Welcome to an elementary course in Theoretical Cryptoastronomy, the study of imaginary things from outer space. The syllabus consists of five modules:
Evaluation will be based partly (∼7 %) on secret observation by intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, partly (∼12 %) on direct use of the Probe, and partly (∼98 %) on guesstimates derived from arbitrary assumptions.
I'm at a loss for an explanation of quite why I should have written this, apart from the obvious fact that it's yet another foray into the world of quasiscience cliché‐mockery. It lets me add a few more site‐internal links, recycle offcuts from my guides to SF Chronophysics, Xenolinguistics, or Exobiology, and put on display the routines I've got bored with rehearsing in arguments.
The big mystery in SETI (the search for extra‐terrestrial intelligence) is why we should have to search for it at all. There's nothing obviously special about Earth; starsystems much like ours have been around for billions and billions of years. So shouldn't outer space be crawling with lifebearing planets, technologically advanced aliens, and unmistakable evidence of inhabitation? Shouldn't somebody already have come looking for us? As the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi put it, “Where is everybody?”
Naturally, it's only a paradox if we're right to imagine that the ETs are out there. Somewhere in our chain of assumptions there's got to be a misstep – a Great Filter that's winnowing our imagined multitude of space‐opera galactic empires down to approximately zero. But where is it? Let's run through the options:
So; there's no good obvious candidate for the Great Filter. For such a tenuous piece of reasoning from so little hard evidence, this has surprisingly big and unwelcome implications, since we know the filter's somewhere, and it might be somewhere that's bad news. Real evidence of life on Mars or Europa becomes something we should be hoping never to find! After all, the weaker candidate #2 is, the more danger it puts at position #4 where it might be about to filter us. We're left having to consider possibilities like strong nanotech being a universally lethal thing to research…
It's conceivable that a super‐advanced space‐travelling civilisation used to be out there, but – oh, bad luck – we just missed them! In which case they might have left some fun pieces of industrial palaeontology lying around waiting for us to find and investigate them. And I don't mean crumbling ancient cities or drifting space‐hulks – I mean truly vast pieces of machinery.
People who are trying to be serious about this kind of stuff usually call them “megastructures”. Unfortunately, architects have started using that term to refer to mere office blocks; and on the whole rather than retreat up the SI prefix table to “gigastructures”, I prefer going straight for the SF‐fannish jargon term: they're “Big Dumb Objects”.
There are two possible approaches to planning for interplanetary or interstellar battles. If what's important to you is efficient and well engineered astronautics, read the recommendations in the left‐hand column. If you prefer something that's going to provide good footage in the media, read the right‐hand column, and don't forget to arrange the schedule of Internet trailers, main release, and associated games/action‐figures to fit your reelection campaign.
| While you aren't accelerating, point your nose towards safety and your drive‐tubes towards danger. This not only saves time in emergencies but presents any potential attacker with the prospect of a reaction‐drive going off in their face. | Keep your nose pointed in the direction of travel. Where possible, use a stardrive that enforces cinematic kinematics, such as a stutter‐teleporter: you aren't accelerating, you're just being continuously relocated in front of where you were. |
| Projectile and coherent‐radiation weapons work perfectly well at long ranges; there's no excuse for star‐destroyers colliding with one another when they have the whole of space to manoeuvre in. If you can see one another, you're too close. | Make sure your fights are dramatic by only engaging the enemy while parked at a strategic location (such as a wormhole exit), and/or only using blasters with inverse‐cube‐law range limits. Never miss an opportunity to call for “ramming speed”. |
| Organic lifeforms make good mascots but bad pilots. When the enemy's deploying clouds of war‐drones, each accelerating on its own vector in its own relativistic frame of reference, primate tree‐swinging instincts just won't cut it. | Embedded‐software journalists are one thing, but never put an AI in charge of your Ultimate Weapon. Get Star‐Captain Biggles to centre the cross‐hairs by hand – his brain may be made of meat, but he's far more photogenic. |
| If you don't want to run the risk of your orbit decaying, standard operating procedure should be to use a “forced” orbit at higher than escape velocity, so that if you stop actively maintaining it you drift away from the planet. | Given that your stardrives provide cheap hyper‐acceleration and you're not planning on hanging around for long, gravity‐wells are relevant mainly for the associated scenery. Remember to park side‐on to the planet so your starboard portholes get a good view. |
| There's no such thing as a survivable impact. You get enough lethality to spare from any contact that doesn't involve deliberate velocity matching; there's little point using fancy gimmick missiles if they're going to hit the enemy head on at Einsteinian velocities. | An armoured hull will save you from drifting space‐grit, but to fly through the Peasoup Nebula on ultradrive you need a serious tachyon‐snowplough – and since that has to be magic in the first place, you might as well go for the whole “divert power to shields!” shtick. |
| Never look directly at an enemy starship – if it explodes it'll be a silent (and slightly delayed) point‐source blast as their antimatter cells lose containment, and if not you're staring up the barrel of their laser cannons! Either way, ophthalmologically inadvisable. | To make beam‐weapons visible in a vacuum, you'll need side‐scatter; maybe some sort of laser‐launched plasma‐bolt? With luck it'll also produce static‐roar sound effects on your comms channels… as will your manoeuvring thrusters. But what you really want is Cherenkov radiation “vapour‐trails”. |
| Unless you've got some appropriate “jumpdrive”, you can only ambush a victim in the emptiness of space by outrunning their sensors – for instance, radar's no good against photonic torpedoes. | Nobody to fight? Hunt Space Pirates! Not only are they naturally exciting, they're also guaranteed to remain a lurking menace to civilisation for as long as you need them! |
| Asteroid belts are negligibly hazardous compared to the junk‐strewn space around your homeworld; even deliberately scattering “mines” is a waste of effort unless they're armed and mobile in their own right. | Space badly needs chunky bits. Hang around in ring‐systems as much as possible, and always fly through a planetary system in the plane of the ecliptic (banking dramatically as you steer) with all your hull‐mounted lights blazing. |
| Any strategy that involves blockading a frontier in space (let alone hyperspace) against intruders is doomed. Indeed, why would you have territorial borders when the Rigellians aren't interested in Earthlike planets? | The best thing about sweeping fleet manoeuvres in three or more dimensions is that you can usually find a map display angle that makes it look as if you outflanked them while they were trying to run away rather than vice versa. |
| The one thing you need before you can conquer an Earthlike world is atmospheric supremacy. As soon as your military nano‐robots have 0wn3d the inhabitants' brains, you can recruit any infantry you need from the local populace. | Space Marines are cool. The name's a bit dumb, given that “marine” is the one thing they aren't, but hell, give them space‐axes and call them Special Ninja Assault Squad, what does it matter as long as they're blowing things up! |
I hear of more and more alien invaders these days who seem to set out with no clear idea of what they want or how they should go about getting it, and who unsurprisingly end up bungling the whole operation. It's dreadfully upsetting to see Greys bawling their eyes out, so here's a guide to best practice classified by objective.
While “researching” all this I've run into several pages advocating a position that seems dafter the more often I see it – the idea that humanity should throw all its energies into filling the Milky Way with self‐sustaining colony‐worlds so as to reduce the risk of extinction when Sol goes red giant in five billion or so AD. Here's an alternative proposal: we round up all the gung‐ho idiots so keen on exhausting our planet's resources and fire them out of a catapult in the general direction of Alpha Centauri. That's a much better way of safeguarding our survival.
Besides, why should we care whether the cosmos will ever run out of hominids? It's not as if our evolutionary descendants at that distance would be recognisably human! And while the development of true “artificial intelligence” is a way off yet, on a geological timescale it's the AIs we should be thinking of as our descendants, not their pet monkeys. As long as we avoid doing anything irresponsible in the short term, we can expect the long‐term survival of our intellectual offspring to take care of itself.
So by all means let's have manned bases anywhere we have business doing things that can't be automated; it might even make sense to terraform Mars, eventually. But there's no need to dress up squalid factional land‐grabs as some sort of grand cosmic destiny. Exporting concepts like political boundaries, territorial conquests, and military arms races into space sounds like a good way of ending up fighting wars of independence against our colonies – and Mutual Assured Destruction won't help anybody's survival chances.