Is Humanity About To Accidentally Declare Interstellar War On Alien Civilizations?
If the Breakthrough Starshot initiative, promoted by Stephen Hawking, works exactly as planned, it could lead to disaster.
Imagine yourself on a world not so different from Earth, orbiting a star not so different from our Sun. The temperature and atmosphere are just right for liquid water to exist on the surface, and a mix of oceans and continents ensures that life has had stable, thriving conditions for billions of years. Evolutionary processes increased the complexity and level-of-differentiation of the organisms on this world, too. Through a combination of chance mutations and selection pressures, a species on this world became sentient, conscious, and reached unprecedented levels of dominance over nature.
As their technology advanced, they began to wonder about alien civilizations around other stars. And then, from a distant, faint point of light in their sky, the first attack happened, blowing a hole in their planet at relativistic speeds. It wasn’t a meteor, asteroid, or comet; from across interstellar space, it was humanity.
