Feel free to read it if you want a more philosophical take! Nietzsche spoke of this, in different words, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. ![]() You typically can't tell if it will go one way or the other. The behavior of a system on the edge of chaos is. An ordered system will always persist for unbounded time. A chaotic system will always destroy any order in unbounded time. Now if you want to talk about infinities, its hard. ![]() Yet every younger generation somehow rises to the challenge (so far!) I don't know how old you are, but from what I have read, every generation comes to the conclusion that the younger generation will probably be the last generation in the civilization. If you assume that a civilization must destroy itself because it isn't perfectly ordered, you miss out on the strange tendency of civilizations to persist way longer than they should at first glance. Those who study this concept find that living organisms and civilizations have a curious tendency to sit in this edge of chaos region. The Edge of Chaos is a hypothesized region dominated by the interplay between order and disorder. The idea is that there are some systems that are insanely ordered. The underlying mathematical principle is known as the Edge of Chaos. An advanced civilization may have sufficient teraforming capabilities to widen the set of possible planets to colonize after someone gets a DUI at almost the speed of light. We search for Earth-like exo-planets because that's what we feel we'd need to survive. The other question would be whether such an advanced civilization would have trouble colonizing new planets. Yes, one nutjob might be able to take out a planet, but not an entire Class II or Class III civilization. ![]() The hard question is whether a civilization that has near-lightspeed traffic could ever possibly limit itself to one planet. It is also possible for a near-lightspeed vehicle to kill off everything on a planet. It is believed that firing all of our nukes would change the climate enough to kill us off. We believe our nuclear arsenals are an example. It is possible for a civilization to destroy itself. That would mean a planet would be able to use such technology to thward the near-lightspeed ship if not detect it in time and launch a bowlingball at lightspeed into its path causing the ship to desintegrate and spread its energy across space and the entire atmosphere of the planet. The armor will likely be something else instead, like a field that disperses dust and micro meteorites before the ship passes. At such speed even air molecules would fuse to the exterior of the ship and create a nuclear reaction. A ship going at near lightspeed will need protective measures, as hitting a dust particle is like a grenade if not more powerful going off while a pebble could turn your ship inside out. It might also has the means to protect against it. A full space ship with hull, armor, passenger capacity, atmosphere, food+drink, equipment and cargo capacity going at near lightspeed would definitely be able to wipe out the civilization from a planet. Simply said, yes! A few KG of mass at near lightspeed would hit with forces many times that of an extinction event meteorite.
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