Authors: Mike McPhail (Ed)
Dan lowered his eyes back down to the rolling green fields and wondered if he now detected a faint limning of grey-brown at the horizon. He wondered if a doctorate, his doctorate, really would have made a difference in his life—or in anyone else’s. It might at least have made a difference in how he was addressed: since failing to be accepted for doctoral study, he had also failed to hear anyone address him formally, using his proper name. He was just Dan—his full name as forgotten as his early promise and potential, his life and services now always at the beck and call of the powerful and the successful. So, because time was shorter today than it ever had been before (although time was always short for a data entry clerk with no reasonable hope for advancement), he forced himself to look one last time at the document which had been the catalyst for his afternoon reverie: his rejected dissertation proposal of thirty-seven years ago.
The application form had begun to yellow with age, but there was no degradation in the clarity of its catastrophic content. He smiled—mostly inwardly—at that adjective: “catastrophic” indeed. Dan had written about catastrophe-—and reaped as he had sown. He read the lines again, wondering how he could have ever been so naïve as to believe that his proposal and his project might have been perceived merely as prudent scientific query, rather than as an apocalyptic challenge to the social and cultural norms that had been the bedrock of civilized behavior and thought for more than three centuries. He skipped over the sheets listing the names-—his, his mentor’s, the department head’s-—and the long (and somewhat archaic) addressing of the sub-department-—Political Science and Synergistic Applied Technologies-—and reached the first page of his fateful proposal:
A PRECAUTIONARY COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF STRATEGIESFOR PLANETARY BIO-/GENO-CIDAL STERILIZATION:
PROJECT OVERVIEW:
This project proposes to identify threat vectors that invading xenosapients might use in a campaign of pre-colonizing bio- or genocide. Although no evidence of xenosapience has been recorded, contemporary social factors make such a study both pertinent and prudent.
Since the Great Renunciation of 308 years ago, the related environmental decision to decrease our presence in, and use of, space has achieved its stated goals of reducing our debris-intensive encroachment upon the pristine exo-atmospheric environment. An inevitable consequence of this laudably eco-conscious initiative is a proportionally decreased capability for advanced detection or interception of potential intruders. With any potential warning interval thus shortened, it behooves us to consider—in advance—what forms of attack are likely to be mounted by aggressors, particularly those who might employ “preemptive sterilization” prior to taking possession of new worlds. By identifying and modeling these “threat vectors”, we may be able to pre-craft defenses that achieve the dual purposes of frustrating such attacks while also minimizing the loss of life on both sides.
This latter criterion, implicit in the universal pacifist mandate of the Great Renunciation, is one of the key motivations of, and explanations for, the highly speculative nature of this project. Experience has shown that unanticipated conflicts pose serious challenges to violence-mitigation techniques, usually because there is insufficient time to adapt them to the specific challenges of the crisis at hand. Given the scope of destruction presumed by this project, advance planning becomes not only advisable, but ethically imperative. To do any less would be to undermine both our odds of survival and our ability to minimize the damage we might inflict upon any potential aggressors.
Dan blinked, shocked, not having read the earnest (and awkward) doctoral-candidate prose in almost a decade. Had he ever really believed that the senior academics who decided his fate could see past the horrors of blood and war that his investigation invoked, that they would be able to glimpse the scientific and moral practicalities that lurked behind it? Did he himself really see that anymore—or was it just something he believed he had seen, like a hallucination of youth that age magically promotes to the status of a genuine “memory?” He skipped much of the careful, carping diction with which he had made his obeisant bows to innumerable cultural shibboleths, and reached that section where he had committed the cardinal sin: to think like the monsters he had invented, to adopt the mentality and objectives of the threat force in order to predict and understand them. His careful contextualization—that this was the necessary prelude to designing effective merciful responses—had been completely ignored, or had gone unnoticed. He had been surprised at that, back then: now, he was surprised he could have ever been so gullible to hope, much less expect, otherwise. He read his thumbnail sketches of Apocalypse, couched in the layman’s prose that had been optimally congenial to the non-scientists on the review board . . .
SELECTED ATTACK METHODOLOGIES:
(in ascending order of likelihood)
MATERIALIZATION OF MATTER WITHIN PLANETARY OR STELLAR SPHERES
A fundament of quantum physics is that various subatomic particles do not transit actual space during changes in energy states, but disappear from their first location, and reappear in their new, probabilistically-predicted second location. A weapon which could accelerate a large, dense shower of these high-energy subatomic particles (e.g. mesons) out of normal space-time so that they would then reliably re-express within the target body of either a planet or star would have utterly devastating results. Planetary core disruption could lead to catastrophic seismic events and sudden tectonic deformation; stellar core disruption could result in massive flare(s), a sharply increased radiation hazard, possibly complete stellar destabilization.
ADVANTAGE:
• defender interdiction of the weapon effect is highly improbable, since the attacker’s offensive energy does not transit the intervening expanse of space-normal.
DISADVANTAGE:
• scalability of effects unreliable, due to uncommon complexity of variables; therefore, this is a preferred attack method only if the aggressor is willing to accept complete annihilation of planetary (or system) resources.
PRE-ACCELERATED KINETIC BOMBARDMENT
Massive solids accelerated to high, even near-relativistic velocities, may be launched to impact the target planet. Attacks by relatively low-mass/high velocity objects have a number of distinct advantages, making this the probable preferred variant. High speed objects will be virtually impossible to intercept or even detect (if they are traveling at near-relativistic speeds). Also, higher impact velocity is likely to reduce atmospheric ablation (and premature fragmentation) of the accelerated object, and also reduce susceptibility to atmospheric deflection.
Aggressors conducting such an attack would probably commence their acceleration of the object in the transstellar planetoid belt that extends as far as one light year beyond the heliopause. This great remove makes their preparatory activities almost completely undetectable; it is also unreachable by any of our current technologies. Careful charting of a clear acceleration track through this planetoid field, and then the system itself, is a prerequisite for mounting such an attack: therefore, detection of the aggressor’s preparatory survey activities might be the only means of acquiring advance warning.
ADVANTAGES:
• very high ratio of destruction : cost, due to simplicity of acceleration, repeatability, and use of cheap, indigenous resources;
• some scalability of effects, if a sequence of smaller objects are used, with post-strike determinations of whether additional attacks are required.
DISADVANTAGES:
• imprecise control over planetary impact points, due to difficulty of long-range precision and limited options for terminal vector correction;
• considerable lag time between commencement of offensive operations (charting, observation, and acceleration) and actual completion of attack (impact).
DEADFALL KINETIC BOMBARDMENT
Massive solids released on planetary reentry trajectories without significant prior acceleration. Although impact sites could be infrastructure targets (cities, defense facilities, power generation centers, transport and communication nexi), a maximally destructive target list would call for a mix of tidal flat, deep-water, and polar ice-shelf strikes in order to facilitate widespread coastal inundation, rain, flooding, and consequent infrastructure and crop failures. Another, but more destructive, approach would involve deep penetrations of the planetary mantle, with consequent ejections of dust into the high atmosphere, triggering a nuclear winter.
ADVANTAGES:
• some scalability of effects (destabilization of biosphere may range from null to severe, but is controllable by varying the number of attacks and their impact points);
• minimal delay between commencement of operations and practical access to indigenous resources.
DISADVANTAGES:
• uncontested access to orbital bombardment points must be secured, possibly requiring conventional (and expensive) military operations;
• low probability of complete extermination predicts a post-strike insurgency by survivors.
TAILORED BIO-/GENO-CIDAL MICROORGANISM
Options range from long-duration agents (e.g.; a sleeper virus which renders all offspring sterile) to fast-acting, broad-spectrum ecocidals (e.g.; an aggressive and non-selective reducing bacterium). The latter would logically be geneered to be hardy, rapidly self-replicating, with a high mutational rate (so as to defeat pharmacokinetic countermeasures), swift to spread to, and affect, new organisms. Optimal employment would be covert seeding, rather than overt bombardment, which could be interdicted at two points: pre-impact intercept and post-impact zone containment or sterilization. Lastly, the organism could be designed to completely die-off after exhausting all available nutrients, leaving a thoroughly sterilized world.
ADVANTAGES:
• high selectivity and scalability: geneered organisms can be narrow or wide spectrum in their effects upon indigenous biota;
• most resources, and select elements of the biosphere, remain intact.
DISADVANTAGES:
• considerable advance preparation required (collection of indigenous biota, gene-equivalency identification, fabrication of aggressor organism, lab testing, operational observation).
Other, less likely methodologies include…
And so his proposal had unfolded, pursuing dreadful and diverse nightmares of Apocalypse down every permutative path. He had imagined weapons as theoretical as a quantum-based device that would function as a “gravity bomb”—devastating either to a planet’s tectonic plates or to the immediate substrata of a star’s photosphere. He had even advanced the admittedly bizarre concept of a “time bomb.”
The sheaf of papers sagged in his hand; if only he could change the flow of time, how different things might have been. Or would they? Knowing what he now knew, would he have done anything different? And would—could—the Academic Review Board have heard him any differently than they had? The Great Renunciation had remade the world, ended the strife between nations, eliminated famine, created an unparalleled equity of wealth and opportunity. Instead of embarking on a quest to find new biospheres, all attention had focused on preserving the blue and green globe that everyone called ‘home.’ In a world where violence had at last become not merely wicked, but vulgar, in which weapons were forgotten implements of a barbaric age, his inquiry had had no place. It was the clangor of a sword upon a shield in an age where cultural harmony depended upon the all-pervasive music of the pipes. And he had been foolish—or perhaps just “young”—enough to think that science (or rather, scientists), were living embodiments of the objectivity they preached and taught and swore to uphold. He never did understand how the renunciation of violence as a behavior necessitated its repudiation as a subject of investigation, any more than he ever understood the complex rhetorical figurations which—so his mentors claimed—provided objective proofs of the pointlessness of violence in all its forms, in all situations. He had wanted to behold that transcendent truth, that touchstone of the Great Renunciation, but his intellect remained innocently intransigent. All his mentors could offer were expressions of sympathy (but no empathy, since they were not so cognitively benighted), and the consoling assurances of a future as a government functionary in a world where no one starved, no one knew pain, and no one who had failed so miserably as he had would ever reproduce. It was all for “The Best,” they had assured him; it was his part to play in the continuing achievement that was the Great Renunciation.