NO STARS ABOVE THEM | FINAL

Seven days...

The world had been ground down to a fine, grey paste. The swamp was a photograph left out in the rain, all detail bleached away by a fog that clung to everything. It didn’t move. It just was, a wet, silent shroud over still black water and the bones of dead trees.

Five military trucks, their green paint scoured down to bare, scarred metal, formed a slow-moving caravan through the murk. They were the last clenched fist of an army that no longer existed, now just a shell protecting the soft, breathing things inside.

In the back of the third truck, under stained canvas, the survivors sat in silence. Everyone wore a mask. The adults had the blank, round eyepieces of standard-issue respirators. The children wore pathetic, handmade things. Scarves and cloth fitted over scavenged filter canisters. The little girl slept against Gora’s side, her breath rattling softly. Kalene was a ball of silent shivers in Lalene’s lap, his eyes too wide, seeing nothing.

Lalene’s other arm held nothing. The space where Favo should have been was a cold, aching void.

Beside her, Chase sat with his back rod-straight, a monument to duty in a world that had forgotten the word. His chassis was a log of fresh damage: black burns across his chest plate, a deep dent in one shoulder that made his arm hang at a wrong angle. In one hand, he turned the steelglass data chip over and over. His glowing eyes were dim, fixed on the middle distance, processing nothing.

The air bit with a cold that seeped into the bones. From the uniform grey above, a thin, silent snow fell. It wasn’t snow. It was ash. The powdered remains of cities and forests and lives, falling in a gentle, perpetual funeral. It was already inches deep, softening the outlines of the wreckage that littered the swamp: the hulk of a main battle tank sat half-sunk beside the colossal, segmented leg of a fallen Strider, both just strange, grey shapes under the same blanket.

The lead truck’s brakes groaned. The convoy shuddered to a halt.

A figure climbed onto its hood, movements stiff with a tiredness deeper than muscle. His gray uniform was a Vice-Admiral’s, or it had been. Now it was torn and stained, the gold thread tarnished black. A battered greatcoat was draped over his shoulders. He raised a pair of thermal binoculars, scanning the solid wall of fog ahead.

The ash settled on his greasy hair, swept back from a face of sharp angles and deeper shadows. A old, y-shaped scar ran from his left temple down to his jaw, pale against the grime.

Vice-Admiral Tityus Kyte.

One week ago, his voice had moved fleets from the bridge of the *HNS Resolute*. Now he was squinting into a poisoned mist, pathfinding for a convoy of ghosts.

He lowered the binoculars. His breath fogged the inside of his mask. He didn’t speak.

— Sir? — Captain Alira Vos climbed up beside him, her own uniform hanging loose.

— One-five. Three-fifteen. And nine hours... — Kyte didn’t look at her. His voice was a dry rasp.

Vos nodded. The last echoes of a broken command.

Kyte finally turned his head. His eyes, dark and sunk deep, met hers through their lenses.

— Tell everybody to keep their heads down. Fire on my sign.

Vos gave a ghost of a salute and dropped down, moving between the trucks, whispering the order to the haggard marines and specters.

A minute bled into the silence. Just the idle rumble of engines.

Then, from the heart of the fog, a shape. A rocket, trailing fire. It screamed out of the grey, missing the hood by less than a meter, searing the air past Kyte’s head. It struck the drowned tank behind them. Mud and metal fragments rained down. Kyte didn’t flinch.

— FIRE!

His own voice was a raw tear in the quiet. He drew his sidearm, a heavy, six-chambered silvery revolver, and fired into the fog.

BOOM

Muzzle flashes answered from the whiteness. Not the red screech of alien plasma. The sharp, familiar crack of Hoku rifles. Figures in rags and scavenged armor advanced from behind the bone-trees. Desperate, sunken faces. They fired at the trucks, at the marines who returned fire from behind wheels and fenders.

The fight was short, brutal, and almost silent. No screams, no shouts. Just the mechanical trade of death.

It was over in less than a minute. The ambushers fell, or bled back into the fog. Silence returned, now heavy with the stink of cordite and opened bodies. Kyte stood on the hood, his revolver still extended. He pulled the trigger.

*Click.*

He cycled the drum.

*Click.*

He pulled again.

*Click.*

The gun was empty. His bandaged hands trembled violently, working the mechanism over and over, the dry *clicks* sounding like a broken clock. His shoulders began to shake.

A sound escaped his mask, distorted. A wet choke. Then a ragged, heaving sob that twisted in his throat into a sharp, broken laugh. Another sob, another laugh, tangling together into a manic, shuddering crescendo. He threw his head back and yelled at the shrouded, ashen sky. A raw, wordless howl of grief, rage, and absolute defeat.

Tears cut clean tracks through the filth on his scarred face behind the mask.

Vos watched her commander come apart. She gave him ten seconds of the awful sound. Then she turned away, her face set like stone.

— Search the bodies. — her voice was flat, final. — All ammunition. All weapons. Any food, any medicine. Leave nothing useful.

The marines moved out, grimly efficient. They rolled over the dead, men and women in militia rags and tattered army gear. Starving faces, cheeks hollowed, eyes wide even in death. They had died for a few cans of rations and half-spent power cells.

Gora watched from the truck bed, her arm tightening around the little girl. Lalene pulled Kalene’s face into her chest, shielding him. She didn’t need to see. She understood. This was the market now. This was the economy. Chase’s head turned, his head tracking a marine picking up a dropped rifle. His hand closed into a fist around the data chip, its edges biting into his synthetic palm. The chip held the blueprint of the enemy, their purpose, their flaws. The most vital intelligence of the age. It was worth less than the half-eaten nutrient bar being pulled from a dead man’s pocket.

Kyte’s laughter died, guttering out into shuddering silence. He lowered the empty revolver, his whole body sagging. He wiped his face with a bandaged hand, smearing ash and tears. He took a long, ragged breath that fogged his mask, then another, forcing air in and out until the tremors stilled.

He looked at his marines looting the dead, the swallowing fog, the gentle, cursed ashfall. He looked back at the trucks, at the masked, silent faces in the gloom.  Vos climbed back up, handed him a canteen. Kyte took it, swished the water in his mouth, spat a dark stream into the grey at his feet.

— Mount up, — Kyte said, his voice a hollow scrape once more, all feeling burned out. — We’re burning daylight.

The engines revved. The convoy lurched forward, leaving the fresh dead to the quiet swamp and the soft, ceaseless ash. It fell on the coastal cities turned to fused glass a thousand kilometers away. It fell on the gutted hulls of starships in silent orbit. It fell on the massive, indifferent ships that still drank the seas, their work uninterrupted.

In 02.35/3504 AdF, Hokushoku and its planet-wide security forces fell after twenty seven hours of resistance against the Unrelenting Force.

But in the silent, grey twilight of the world that was left behind, the true battle for the surface had just begun.

— M.O. Valent, 01/12/2025

<< PART 6

NO STARS ABOVE THEM | PART 6

— Chase? Chase! FUCK, WAKE UP CHASE! — Gora shook Chase hard. He didn’t budge, only slumped off the horn.

— What is happening? Is he okay? — Lalene leaned forward from the back seat.

— Stay back, ma’am. — Gora extended a hand towards her. And gave up on shaking Chase. She popped open the panel at the back of his neck and flipped the manual override, nothing. — Shit. He’s completely off… — she tried turning the car on again, but the car didn’t respond. — … This is bad, bad, bad…

— Talk to us, dammit! What the hell is happening? — the man behind her seat pushed and shook it up.

— … Fine! We are cooked, is what happened. An EMP must have disabled all electronics in the whole state area. — Gora bursted out and unlatched her seatbelt.

— An EMP? What-

— Doesn’t matter. We need to leave the city, now! Because-

Suddenly a damp and dry crack roared from all directions, deafening fading and echoing in between the buildings like a roaring thunder as nearly every window shattered and cracked, as a faint orange light glowed from beyond the clouds. Both the man and Lalene covered the children as the windows cracked and the car got rained on by glass.

— Everyone okay? — Gora checked on them. — I’m glad I never got any implants.

— My left eye’s gone! I can’t see! — the man groaned, clutching his face.

— We can get you a doctor and find a new eye at the camp. I need someone to help me ditch Chase. We can’t afford to wait for him to reboot, that is, if he’s still with us. — Gora left the car and opened the back door. — Grab what you need, we move now.

Gora hurried Lalene and the man off the van, looking around over the front and behind the vehicle. She grunted and pressed her helmet controls trying to restart it, finally giving up and throwing it away. She wiped her face with a sleeve, forcing herself to focus. With a grunt, she pulled down her combat skin, letting her ears and feathers puff free in the cold air.

— Can you shoot? — she walked to the man holding the little girl.

— Uh, I’m a linguistics major. — excused the man covering his malfunctioning synth eye.

— I did hunting lessons with my ex-husband. — Lalene stepped forward.

— Good enough. Standard issue rifle. — Gora pushed the rifle to her. — stay behind me.

— … Lift, pull, hold, slide, switch. — Lalene scanned the weapon with her hands and muttered as she readied it.

[SOUND OF DISTANT GUNFIRE, FAINT SIRENS. WIND HOWLS THROUGH BROKEN STREET]

The city was a different kind of quiet now. A dead quiet, broken by things that didn’t sound like sirens or people. The kind of quiet that felt heavy, like a blanket smothering the world. The only light came from above, that ugly orange glow behind the clouds, and from the distant fires reflecting off the bottom of the smoke layer. Street signs were dark. Building lights were out. The world had been unplugged.

Gora led, her head on a swivel, ears twitching at every distant crack and thud. She wasn't looking for street names anymore. She was looking for shapes, for movement, for the silhouette of a landmark tower against the hell-glow.

— We need to find a metro entrance. Get underground. — Gora’s voice was low, cutting through the silence she herself had imposed. — It’s a straight shot. Less eyes on us.

[SOUND OF FOOTSTEPS ON GLASS AND DEBRIS. KALENE WHIMPERS SOFTLY]

— Shhh, baby, it’s okay. — Lalene’s whisper was strained, her grip tight on the rifle, her other hand pulling Kalene closer. Favo followed, his piece of scrap metal held like a talisman.

A few blocks over, the silence broke. Not with random noise, but with the organized, terrifying sound of a real fight. The staccato pop of rifles, the heavier thump of something else. And a sound they hadn’t heard before, a high-pitched, shrieking whine of energy weapons. Gora held up a fist. They froze in the shadow of a collapsed bus shelter.

— Wait here. — she hissed, and darted to the corner of a building, peeking around.

[SOUND OF INTENSE FIREFIGHT GROWS LOUDER]

Lalene risked a look. Down the wide avenue, an army squad was pinned behind the smoldering wreck of a… thing. A hemispherical craft, maybe ten patas across, lay crumpled against a fountain. It was scarred and smoking, but a hatch was open, and from it, the invaders poured out.

They were a nightmare of standardized design. All clad in the same sleek, dark armor and battleskin, marked with unfamiliar, sharp-angled symbols that glowed faintly in the gloom. But the bodies underneath were all wrong.

Most of them, maybe half, were bipedal, humanoid. Their movements under the armor were jarringly familiar, but their precision was alien, coordinated. They moved like parts of a single machine.

Among them, things that stood on two thick legs but ran on four limbs, their armored backs bristling with tentacles that uncurled to fire weapons or drag wounded comrades back with brutal efficiency. A heavier one, a brute nearly bursting out of its standardized plating, hefted a cannon that thumped with a deeper, more resonant shriek. Its bolt hit an army barricade, and a section of it didn’t just shatter. It boiled away in a cloud of vapor and molten stone, the shrapnel sizzling through the air.

The air itself was being torn apart by their weapons. Every shot was a rising, piercing SCREECH, like a steam-kettle pushed to its breaking point. That ended in a wet, fizzling CRACK as it vaporized flesh, metal, and concrete. The smell was ozone, cooked meat, and hot stone.

— They’re… people? — Lalene whispered, horrified, her eyes fixed on the humanoid forms.

— Don’t know. Don’t care. They’re shooting. — Gora muttered, pulling back. — We go around. Now.

But before they could move, a new sound emerged. A chittering, skittering wave of noise from the side streets. A flood of the smaller, multi-legged fauna poured into the intersection. They didn’t care about sides. They swarmed over the army position. They clambered over the downed saucer. The neat lines of the firefight dissolved into a melee of screams, alien shrieks, and the wet sounds of close-quarters death.

One of the armored humanoids turned its weapon on the swarm, the screech of its bolt drowning out the fauna's clicks. It burned through three of the creatures before a larger beast, a hulking thing with exposed, glistening muscle fused to rust-colored metal plates, barreled into it, crushing the invader against the saucer's hull.

— They’re fighting each other? — Favo breathed, his eyes wide.

— They don’t care, — Gora said, her voice grim with understanding. She’d seen it. In the chaos, she saw one of the invaders. Its helmet was cracked, and the face underneath, the face was hoku.

Their eyes focused on the heat of the firefight a moment earlier, suddenly turning to her. Their rectangular pupils sharpened, as if having a split second of conscience before turning back to its energy rifle, reloading it quickly.

— They just don’t care. Move! Back this way!

She shoved them back, toward a set of stairs leading down into darkness, a metro entrance. As they stumbled down the first few steps, Gora’s eyes locked on a body sprawled near the curb. An army regular. A grenade belt, still full, was strapped to their chest.

— Shit. — she spat. — Get down there! Don’t stop!

— Where are you going?! — Lalene cried.

But Gora was already moving, low and fast, back out into the open. She sprinted, a crouched shadow, toward the corpse as the chaos of the three-way battle raged fifty patas away. She grabbed the belt, yanking it free. A clawed limb smashed down where her hand had been a second before. She didn’t look back. She just ran, hurling herself down the metro stairs as a red energy bolt seared the wall above her head.

She landed hard at the bottom, breathing in ragged gasps. The grenade belt clattered on the tile floor beside her.

In the dim light filtering from the street, five pairs of eyes stared back at her.

— Let’s go, — Gora panted, scooping up the belt. — And don’t touch the rails.

SCIENCE&ARTWORK | EUPAKUGA DET OIT'KORA ZAPAHIT

   THE CODE OF THE STELLAR PILOT

Though grandiose, our history is written in sweat, pain, tears, and blood. The attempt to erase our differences have brought us to the brink of ruin, now these same differences unite us in the path towards curiosity, freedom, and peace in the future. Blessed is our newborn society, reborn from the ashes, blessed are we who serve its perpetuation. 

We stand ready to take on any mission, to halt any conflict, and to spread peace throughout the Greater Expanse, wherever it may be found.

Following faithfully the code ahead, and displaying great pride and respect in being a stellar pilot. I abide by my honor, courage and altruism. 

Therefore, I will act mindful of the privilege I have to serve. In taking this oath, I, [PILOTNAME], affirm my uncompromising integrity in word and deed. I hereby, sacrifice my social, economic, and personal bonds with this world that birthed me, in order to follow my duties as a stellar pilot. I hereby accept my crew as my only family, and my vessel as my only home, my body belongs to the stars, my soul belongs to the people, and my heart belongs to my crew.

[...]

Through this oath, I reject servitude to any master but the greatness and continuation of our people, whilst also rejecting any crowns and riches from it.

I swear to seek illumination from the past, present, and future, and with my unique point of view, judge the best course of action for my family, and my people. 

I accept my people, ever changing, as my protected. Lest them return to barbary or teach me anew, with patience and bravery I offer them my hand and my sword.

I accept my crew as my companions and protectors. Lovingly, I will open my arms and receive them in times of need. 

I accept my vessel, the [SHIPNAME], as my home. Care for and listen to it as if it were my mother, sacred and immaculate. 

THIS IS THE WAY OF GREATER EXPANSE, THIS IS THE WAY OF GREATER GOOD, THIS IS THE WAY OF THE PILOT.

    According to surviving records and artifacts from the late Stellar Era, Starpilots were a subset of society created during the Golden Stellar Era, their mission was to guarantee that Hoku society persisted across time and space, serving as a moral and scientific baseline to the societies they were to interact with, safeguarding any new knowledge and re-delivering lost history and advancements.

    Only a dozen generations of starpilots were ever trained over the second half of the Stellar Era, the last ones were the Winged of Kal'halel Tet, circa 550 years before the Fall of Hokushoku. Starpilots were crucial to maintain the stability and peace of the Hoku Expanse for centuries, serving mainly diplomatic and humanitarian issues that they came across.

    Because interstellar voyages demanded vast reserves of energy and time, especially when carrying a live crew, the very rhythm of governance began to slow. Beaming high-intensity radio transmissions was out of the question — not only due to energy costs but for fear of detection by the then-uncontacted Dominion. Discreet communication became an art of its own.

    The travel time of messengers could be severely cut down in a few ways, sending a synthetic onboard and just shooting the ship near-lightspeed, but that would also take out the *human* element of the mission, since the people on the other side would need to be able to relate to the messenger. Thus was born the starpilot out of a moral conundrum of not knowing if society would understand or even accept an artificial messenger.

    A starpilot travels in groups of up to 8-12 crewmates (varies with generation) in relatively small vessels capable of faster subliminal travel than your average mining flagship. The small crew minimized consumption while preserving sanity. It also allowed experimental thrusters and kinetic bumpers to be tested in the field.

    Because of the extreme speeds and preservation technology involved, their lifespan greatly surpasses those of hoku stationary in planets, granting them access to the true order and unraveling of events in history, if anything, the recorded dataset of such starships is worth quite a lot in classical technology and history.

    The presence of starpilots kept internal conflicts to a minimum across Hoku space, and the sight of such démodé ships often meant that there would be no need of a conflict because several starpilots could assemble a reunion and judge what could be done for a particular colony or settlement. How they did that is partly secretive, but every generation of starpilots had pre-established routes and meeting points to make exchanges of Intel which could be cross-referenced.

   The need for starpilots waned as the Hoku merged with the Arrene from the Dominion. A few pilot schools endured well into the Lower Stellar Era, more as a tradition — or a romantic vocation — than a necessity. The last time pilots saw combat was during the Fall of Hokushoku, their skill in gathering intelligence and sabotaging enemy lines proved crucial in evacuating settlers from the Expanse into the Dominion. There are rumors that a few wartime crews remain dormant in the outlands, stranded, or perhaps unable to let go of the war.

    Be they saints or zealots of a forgotten age, today most remember them by their ships. The price of such derelict vessels skyrocketed after the Fall of Hokushoku, each a rare and coveted relic. To possess one became a mark of status and dominion over the Outlands.

From the Annex, level 79, Hoku History, Codex of the Stellar Era vol. IX

Last accessed 22.10.3832 year of the Prime Foundation

OK, INTERSTELLAR IS BETTER THAN I THOUGHT

I STAND CORRECTED

For those of you who don't remember exact details about the movie Interstellar (2011), it mostly happens within a black hole system, composed of Gargantua - a 100 million solar masses supermassive black hole - Pantagruel, a main sequence solar-type star (G or F type) - and an unnamed neutron star.

Note that I had previously not read The Science of Interstellar by Kip Thorne before, which would have been of great help. So I wanna share of the aspects about Gargantua that was always a point of contempt for me, until very recently.

We know that for all the scientific realism and hard sci-fi the production of the movie incorporated into it, a lot of creative liberties were taken to make it more 'palatable' for the average viewer. Some examples of that is how far away Gargantua appears when observed from its closest blanet (yes with a B, we're dealing with black hole planets here), Miller's planet - in the movie it looks pretty far away, but in reality Miller's planet would be orbiting so close to the black hole that by some estimates it would only be about some tens to hundreds of kilometers above the ISCO, which is the inner edge of the luminous accretion disk. Which by itself, is only possible if Gargantua is a Kerr black hole with a rotational speed just 0.99999999999999 times the speed of light!

Of course that would be an absurd view in the sky, plus the various relativistic effects that should be taken into consideration when painting the sky - all that would have been overwhelming not only for the production but for the audience to take in as well. A similar case can be made for its waves, and the apparent color of the accretion disk, which had its blue/red shift color removed in the final rendering as to not confuse the audience, making it look a flat sun-like color.

So, given those and many other more subtle taken liberties, I thought to myself while parsing and reverse engineering the Gargantua system for myself - "oh wow, these planets must be absolutely toasted being this close to black hole!" BUT... I still had much to learn about it, it seems.

So here is a summarized version of what I initially thought of:

Gargantua is a sleeping giant, and it can't wake up

Gargantua's accretion disk is hot, but not really 'hot' compared to other black holes. Active black holes have accretion disk temperatures in the tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of degrees, thus outshining even whole galaxies in the process of feeding. Those types of black holes are what we usually identify as radio galaxies or quasars - typically, a galaxy's central black hole in a feeding period. But since Gargantua's accretion disk isn't much hotter than the surface of the Sun, that is between 5700 and 6000 K, its disk is not only much cooler than usual, but also must be much thinner than usual? How thin? Basically non-existent! It is feeding basically on 1/3rd of the Moon's mass every year.

And even so, that means that at the distances involved between Gargantua and its blanets, that is, under 40 AU, the insolation for them is hundreds of times greater than Earth's because the accretion disk is thousands of times brighter than the Sun. That also happens with red giants, even though they are cooler than the Sun, their much larger surface area for emitting light makes them hundreds to thousands of times brighter. In this case, Gargantua's accretion disk is between 1.3 and 2.25 AU, roughly ~1.0 ASTRONOMICAL UNIT WIDE.

And if we tweak the feeding rate for the black hole until the thin-veil of gas around it isn't as luminous, we run into another problem: its Bondi radius - that is, its area of influence in interstellar space - is several parsecs wide, any unbound rock or cloud of gas can fall into it and add to the accretion disk mass, thus more than doubling its feeding rate and thus making it more hotter and brighter than it was before. In my view, it was one rogue asteroid away from just blasting the blanets with the wrath of 10,000 suns!

Before we continue, let's establish that 1.0 Earth insolation equals how much we get on average from our Sun, about 1360 W/m².

PHYSICS I OVERLOOKED

Turns out I was indeed correct in my assumptions, HOWEVER, it was incorrect to assume that the accretion disk is a perfect emitter from every angle. Which would simply not be true at all.

 

By considering the disk surface as a Lambertian surface, it means that an incident ray looks brighter or dimmer dependent on if the surface is face-on to the observer or at an angle to the observer.

Now let's imagine that our disk is a thin disk with a flat temperature profile, it would look very dim almost dark when observed edge-on compared to looking at it at 90° from the disk plane.

It is an okay assumption in this case, considering that when calculated for an accretion rate of 0.35 Moon-masses/yr, the disk temperature profile is more or less flat - between 5500 and 6000 K. We can then adopt an average solar-like temperature for our disk.

 

Our total luminosity based off disk geometry and temperature is about 70,000 Lsol, which is about 35,000 per face of the disk. Like I said before, putting an object even at 40 AU above either disk face means it is getting.... 35,000/40² = 21.88 Earth insolations (~30,000 W/m²). Which is not how it looks in the movie.

However, using Lambert's Cosine Law, we see that the insolation at our blanet is also dependent AND variable on its current angle from the disk's plane. In which case for simplicity, I will define the black hole system's Ecliptic the same as the accretion disk plane.

In our Solar System, the planets have formed more or less in this flat plane which we call the Invariable Plane, which is perpendicular to the Sun's rotational axis, turns out the Ecliptic is just another intersecting plane dictated by the Earth's orbit, which is convenient to us, because we then measure everything relative to it. Anyway, most planets and objects are within 7 degrees off that plane, and really at an average of 1.92° off it. If the planets around black holes are any similar to how planets form around stars, then that should also be somewhat true. Thus we should take the planet's orbital inclination in relation to the disk plane as a variable.

Inputting 1.50° as our maximum inclination at 40 AU we get only 2.62% of the disk face's maximum brightness, which is 0.57 Earth insolations or 780 W/m²! Way colder than receiving over 30,000 W/m². Usually that doesn't really come into play when dealing with stars because stars have well defined circular silhouettes no matter what angle you look at them from, so their perceived intensity is independent from viewing angle.

Now because our planet isn't always suspended 1.50° above the plane - it's relative vertical position changes throughout its orbit - that is the maximum insolation, the minimum will be a brief period where the disk occludes itself at inclination 0° which has nearly no power input for a non-lensed disk. Seasons will be mostly dependent on that relative altitude to the disk rather than orbit-shape dictated.

If we map out the disk perceived intensity by filling the environment with 'fog' which can reflect light back to the viewer, we would see a figure similar to this:

 

Basically two spotlight-like beams of light above and below the disk, with a very dark colder donut-shaped area around it, along the disk plane.

FROM EVERY ARTISTIC LIBERTY THEY TOOK, I'VE CHOSEN TO NITPICK THE ONE THING THEY GOT IT RIGHT FROM THE START, LMAO

Of course, this approach also ignores two factors that would be important in more realistic disks:

1. It ignores surface density, texture and layers.

The disk would present a 'thin' gaseous or plasma atmosphere above its surface, which would create a 'limb darkening' effect at shallow angles. That would decrease the amount of power received from the disk at a given angle by a measurable amount, because light rays would have to traverse more and more of this atmosphere and thus scatter along the way. This also means that even when observed edge-on, the disk wouldn't be truly dark, as the light scattered off the disk atmosphere above and below the faces would still reach the planet. Thus, the assumption of L~0.0 W/m² for θ~0.0° isn't true in the real world, because the luminous disk wouldn't be truly geometrically thin.

2. It ignores gravitational lensing.

The black hole would bend light from parts of the disk occluded by the black hole shadow, and parts above and below the disk, around the event horizon and towards the viewer. That would also add to the extra light received by the planet at any given position in its orbit, but mainly at that occlusion zone of θ~0.0°.

I'm yet to work those into my toy model.

Anyway I hope you've enjoyed the ride, this is another sneak peak into the DOMINION framework I'm building to help others into making well-researched space-focused sci-fi settings.

 - M.O. Valent, 02/10/2025

THE QIRE | SCIENCE&ARTWORK

LIVING STUMPS!

    ... Said him! Can you believe that!

Laugh all you want. You wanted to know, right?

>Ian slammed his glass on the table, unamused. He had that conversation maybe ten times by now<

    Sure, sure, I won't interrupt you anymore. Go on, "kindless orphan".

You ever seen a real tree? Like the ones, the old ones near the central plaza. By the great elevator.

    Yeah, I have. Majestic, aren't they?

Like that. Rough, not scaley, not silky, nor armored. Like a thick, impossibly flexible hide is what they wear, or are made out of. I've hear rumors they don't need that sort of thing. Clothes. Though they have innovated on a few pieces, I'm sure. Who wouldn't like to be tougher?

    That still doesn't help it, 'runner'.

>Ian gulped down his last glass, and took a moment to chew on the small fruit pinned on the glass<

The one I saw at Niniveh. Must have been like two-eighty or three. About two storage units tall, can you picture that?

And one third as thick. Like a tree. Standing on its many roots.

Those damn legs, you can't even keep up with them when they move, as if gliding over the floor, without friction. Long, and rough.

The body is a little skinnier than what it initially looks like up close. They have wings, but they stay folded against their body like a tight cape.

Like I said. A walking, living tree stump.

    Wings eh? Like a bird? Or a K'yen?

>Ian scoffed< Bird... Worse. Too many wings to count, They show too little, and I don't like to imagine what it would take for all of them wings to open up. >he pushed to empty glass aside< Virgil, let's call him that, it's complicated to explain.

He needed only two to glide, but those two wings made him look the size of a starfighter. Burning orange bright scales, I'm not sure what kind of fucked up chemistry or optics is happening, but it hurts.

    Hurts?

It physically HURTS. Your eyes. Your mind. Their presence is soul searing and eye-bleaching. He never opened his wings towards me, only towards THAT thing after us. But I could feel it. Like the scale patterns on it were a window to another dimension, clipped into reality like a poorly edited movie.

I've heard about those damn wings from another hunter like you, who heard it from a target who was almost killed by one. "It's like staring into the naked face of God... or the Devil."

For lack of a better word, I'd like to say its panic, but I'm also trying to be very rational about it. 

Maybe we shouldn't.

    Now its getting interesting, runner.

It is not! No one should... I was lucky to be not the one in Virgil's path. Not the one he actually wanted to burn with his heat. Searing heat. Body heat. Like a pot of molten lead inches from your face, even when their wings cover their bodies. Papers ignited and plants withered just from proximity, as if he sucked the life from them.. Like a being straight out of hell, or heavens burning all impurity...

Their faces, triangular, like someone glued a clam or mollusk to the top of a column. Needlessly small eyes, more like needle holes for light sensing, inexpressive. Invisible mouth, or more like a beak that clacks and roars when it feels like actually making a sound.

Atop it, ribbons, like thin tentacles with a similar material that of the wing scales, like they are crowned by fire at all times... Virgil used one of those ribbons for illumination once, so I at least know they need light like us, but they are able to make their own.

    It makes me wonder if they don't come from somewhere dark.

Perhaps. It does absurd me, though, that they have considered the near extinction of the Arrene a reasonable argument for a "Draw..."

What did the Arrene have or say to them? I can't think of a possible solution that could actually work. They have so little to lose with it, from what we know. Are they playing along? I don't know.

And I don't wanna know...

Are you Happy?

    More like amused... You earned it. Next one is for him!

- M.O. Valent, 30/07/2025

I SPEAK FOR THE THREES

THERE ARE NO THREES UP THERE

an underwhelming counterpoint to eldritch superstates

There are no Type III civilizations out there. Period.

And I dare argue that exponentially less civilizations, should they exist, do it above what Sagan and Kardashev would call it, Type 2 (or K-II, you get the idea, I'm not gonna bother with how you write it).

This is a part of a beef I have with both ufologists and grand sci-fi enthusiasts alike, for the same set of reasons.

1. Not studying enough chemistry and physics.

2. Thinking that absence of evidence equals evidence of non-absence.

3. Underestimating human understanding.

 

Let's strip this from the top down.

For those somehow unfamiliar with, be it by newfound curiosity or just forgot about it, the Kardashev Scale as originally proposed by Soviet astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev is a way of ranking the level of technological development of a civilization through their energy consumption.

 

Assuming the growth of mankind at the time and how much energy we needed to consume to maintain our society, it seemed reasonable to assume that at one point in our future, we would need to soon consume the whole energy that reaches Earth from the Sun, and later, the entire energy from the Sun itself, and so on.

It has since been refined by Carl Sagan and others as follows:

CLASS // ENERGY NEEDS

TYPE I    — 10^16 W, equivalent to the entire energy budget of Earth.

TYPE II  — 10^26 W, about a quarter the Sun's energy.

TYPE III — 10^36 W, about the energy of the entire Milky Way galaxy.

By that measure, we humans stand currently at Type 0.70~0.73.

 

This concept often comes hand in hand with the concepts of mega-structures in space, since they are proposed as viable means of obtaining said energy and using it, serving as habitats for said advanced civilizations. Such as Dyson spheres or swarms, stellar engineering, stellar lifting, ring worlds, the whole seven rings.

Now, I'm far from being the first one — and the last one — to point out the obvious problem with the concept put into practice. Right? You see, all 10¹⁶-10¹⁷ Watts of power Earth gets from the Sun are used for other things. Take the wind for example, created by the updraft of air from heating the surface of the sea and land, or the energy used by bacteria and algae. All that is included in that energy bill. Should humanity harness all of it, we would live on a barren rock, not different from that of the Moon's surface.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN, YOU NEVER SEEN BLADE RUNNER?

If we needed this much energy, we would most likely, outright “make it”. That is, either through fission or fusion plants.

“Why not solar?” You may be asking yourself, perhaps believing what happened in Chernobyl is the norm.

First of all: Did you not hear what I just said? Solar is the motor of Earth's very biosphere, and you wanna tap into that?

Second...
Although solar energy is on average 10x as cheaper per watt than nuclear power, its land coverage is 10-20x as expansive as nuclear power. Also requiring the usage of rare earth metals for its manufacturing, not to speak of long term maintenance and recycling economy it would need to create to make that waste less wasteful. Yes, it is true that covering about 1.0-1.2% of the Sahara desert IN PRINCIPLE, would suffice for the world’s current energy needs. But what do we do about its climate change potential? Solar panels need to be dark to absorb energy, and that heats them up, creating heat islands that change the direction of winds, impacting the local weather. More so the global weather, if we actually bid on the insanity of turning the Sahara into a solar farm. And what do we do when we need to double that energy requirement? Another 115.000 square kilometers? How much about the strip-mining needed for that, and the contamination created by that much e-waste?

By land usage, nuclear would give us 10-20x the room to spare — in a way, I think that’s how one justifies the price tag — given how humans are organized and divided, nuclear sounds about as close one can get to clean energy for the whole planet. Even with it being as inefficient as it is (remember, it is still a steam machine), the waste heat produced would vastly be off-set by the non-emission of carbon waste, previously generated by coal and oil energy production. We sure could find use for the other 2 watts of hot water per watt of energy in the grid. And the spent fuel, after being further used by breeder plants, can be buried in geologically stable rock, or sunk in the bottom of the ocean for eras. Solar can’t be entirely discarded for some niche uses, such as isolated communities and industries, but for the masses? Give me those steam towers.

Which is why Dyson swarms were conceived, at least in part.

 

Obtaining this energy, without strip-mining or going nuclear. It’s essentially solar/thermal but in space, and without disrupting the climate.

 

WE DON'T SEE DYSON SWARMS, THOUGH

The average red dwarf emits about 1-10% of the Sun's energy output. Surrounding such a celestial object would still be a challenge, but not as colossal of a challenge as it would be to do the same to the Sun, in principle. Still, 1% of the Sun's energy output PER SECOND is about SEVEN THOUSAND TIMES humanity's energy usage PER YEAR (which is about 5.4x10^20 Joules per year).

I'm pretty sure any civilization with this much power at their disposal (224 billion times present day Humanity) is definitely far more capable than we are, and we should not give them shit if their energy bill is not equivalent to a whole sun-like star. From our current understanding of processes as a whole, this is basically limitless energy, even at a loss rate of 99%.

If it's so efficient and attractive. Why couldn't we find them? It is perhaps the easiest type of technosignature possible to find — and there is our answer. It is the easiest possible type of technosignature one can find. And they don't want to be found.

Dyson swarms, for the most attractive they can be, are very expensive lighthouses, quite literally. Except the moment you light it up, it’s only a matter of a few decades or a century before your home planet gets rained by a million relativistic kill vehicles (RKV). Either as a preemptive strike against a possible future competitor, or by fear of standing on an equal fight in the near future.

One must not discard the possibility, that if life is relatively common in the universe, one of those stars in the sky has a sniper rifle pointed at you (or a buckshot), even if it is only one per ten thousand civilizations. One example of it happening once before would be enough to settle the interstellar neighbourhood in curfew essentially forever.

And you don’t even need 1% of the Sun’s power to launch this many relativistic weapons. Even 0.1% would be enough to wreak havoc on galactic scales if we wanted to — and almost undetectable, without engulfing the star. In which case, looking for them becomes pointless — they’d be indistinguishable from dust clouds, even if they pose a threat to us.

ON THE MATTER OF VON NEUMANN PROBES

My favorite least favorite type of alien.

Such as building a Dyson swarm, it is not hard, in principle, to build a Von Neumann Probe. You only need to succeed once.

Build a machine that is able to get to a planet, mine and refine materials to make more copies of itself, and let it replicate away into the galaxy. Even if it just doubles each cycle, starting at 1 unit, taking the average distance between stars with rocky planets as 7 light-years, and travel velocity as 10% lightspeed, and 10-20 years for it to replicate itself.

That’s on average 80-100 years per doubling.

In 10 cycles down the line (1000 yrs) we got to 100 thousand stars, 100 million in 20 cycles, and in 30 cycles (3000 yrs) that’s 107 billion stars. By the 32nd iteration, we will likely put a probe in each system available in the Milky Way’s estimated 400 billion stars, in 3-4 thousand years only. And given the age of the universe, and our own galaxy’s, if nobody ever gave a stop order of such a machine, every atom of non-luminous matter in the galaxy would have been converted into machines already. Even at 1% of the speed of light, that's less than 40 thousand years.

At which point, we’re not even talking about finding little green men. Just any kind of evidence for that matter, DNA, weird fossils, signs of strip mining in the deep past, or a derelict alien vessel around Mars.

Von Neumann machines get even worse when combined with planet killer arrays, such as building RKVs launch stations and gamma ray bombs, we should be seeing them all around us. Or we wouldn’t be here.

Which means… >drumroll<… Nobody has done it yet. Somehow. Which takes us back to the Fermi Paradox again. We could be the first ones to conceive such an idea, the very last ones, or civilizations out there strictly forbid such a thing from occurring because they are little green space hippies.

Or perhaps the Late Devonian extinction even was such an attempt, who knows?

Technically speaking, civilizations focused on spreading as much as possible should follow a similar growing principle. As a disperse and forget tactic. But, would that be the case, we either live near a somehow untouched corner of the galaxy, unlikely at best, or no one is really doing it (simplest answer). Else, they would be here already, and we would not. It’s the anthropic principle again at play here. Now as to why they wouldn't be here, if they do exist, is anyone's guess.

Like between ants and humans. If a shopping mall already covers the landscape, the only time ants could've lived there is long before construction or long after the ruins crumble. In that sense, our existence might simply mean we’re living in the forgotten dirt before the galactic developers arrive. — call it the ANT-thropic principle, haha.

SPEAKING OF ANTS…

SETI, is a little frowned upon by some, sci-fi enthusiasts and ufologists alike, because of the indian vs conquistador mentality. But I’m sitting comfortably knowing that in principle, nobody is actually listening to us, and that, should they know about Earth — since it has been emitting readable biosignatures for at least 3 billion years — they would have been here already. And we would know about them too. (looking at you, Elder Things!)

Which is quite of a similar case against the Atlantean (ew!) and Silurian Hypothesis, and is another whole can of worms to open, which I will not. But in summary, there is nothing to suggest that we had other, previously advanced technological civilizations, living on Earth, prior to ourselves, be it during the last ice age, or millions of years ago. And trust me bro (or do your own research on how we tell things on geological timescales), we would know it.

What does that have to do with ants? The whole reason I started this post. I heard something over on a YouTube comment section like:

“The ants at the kitchen have spent the past two years scouting every nook and cranny of it, trying looking for holes, and pheromones. Concluded they were alone in their universe. Meanwhile, having that conversation right next to a family having an evening coffee.”

Which is, a somewhat stupid way of putting “We haven’t found aliens because they are too far beyond our comprehension to be found.”

Dear son. We went from using oil lamps and horses on the streets — to building nukes and a space station in the span of a lifetime. Progress is nearly exponential, and it only gets better the more people we have, and the more resources we have at their disposal. Yes we might be fading away from radio towards energy saving short-range technology, but that doesn’t mean we stopped using it altogether. It doesn’t mean that any other civilization out there will be unfamiliar with radio, because they have been there before.

The ants in the kitchen might not understand what the house or the humans are, but they know something is up, as they can smell the humans, and the food, and can see what is natural or not in their surroundings — so even that fails to save the argument.

The ants would notice the sugar, and plates and chairs changing places. And we would notice entire galaxies or stars suddenly moving or missing, or spawning out of nowhere.

I’m not saying humans have all the answers, but we’re close to modeling the rules of the game — we just don’t know how many players are on the field, or what their motives are. The models work 99% of the time, and we are figuring out why the 1% doesn't work, each time pushing the barrier further and further. It would be equally naive to assume we couldn’t possibly know it all, or get close to it a few generations down the line.

“Aliens could be made of sentient rocks, or be gas clouds.”

The day we get a halfway decent hypothesis — not just a buzzword soup of quantum states and gravity modulation — I’ll give it a thumbs up.

Same for silicon, sulfur, or antimony life proponents — carbon-water-oxygen life is still chemically more stable, more common, and far more energy-efficient. Not saying we couldn’t find exotic life, but we probably won’t be chatting with crystal men anytime soon. Most of those chemistries barely support self-replicating molecules, let alone cells or complex systems.

“Aliens could be communicating with gravity waves or neutrino beams.”

And I send texts to my friends using a nuclear plant’s smoke signals.

Long-distance communication can be done just as efficiently with radio — if not more. Generating enough neutrinos or a gravity wave to carry information requires absurd amounts of energy — the kind we only associate with supernovae or black hole collisions in distant galaxies. If someone nearby was using those, our detectors (built specifically to catch such things) would be lighting up like night-vision goggles in a dark room full of people holding infrared flashlights.

“What if they travel at or faster than light?”

About warp drives or stable wormholes — we’re back to the Von Neumann spread problem: why aren’t they here already? If every star is just one jump away, why isn’t someone already on our doorstep? The side effects would be loud. Relativistic mass-energy distortions, burst emissions, maybe even gravitational ripples. Something. Anything.

Such post-materialism, borderlining fanfiction and outright mysticism spoken as if it holds any water (pun intended) is infuriating, and anti-scientific by nature.

Like an invisible pet Dragon in my garage, I insist it exists because I can always argue its even more exotic as to avoid detection, at which point it might as well not exist. It gets to a point of such suspension of disbelief that we start to question if even chairs are real (and they aren’t!).

The only thing I can’t possibly argue with, at least, is metamaterialism. Yes aliens might survive eons, but locked in a 10km by 10km computer array around a red dwarf, being taken care of by AI servants, and we would never know about them, because they live in what’s virtually, a parallel reality to ours.

On a similar note.

Why would a civilization that works in the timescales of eons be interested in us at all, if such feat involves folding into themselves? They most likely would be sleeping long before we appear and wake long after we are gone. For all intents and purposes, they do not exist to us, and we do not exist to them.

WHAT DO I THINK? ( — asked nobody)

Personally? I don’t know.

I have a feeling, and it goes against what we do know. It seems impossible possibility that we are a fluke, but an understandable one at that, if the anthropic principle does us any favor — it means the Milky Way, or this arm of it must belong to us. We can be mostly sure that no-one within 40-60 light-years from Earth knows about us, humans in particular, because there are no detectable signatures back, biological or technological — remember, it's a two-way street.

As far as we know, there aren’t any Type II or III civilizations anywhere nearby — at least not within 3 million light-years — would they have existed in the past and at great distances, we would see their light from here. But there's plenty of room for Type 0.7s and 0.8s to hide.
Maybe that’s the real flaw in the Kardashev scale: it’s intuitive, but it fails to rigorously account for all paths of development. At worst, it assumes progress is linear and infinite — that it’s turtles all the way down.

In reality, no civilization may ever need to go beyond Type 1.5. The only reason to grow further would be sheer population pressure — or worse, blind momentum. The same way we collectively are Type 0.7 as a species, but the United States or China as superpowers are far below that threshold. As a species, we would have to be far too numerous and hungry collectively to have any one smaller collective organized entity needing as much power as whole star. Here I'm talking one vast alien empire existing as a network of Type 0.9 or 1.2 civs working together.

It’s also possible that beyond a point, each step up the ladder becomes exponentially harder to do so, somehow. If that's the case, then perhaps we don’t see Kardashev IIs or IIIs not because they’re extinct — but because the universe simply hasn’t been around long enough for anyone to make it that far.

In my works of fiction I try to not entirely pull the rug, instead relying on stagnation and societal decay as to why nobody, or almost nobody, ventures beyond the Dominion’s 240ly-wide bubble. Have you ever tried walking two miles into the Amazon? It is hard! And there are people there, very little, but yes, it's just not worth it most of the time without any roads, or supply lines nearby.

Who, beyond the most dedicated scientists and madmen, would do that? The average person is reading this from the comfort of their home, and it speaks volumes. Most if not all large Kardashev I civs would be too busy trying to manage the massive infrastructure and maintain its momentum (or inertia), trying not to break apart for them to keep moving forward because they can. But then we’re getting into the Big Alien theory, which might influence the actual scenario we live in.

In summary, aliens, if they do exist, they do at far more tame power and energy scales than Kardashev initially imagined would be necessary to sustain civilization. Either because of the logistics of such a societal project stalling their expansion as a whole, or because they value survival above expansion, preferring to fold into themselves or staying silent and spread thin instead of condensed and loud.

But as a precaution, we should do more active listening than beaming. Strip mine Mercury for weapons, and give them a proper welcoming salvo when they get to our shores.

- M.O. Valent, 12/06/2025

Better than RKVs?

DESTROY ALL CREATURES, THEY CAN’T BE REGENERATED.

“Destroy all creatures. They can’t be regenerated.” is in the text box of two of the most iconic cards in the card game of Magic. Wrath of God, and Damnation. Simple, rigid, brutal — even to those not at all familiar with the game. They spell and evoke a sacred cleansing, or an unholy doom.

And it gets even better, or worse (depending on your worldview), when combined with the aesthetics of the illustration by Kev Walker in the set Seventh Edition (2001) and later in Planar Chaos (2007).

 

SALVATION THROUGH ANNIHILATION

“Destroy all creatures. They can’t be regenerated.” — The first and only words they heard from their creators before being launched in the face of the abyss.

In Fred Saberhagen’s "Berserker" series (1967), ancient machines created to fight a war that no longer exists go rogue, resulting in the attempted erasure of all sentient life in the galaxy.

The concept was later expanded into the Berserker probe or civilization:

• Potentially a type of Von Neumann probe, self-replicating and rapid-spreading.
• Rogue AI or an intentionally built exterminator.
• Working under the directives of a dead creator.
• Its goal: terminate all intelligent life before it becomes a threat.

Such an invention proposes a possible solution to the Fermi Paradox.

• Life is common, but intelligent life is rare, because it is being systematically wiped as soon as it makes its presence known.
• The galaxy is then full of dead, silent worlds.
• Civilizations that know of such probes or civilizations choose to remain silent.

The silence comes from a deep desire for survival, both from those alive today and those who are long gone but left the Berserkers behind.

Potentially, every civilization understands the rationale of becoming a Berserker themselves and adopts it.

Which leads us to the Dark Forest hypothesis.

The universe is like a "dark forest" where every civilization is a hunter. Since no one can know the intentions of others, everyone stays silent — or shoots first.

Popularized in Liu Cixin’s novel The Dark Forest (2008), the second book in the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy (The Three-Body Problem series).

Key Logic:

1. All civilizations want to survive.
2. Resources are finite.
3. You can never truly know if another civilization is friendly.
4. Therefore, the safest move is to stay hidden or eliminate others preemptively.

This results in:

• A "cosmic silence" — nobody is broadcasting, because to do so is to risk death.
• A universe full of civilizations, each afraid, each hiding.
• When someone does speak, others might interpret it as a threat and destroy them — not out of malice, but rational survival.

THERE IS NO STEALTH IN SPACE

In principle, there is no way to hide oneself from external peering across the vastness of space. Sufficiently advanced telescopes and sensor arrays can and will detect radio emissions, leakages, biosignatures, and technosignatures from potentially thousands of light-years away. We are, year after year, inching closer to that potential.

Plus, the Earth itself, as old as it is, has been emitting bio-signatures for as long as 3 billion years, and as far as we can tell, we haven’t been visited or exterminated yet. Worse still, we have been broadcasting into space for about 100 years — had anyone been listening to it nearby, say within 50-ish light-years, we would have received a response, or known about them by now, right? This uncertainty only further stokes the apparent silence in the heavens.

As far as we can tell, there are no technological indicators nearby, at least not ones that point to a far far more advanced civilization than ours. Such as Dyson Swarms.

But I dare to propose that no one builds Dyson swarms in the way we expect. If a civilization factors existential risk into its engineering decisions, then a Dyson swarm becomes nothing more than an expensive lighthouse, and a potentially deadly one at that.

Sure, absorbing even just 1% of the Sun’s total energy output would mean nearly limitless energy for humanity, but it would also signal to the entire Orion Arm that we are here. Anyone observing the stars for a sufficiently long amount of time would notice that now our Sun suddenly dims in regular intervals compatible to that of a techno-signature, and upon realizing that, we just gave them to chance to respond accordingly.

If there's one thing Magic, game theory, and war have taught me, it's this: giving your opponents a choice is almost always a mistake.

We then revert to low-yield Dyson swarms at (<1%), because the energy need still exists, but over-doing ourselves above a certain signal-to-noise threshold is dangerous.

In the dark forest, the most negative outcome is annihilation, and the least negative is staying silent. The neutral option however, given you have the opportunity to make the first move, is to strike first before they become capable of doing so to you.

THERE ARE NO SECOND CHANCES IN SPACE

You are a multiplanetary Kardashev 0.8 civilization, and you have found 10 potentially habitable planets within 100 light-years from your star. Great job! Can we jump to interstellar colonization? Not yet.

We need to study those worlds, and see if they actually harbor any kind of life, and if that life poses a threat to our own existence.

After almost a century sifting through space and watching those systems closely, we have determined:

7 of those worlds are far too primitive or sterile to represent danger. Prime candidates for safe exploration.

• Planet A 25ly away from ours has weak bio and techno-signatures of a 19th century industrial society. K 0.5
• Planet B 50ly away from ours has strong bio and techno-signatures. It's not clear how much advanced they are, they could between a century or a few decades behind us. K 0.75
• Planet C 100ly away is clearly on the same level if not more advanced than us. K +0.8

Threat Assessment:

• Civilization A - Low priority, they don't know we know about them. Can't do anything about us for a good while, but they are close enough that once they do - they will have the upper hand.
• Civilization B - Alert, they might know about us, or be very close to finding out we exist. We are lucky to have found them first.
• Civilization C - HIGH ALERT, they probably have known about us for a century or more. If they attacked us immediately upon discovery, then we have to retaliate and scatter before we are wiped out soon. If they didn't attack us, then we have the advantage of attacking first.

There are a couple creative ways we can deal with those. The safest option however, with this little information, great technological and time dilation gaps, in all three scenarios, is to attack first.

However, our mere existence here indicates there is something else at play.

Civilization B likely knows about A. And C knows of both us, A and B. Yet they have done nothing, apparently. Civilization C is also alive as far as we know it, so that's weird.

Let's wait to see what happens to the others while we arm ourselves for a potential conflict.

The swiftest way to eliminate a planetbound civilization, like ourselves, would be to deliver them a Relativistic Kill Vehicle - RKV to their homeworld.

A single 100 kilogram steel sphere traveling at 99.99% the speed of light would carry enough energy to deliver about 150 Gigatons of TNT, equivalent to a 2km-wide asteroid impact at 17km/s. Scale that to about 50 tons of steel, and we got ourselves 75 Teratons of TNT, or equivalent to the dinosaur-killer asteroid in our hands. If we want to maintain the impact but reduce the projectile size, we have to make it even faster, at near-near lightspeed.

That should be it, right? Sit a container-sized projectile atop a really large proton or matter-antimatter rocket, position a few whipple shields to protect the payload and rocket from interstellar debris and voilà, shoot and forget.

Congratulations, you have just missed your target, and now they know you exist!

A planet is a big target. A container-sized projectile traveling at 99.99% lightspeed should hit it — but only if you can predict its position 25 years in advance, down to the hour. That’s a hard ask.

That requires precise and near-perfect information to achieve, or insane navigational input on the warhead. Workable, but still impractical.

There is also the issue of false hits. The projectile hits a moon, or large enough asteroid in their target system that the whipple shield is not able to protect it, the thing explodes in interplanetary space without causing the intended damage. That also includes unaccounted rogue planets in interstellar space.

Alright — just send more!

You can fire a thousand RKVs to ensure one or multiple hits on a planetbound target without any defenses. That would work. But your fire cone would still have to be very tight. And if you fail to exterminate them, they will know exactly where in the sky to look for you. That could work for Civilization A — just double-tap them. Better safe than sorry.

WHEN PLANETARY XENOCIDE ISN'T ENOUGH

Getting rid of an equivalent Type 0.8 civilization requires a little more work than that. Like us, they may have expanded across their system, making single-target annihilation ineffective, we don't know for sure how many targets we would need to take down in their home system.

You count at least 5 Earth-sized planets in the system, with possibly 50 minor bodies such as moons and asteroids, with about 10,000 major space habitats and stations. That's 5 high value targets with 10k moderate ones. Let's say 10,100 hits is an acceptable mission result. Instead of a couple hundred to a thousand, we now need over 10,000 weapons with 100% accuracy to get the job done.

If for the previous one we needed about 1,000 RKVs to ensure 1-2 hits. For this one, given a similar statistical success rate, we need to deploy roughly on the scale of 5-10 million weapons.

This suddenly sounds like a bad plan now, that's 325 million tons of steel just for the payload, not to speak of the amount of antimatter needed to power it, and the firing flash we will send into space. And firing slowly one by one would give our target enough time to react in the case we don't get them in the first shot. At 50ly distance, that also means they will know they have been attacked 1.8 days in advance, giving them time to counterattack if they have similar weapons, or even, counter our attack before retaliating. Too risky, too flashy.

It gets even worse if we wanna attack Civilization C the same way. Imagine hundreds of thousands of habitats, or even aiming at neighboring star systems to theirs as well if they have gone interstellar already. Their response window to our attack is even wider at 3.6 days, and it would only be worse would they be at 1000 light-years from us, with a month to respond (because light still travels faster than our projectiles).

In conclusion, RKVs aren't the perfect weapon for interstellar warfare. They are effective however, if:

1. Target is relatively close. Within a few dozen light-years.
2. Target is planetbound. Lower technological tier.
3. Your weapon travels at near-C. RKVs of lower velocity can still be efficient in interplanetary conflict.

Failure to obliterate your target in the first hit with the least amount of weapons results in your own likely annihilation, either by their counterstrike or by a preemptive alliance of eavesdropping civilizations. Undesirable, unless you point your weapons in every conceivable direction at once. Spray and pray, it's the Berserker way.

EXILE ALL ARTIFACTS, CREATURES, ENCHANTMENTS, AND GRAVEYARDS

Is the text of a desperate Farewell being played for all its modes.

Meet the MIRP - Matter-Antimatter Induced Radiation Pulse. The perfect Berserker Probe.

If matter-antimatter reactions can be tamed, then sending a few probes behind our grapeshot would ensure another round of sterilization. Not only to propel our masses, but to flashbang their home system with radiation. Intentionally detonating an M-AM core would release intense amounts of radiation, thousands of times above their background levels and likely way above what usual radiation armor in space stations can deal with.

Since M-AM annihilation reacts one-to-one to release pure energy, we could perhaps, react a few billion tons of each, creating an artificial supernova at roughly point-blank. Total annihilation by gamma ray burst without the hassle of building 1 billion steel spheres and yeeting them at near light-speed. It could even easily pass off as an interstellar rogue asteroid. And the flash? Easily dismissed as distant supernova, or even drowned in background noise since it is so localized in effect.

And we know how dangerous that can be, take the Late Devonian mass extinction event, about 360-375 million years ago. Where supernova radiation is theorized to have contributed to mass extinction through ozone depletion and increased UV exposure, due the presence of iron-60 in the rock layers. The estimated energy flux is on the order of 100 kJ/m², mostly because of atmospheric attenuation — so while it would be effective against space infrastructure, it would have to hit way harder than that to pose an existential threat to life on the surface of an Earth-like planet if we wanted to fry all Life.

Which makes me wonder. Has Earth been attacked before? Have we outlived our aggressors perhaps? I hope so. Would the solar system have been someone else's colony, that got targeted, it is perhaps not so far off. (No I'm not entertaining the Silurian hypothesis.)

Would a 1000 solar-luminosity flash occur over a split second at under 1 AU from Earth, it would release an energy dose of approximately 13.5 GJ/m² — over 13,000 times more intense than the Late Devonian extinction event. And it would remain lethally effective out to 10 AU, covering all, if not most, of a civilization’s core space infrastructure and habitats.

The real challenge lies in gathering the 2.2 trillion kilograms of antimatter to complement an equal mass of conventional matter. But how much is truly required depends on proximity to the target — or, alternately, on deploying many smaller units across key orbital lanes and gravity wells.

Gathering this much antimatter is a non-trivial issue, but one already accounted for if one does intend to fire RKVs at near lightspeed anyway. I'm just proposing a far more efficient use per kilogram, at a near 100% kill-rate.

Aside from that, it has nearly infinite range, nearly infinite efficiency and nearly infinite accuracy, it is also fragile, so tampering with it if found could possibly trigger a premature detonation. Differently from RKVs which only work effectively at a limited range due informational gaps, such a gamma-ray burst bomb wouldn’t give away your location in the slightest, because it's an area effect, it could have been the system next to the target, or someone in the far edge of the galactic arm.

It could have been wandering space as a sleeper agent, and detonating upon sensing radio waves at sufficiently close range.

It could possibly be maneuvered out of the system to mitigate its effect if they realize it can’t be disarmed, but that assumes the target fully understands what it is dealing with in time to act upon it. And that’s unlikely, resulting or requiring an ungodly amount of paranoia.

And that fulfills the requirements for the dark forest scenario to be sustained.

• Civilizations value survival above extinction.
• Civilizations can attack with 100% accuracy and 100% efficiency at extremely long distances.
• Civilizations can attack so with near 100% anonymity, as to not invite a counterattack.

It makes the forest completely mined and booby trapped, or in the process of becoming so.

Plausible by engineering, invisible by design.

Goodnight.

- M.O. Valent, 10/06/2025