Yep. There’s hints that you might be able to alleviate this somewhat with a very powerful laser (vacuum self-focusing is arguably a thing[1], although it hasn’t been observed thus far I don’t believe), but good luck getting the accuracy necessary to do anything with it beyond signaling.
(Ditto, a Bessel-beam arguably doesn’t attenuate… but requires infinite energy and beamwidth. Finite approximations do start attenuating eventually.)
It would be worth writing, yeah. It would be an update for me.
P(any civilization in its early computing stage will run any code that is sent to them) ≈ 1 for me, not sure about the other terms. Transmission would also require that a civilization within the broadcast radius enters its computer age, and notices the message, before they mature and stop being vulnerable to being hacked, all before that region of space is colonized by a grabby civ (Oh, note, though, this model of spread, if it is practical, we might be able to assume that grabby civs can’t otherwise expand at relativistic speeds, so that buys us some time before colonization blankets that region of space and stops these vulnerable ages from arising, though I’m not sure how much time that buys us.)
Interesting that the attacker they end up noticing would be fairly random, less to do with who is closest, more to do with which segment of the sky they happen to scrutinize first.
There are 2 possible cheats I can think of to attenuating lasers.
Firstly, attenuation depends on radius of the emitter. If you have a 100ly bubble of your tech, it should in principle be possible to do high precision laser stuff 200ly away. A whole bunch of lasers across your bubble, tuned to interfere in just the right way.
Secondly quantum entanglement. You can’t target one photon precisely, but can you ensure 2 photons go in precisely the same direction as each other?
Okay, no, the Teilhardian laser-as-nanomanufacturer idea is probably not workable. I read an extremely basic article about laser attenuation and, bad news: lasers attenuate.
The best a laser could do to any of the planets about the nearest star seems to be making a pulse of somewhat bright light visible to all of them.
I still wonder about sending packets of resilient self-organizing material that could survive a landing, though.
Yep. There’s hints that you might be able to alleviate this somewhat with a very powerful laser (vacuum self-focusing is arguably a thing[1], although it hasn’t been observed thus far I don’t believe), but good luck getting the accuracy necessary to do anything with it beyond signaling.
(Ditto, a Bessel-beam arguably doesn’t attenuate… but requires infinite energy and beamwidth. Finite approximations do start attenuating eventually.)
See e.g. https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-ph/0611133.pdf
I don’t think there are enough stars in the universe for that.
It would be worth writing, yeah. It would be an update for me.
P(any civilization in its early computing stage will run any code that is sent to them) ≈ 1 for me, not sure about the other terms. Transmission would also require that a civilization within the broadcast radius enters its computer age, and notices the message, before they mature and stop being vulnerable to being hacked, all before that region of space is colonized by a grabby civ (Oh, note, though, this model of spread, if it is practical, we might be able to assume that grabby civs can’t otherwise expand at relativistic speeds, so that buys us some time before colonization blankets that region of space and stops these vulnerable ages from arising, though I’m not sure how much time that buys us.)
Interesting that the attacker they end up noticing would be fairly random, less to do with who is closest, more to do with which segment of the sky they happen to scrutinize first.
There are 2 possible cheats I can think of to attenuating lasers.
Firstly, attenuation depends on radius of the emitter. If you have a 100ly bubble of your tech, it should in principle be possible to do high precision laser stuff 200ly away. A whole bunch of lasers across your bubble, tuned to interfere in just the right way.
Secondly quantum entanglement. You can’t target one photon precisely, but can you ensure 2 photons go in precisely the same direction as each other?