No chance of future hyperweapons

--timescale is super distant – 10^8 years – making prediction impossible and making it tactically useless

--indicts Torres

Dr. Milan M. Ćirković 19, Research Professor at the Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade, and Research Associate of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, Ph.D. in Physics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, M.S. in Earth and Space Sciences from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, B.Sc. in Theoretical Physics from the University of Belgrade, “Space Colonization Remains The Only Long-Term Option For Humanity: A Reply To Torres”, Futures, Volume 105, January 2019, ScienceDirect

3. Conflations, far and wide

Torres’s arguments often rely on conflation of what can be dubbed “reasonable” and “unreasonable” speculation. For example, to assume that (post)humans will one day colonize and perhaps terraform Mars is a reasonable speculation; to assume that (post)humans will one day develop “weapons that could destroy entire galaxies” (p. 82) is an unreasonable speculation. There are no indications whatsoever that the latter is physically possible. For instance, the binding energy of the stellar subsystem of the Milky Way is about –6 × 1050 J; if “destruction of the Galaxy” means unbinding all its stars, this would imply the hyperweapon capable of releasing at least that much energy, equivalent to completely converting more than 3000 Solar-mass stars into usable energy (as per E = mc2).3 This is significantly more than the output of the most energetic known natural processes, including supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, and the most violent QSOs; even more importantly, we cannot envision – if our current astrophysics is correct and there is no bulk antimatter anywhere in the universe – the kind of energy-releasing process necessary for this task. Even if our distant posthuman descendants manage to discover and control such a process, the timescale for such a destruction would of necessity be measured in multiples of 10^7 or 10^8 years, which sounds a bit unreasonable in the tactical sense. And even if a military operation spanning 100,000,000 years or so could be palatable to a hypothetical future immortals, its efficiency would be doubtful, since not only would the adversary have enough time to prepare, but the unbinding might not automatically mean the destruction of adversary’s material and industrial capacities. (And similar objections could be posed to other construals of “destruction”, e.g., attempting to collapse all baryonic matter into the central supermassive black hole.)

And even if it is possible in some contrived philosophical sense of the “fullness of time” and not in the next billion years or so, there is no need to worry about it, since there are literally thousands of more probable catastrophic scenarios which could occur naturally and which bear no connection to the issue of space colonization. For example, there is a non-vanishing probability that Earth (or the Solar System generally) is on the collision course with an old – and hence hard to detect – neutron star or a black hole. Although highly improbable, such a scenario is still arguably better grounded in our scientific understanding that any “galaxy-destroying” hyperweapon. And it is exactly colonization of space which is the only way of mitigating such cataclysmic collision. The point of this example is, of course, not to make the reader worry about the possibility of such collision; instead, the point is that in futures studies, if we once “cross the Rubicon” by envisioning scenarios of very small probabilities, it is quite easy to reach the conclusions quite opposite to the ones of Torres. For instance, could we not envision a device which will emit “rays of peace”, pacifying any sentient being within its radius?4 Well, the idea is funny – but it is not funnier than the idea of galaxy-destroying hyperweapon.5