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Charlie Strosscstross@wandering.shop
Aug 29, 2026, 7:22 PM
@swope @nyrath Not that I know of: if there is, it's a scientifically illiterate trope. *Nothing* we can do will significantly affect Earth as a whole; we can't even poison the entire biosphere. Worst we can do is *maybe* unalive our species and a few others, and even then I wouldn't bet on it.
Any alien civilization with the tech to get here and a sapience model that might be concerned with the likes of us would have to be be ludicrously far beyond us.
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Replies

Michael Buschmichael_w_busch@mastodon.online
Aug 29, 2026, 7:28 PM
@cstross @swope @nyrath
I once worked out a series of events by which humans could destroy the Moon and reduce the Earth's crust & upper mantle to magma.
It would require a couple of hundred years and a truly outrageous number of nuclear bombs to run asteroids into one another until much of the asteroid belt was destabilized.
But we could do it.
Let's not.
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Charlie Strosscstross@wandering.shop
Aug 29, 2026, 7:45 PM
@michael_w_busch @swope @nyrath Yeah, that'd do it. It'd also give everybody else enough advance warning (asteroids being nuked, and colliding!) to work out who was doing it and punch them in the head repeatedly until they stopped. Beyond that, we're getting into "Forge of God" territory.
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Andrewcinebox@masto.hackers.town
Aug 29, 2026, 8:25 PM
@cstross @michael_w_busch @swope @nyrath yet nobody seems to want to punch fossil fuel CEOs in the head until they stop
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Charlie Strosscstross@wandering.shop
Aug 29, 2026, 8:27 PM
@cinebox @michael_w_busch @swope @nyrath What do you mean? OF COURSE I'd like to see them punched in the head until they stop! (I'm just not physically capable of it.)
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swopeswope@mstdn.plus
Aug 29, 2026, 7:29 PM
@cstross
Oh, I didn't mean specifically aliens being concerned the Earth being damaged, although that would be a subset.
Maybe just nuclear weapons or fallout being a technosignature that makes Earth stand out for ETs to see us.
@nyrath
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SeiðrIlluminatus@mstdn.social
Aug 29, 2026, 7:39 PM
@swope @cstross @nyrath That would fall more in the territory of the "Dark Forest" hypothesis of Lou Cixin's novel.
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Charlie Strosscstross@wandering.shop
Aug 29, 2026, 7:46 PM
@Illuminatus @swope @nyrath He didn't invent the "Dark Forest". If you want some earlier work, see Fred Saberhagen's Berserker stories, or (1980s update) Greg Bear's "The Forge of God"/"Anvil of Stars" duology.
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SeiðrIlluminatus@mstdn.social
Aug 29, 2026, 7:49 PM
@cstross @swope @nyrath ✍️✍️✍️
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swopeswope@mstdn.plus
Aug 29, 2026, 7:52 PM
@cstross @Illuminatus @nyrath
I think Col. Bleep is clearly not Dark Forest because the Futurans spot the 1945 Trinity test through a telescope, read it as "a sign of trouble," and send Bleep to keep watch on humanity.
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Charlie Strosscstross@wandering.shop
Aug 29, 2026, 8:01 PM
@swope @Illuminatus @nyrath Too bad we'd be more likely to get Invader Zim instead.
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swopeswope@mstdn.plus
Aug 29, 2026, 7:32 PM
@cstross
I presume most tropes are inaccurate.
@nyrath
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David Scott Moyerfarbel@mas.to
Aug 29, 2026, 7:40 PM
@cstross @swope @nyrath We couldn't burn off the atmosphere with a sufficient number of bombs?
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Charlie Strosscstross@wandering.shop
Aug 29, 2026, 8:00 PM
@farbel @swope @nyrath Not with any number of the kind of bombs we've built to date.
(It's not ruled out by the laws of physics, but … once you get over about 100Mt yield, you run into the law of diminishing returns: most of the energy goes straight up into space, and meanwhile the "useful" energy that a given nuke releases doesn't go up linearly with yield.
Much more detail than you ever wanted to know on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_nuclear_explosions
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Winchell Chung ⚛🚀nyrath@spacey.space
Aug 29, 2026, 8:17 PM
@cstross @farbel @swope
Agreed. My father was in USAF-SAC as a bombardier on a B-52. He showed me how saturation bombing a city with 100 nuclear warheads (each with one unit of fissionables) will inflict far more damage than one warhead with 100 units of fissionables.
The 100 unit bomb wastes most of its energy on the sky and the ground.
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Michael Gemar 🇨🇦michaelgemar@cosocial.ca
Aug 29, 2026, 10:55 PM
@cstross @swope @nyrath Also, nothing we can do to Earth would render it less habitable than any other place in the Solar System. The whole “Mars as a backup for civilization” is a silly notion — even a nuked Earth would likely be easier to survive than Mars.
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