Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to Incoming! You never hear the one that gets you.

Forget the Death Star
Socrates II — (archived)

I want to think that if you can build a Dyson Shell or Swarm, that
targetting a planet mucho light years away is barely an exercise, but
who knows?

I am just amazed at two things about this concept: That I had not
heard about it until recently, and that it IS theoretically possible, at
least as much as a Dyson construct is.

Which leads to other questions such as, if you can build a Dyson Swarm
(or even BE one, such as a Matroishka or Jupiter Brain), do you use
its capability as a supermegaweapon? If so, is this yet another possible
answer to the Fermi Paradox, that once the first society/being makes
a Dyson Swarm/Shell, it uses that power to get rid of any galactic
competition?

Is the fact that we are still here means there are no such things, or
that we aren't even worthy of destruction by galactic superbeings,
or that the beam is still on its way?

Even if you don't have the skills, resources, or desire to build a Dyson
Shell/Swarm, a society could still send a large ship or chunk of metal
at relativistic speeds towards another planet to hit the place and
pretty much destroy that world and anyone on it from the kinetic
energy alone.

So it is still possible to wipe out a neighbor and their neighborhood
on a celestial scale even if you don't have a Dyson Shell/Swarm, and
the fact that we are still here still brings up the questions I raised
above.

And why hasn't somebody turned this into a SF story?!

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