I've started reading a new sci-fi book, and it has the single most realistic and terrifying depiction of first contact I've ever encountered.
It's called The Killing Star and I can't stop thinking about it.
First, let me save you a click - physical editions are priced in the low hundreds of dollars. Even though the book was only published in ‘95, it must've had a small run. The good news is it's available as an ebook.
In short: Aliens attack. But… they don't do it like idiots.
They don't send big bulky machines that are somehow susceptible to bacteria (War of the Worlds) or blow us up, landmark by photogenic landmark (Independence Day). They don't come to Earth to ritually hunt us (Predator) or burst out of our chests (Alien). Neither do they come to reset time (Edge of Tomorrow) or infect our bodies (The Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Faculty, a lot of others). All of those premises are so inefficient. They make for underdog-but-not-by-too-much conflicts where humanity stands a chance. The reality is much more grim.
(spoilers next for the first couple chapters of The Killing Star).
This is within the first dozen pages - the drama happens almost entirely in the aftermath. Basically, it goes like this: There's a flash in the sky - a great tear rends the atmosphere. Moments later enough energy is imparted to boil the top of the oceans and annihilate all trace of surface life. No vegetation or animal life survives on a sterilized planet. No Earthly relics remain except some submersibles in the deep ocean, no trace of civilization left but some communication satelites still in orbit.
What happened?
Interstellar craft travelling at 92 percent the speed of light, crewed by machine intelligences, split off and together simultaneously rammed directly into every major source of electromagnetic radiation in the solar system. By the time people could look up to see the flash of light, it was too late. It would all be over in a matter of seconds.
This is, in short, a dramatization of the Dark Forest Theory. There's some nuance to it but if you want it in a sentence - the reason the universe is so quiet (from an artificial signals perspective) is that everyone smart enough to know is scared shitless. Game theory dictates that if someone could be a threat, you take them out (After all, the safest place for another game piece is off the table entirely). This dynamic creates an eat-or-be-eaten relationship between interstellar civilizations, where mutual incomprehension breeds antagonism, even xenophobia. In The Killing Star, that “The Intruders” come to this same conclusion is self-evident. That a story even exists after these first few dozen pages is because their task is incomplete.
If The Killing Star shows the brutal efficiency of relativistic weapons in interstellar warfare, my all-time favorite sci-fi novel, Joe Haldeman's The Forever War also models the perils of the Dark Forest and interstellar war. Basically - mutual misunderstanding leads to enmity, leads to escalation, which leads to a quagmire. As a kind of Space Vietnam, it's essentially an argument against the mindset that leads to the Dark Forest dynamic - and mankind's propensity to meet the unknown with aggression generally.
But I'm not sure that's how I take it.
(spoiler alert too for the ending of The Forever War).
The Forever War‘s foundational misunderstanding that sparked its interspecies bloodbath only gets resolved a specific way: When both species achieve some kind of singular, collective intelligence, in this case through cloning, and each intelligence recognizes its kindred being across the species barrier. The entire war is presented as a folly - a tragic waste because it was avoidable. But how avoidable was it if it relied on a technology we didn't have, to foster an understanding even the other side wasn't ready for? And if it wasn't avoidable, then a lot of the assumptions around it change: Vietnam wasn't defensive, no matter what anticommunists would have you believe. If the conflict in this instance was inevitable, isn't aggression a matter of who draws first - and who dies?
There are several good faith critiques of this stance, beyond the xenocide of it all:
The “live and let live” philosophy. This theory goes that, even if we detected an interstellar civilization's signals, we're so far away, through such an incredible gulf of space, that there's no way for us to practically harm each other. The issue with this case of course is that if they do acquire the ability to travel interstellar distances - they also gain the ability to pretty much destroy us or anything they want through the scenario described.
Another critique is the same reason the United States and Russia haven't destroyed each other: MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). Any energy source that could push a craft to 92 percent the speed of light would also be incredibly visible, even to us, from lightyears away. That means that we'd have years to try and counteract it, or, in a last gasp of revenge, send our own interstellar probe / craft / missile. But this, to me, has a few problems. For one, even the latest telescope launched, the Nancy Grace Roman telescope, will only survey about 12 percent of the sky. That's an enormous improvement over Hubble at 0.1 percent, but it still allows for a whopping 88 percent of our sky unsurveyed and unmonitored. And again, once a craft running at 92 percent of the speed of light entered our solar system, we'd only have hours at that point of warning. And how can we know an alien race will act out of self-preservation? Or even rationally? What if we only have until they happen to discover us until hostilities begin?
Then of course there's the hypothesis that advanced technology must confer other kinds of advancements too, like advanced morality. Surely an alien race that reached interstellar travel was united in harmony, and possessed superior moral faculties - the kind that would prevent it from engaging in an intergalactic genocide? I'd like to believe this. And I think there is some truth to the idea that any society that's passed the Great Filter would have to be capable of at least advanced cooperation. But to make the jump that aliens are entirely benign because of their advancement would have no precedent in our history at least: The Europeans, when they encountered American civilizations, certainly didn't possess “greater moral faculties”, at least none that prevented them from carrying out their own campaign of genocide. And is the kindness of strangers really something we can pin the entire future human race on?
And that's kind of the crux of it, isn't it? Everything is probabilities and risk, but can we really accept any risk when it comes to something as important as the future of the human species? That's the part of the Dark Forest that gets me - the game theory of uncertainty. No player in this game wants to destroy the other. But the risk of another civilization taking into their head that they want to spread their culture at the end of a ray-gun is too great.
That's why, as controversial as it is, maybe we should consider pre-emptive action.
If the Dark Forest and all rational thinking says we only have aggression in store for us, that peaceful first contact is not possible, that the clock has already started on hostilities, then taking a proactively aggressive posture is simply smart self-defence. I'm not saying we should hunt out and kill new civilizations, but I'm also not saying we should shrink and try to make ourselves as quiet as possible (another strategy from the Dark Forest). I'm saying if we see another industrialized civilization through the murk of spacetime, we should probably consider the idea that we are already at war with it. Because we might just be the events of The Killing Star away from total annihilation.
In other words: Star Trek had it wrong and Star Wars had it right: shoot first.
