Some time in the 1990s, I read a science fiction novel by George Zebrowski and Charles Pellegrino called The Killing Star. It begins with a relativistic projectile attack on Earth that wipes the planet almost clean of life. Some humans survive and the novel goes on to explore how they find the source of the attack and discover why it happened.
I have been wanting to reread the book for some time, but my paperback copy has long since disappeared, and oddly, it's not available as an ebook. Fortunately, there is an audiobook edition, and I've been listening to that.
The book makes an interesting point, which may also be a solution of sorts to the Fermi Paradox. The reason we haven't detected any aliens may be because as soon as one race develops relativistic technology, the safest course of action would be to wipe out any other races. So either there aren't any aliens left, or they're hiding silently in dark vastness of space.
Let's hope that's not the case, because we've been blasting radio and television signal into space for over a century. There are a lot stars in a 100-light-year distance from Earth.
And that's not the only problem. The Breakthrough Starshot initiative proposes to launch relativistic probes, albeit very small ones, at nearby stars. As this article points out, even a chip sized object travelling at relativistic velocities could cause catastrophic damage. Could we inadvertently start an interstellar war in the name of exploration?
It's a scary prospect and one that the proponents of the Breakthrough Startshot project should be thinking about.
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