the_dunk_tank

It’s all just “how do we justify interstellar invasion in a novel now that we know interstellar invasion is impossible and/or not worthwhile”. Like you say, it’s contrived.

I think the author would agree with this sentence lol, I've read nearly everything Liu Cixin has written that's been translated into English, he did say somewhere that sci-fi wouldn't be interesting if it was about what was the likely thing to happen. He said he doesn't believe the stories he writes are possible or likely, but just a way to explore different concepts.

In the books, the Trisolarians only funneled all their resources into developing those specific technologies after becoming aware of a habitable planet as close as 4 light years way, at the expense of many other developments that would have been beneficial for their ongoing society. It was a huge gamble for their civilization too.

What really maddens me about Dark Forest is that it absolutely is not easy. You're trying to build a machine with enough energy to glass a planet that you're somehow going to launch interstellar distances, with enough delta-v to catch another planet, and enough delta-v for course correction and terminal manuevering, and some kind of hardened control sytems that can survive decades, centuries, or millenia in the deep black, and some kind of power system that can run all of this presumably using magic bc idk what other power system could do all that.

Stembros talk about how they expect to find megastructures like dyson swarms lying around all over interstellar space totally ignoring basic materials science problems like "the materials to do that don't exist" and basic logistics problems like "why would you ever need or want that much energy?". They assume everyone is going to decide to strip-mine their solar system to build power generation facilities on a titanic scale, but they never ask what you would do with those facilities or why you would want them. It's a totally unconsidered faith that people will just do it bc it's what they think is cool. And they don't think about what they'd do with it, either. Like great, bro, now you've got a Kardahsev One economy. What are you going to do with the entire energy output of a star? And then it's just star trek babble bc for the most part there isn't anything to do with it. Maybe if you were trying to run some inconceivably large number of microwaves, but with simple interventions like birth control you won't arrive at a situation where you have inconceivable numbers of people who need inconceivable numbers of microwaves to heat up inconceivable numbers of burritos.

Soory, went a bit off course. But there seems to be this assumption with techbros that somehow these enormous challenges - how do you keep a space ship functional and intact over the course of years, decades, centuries, or millenia as you fling it at another planet? - will turn out to be trivial. It'll turn out that balling up some enormous amount of mass an energy and sticking a guidance system on it that will either function without repair or flawlessly self-repair for an indefinite period of time isn't a big deal.

And by the same notion, the "problem" of the Fermi Paradox is that obviously everyone else would want to do what I, a 20th century Euro, wants to do and conquer the entire universe by sending small robots to build small robots to build small robots forever, for no real reason, that would never benefit me or anyone else.

It's like "well, these things are technically feasible (debatable) so obviously people will do them!" Never stopping to consider if the things are practical or desirable or what they would accomplish.

Even asteroid mining and planetary colonisation right now is like that. Why? What are you even going to do with a billion extra tons of iron and platinum? We don't need it for anything, and anything you did build with it would probably be a complete ecological disaster. No one actually wants to live in space. It sucks up there, and it's all dead rock with nothing to see or do.

I sincerely believe that the way modern westerners look at space - "The Last Frontier" , a literal frontier for colonial and imperial expansion, is silly cultural bs that obscures not only how difficult space exploitation is, but how utterly useless it is.