones.
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.
Thanks! It seems to me that we should be cautious about assuming that attackers will have the advantage. IR scholars have spent a lot of time examining the offence-defence balance in terrestrial military competition, and while there’s no consensus—even about whether a balance can be identified—I think it’s fair to say that most scholars who find the concept useful believe it tends to favour the defence. That seems particularly plausible when it’s a matter of projecting force at interstellar distances—though if space lasers are possible it could be a different matter (I’d like to know more about this, as I noted in my original post).
If, moreover, attack were possible, it might be with the aim not of destruction, but of conquest. If it succeeded, so long as it didn’t lead to outright extinction, this could still mean astronomical suffering. That is a problem with Thorstad’s argument which I’ll pick up in a subsequent post—it treats existential risks as synonymous with extinction ones.
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.