Talk:The Killing Star

Note

Ecualegacy: Admittedly I'm writing this article without the book in front of me and with 6 months of time since reading it. I'd love to see improvements. Note to the admins: please let me know what is needed to keep this article from being deleted outright again.
Ecualegacy (talk) 00:00, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Story Premise Discussion

As quoted from the book, The Killing Star assumes the following about alien behavior:

1. THEIR SURVIVAL WILL BE MORE IMPORTANT THAN OUR SURVIVAL.

If an alien species has to choose between them and us, they won't choose us. It is difficult to imagine a contrary case; species don't survive by being self-sacrificing.

2. WIMPS DON'T BECOME TOP DOGS.
No species makes it to the top by being passive. The species in charge of any given planet will be highly intelligent, alert, aggressive, and ruthless when necessary.

3. THEY WILL ASSUME THAT THE FIRST TWO LAWS APPLY TO US.

These statements, while possibly valid, lead to a puzzling mystery touched on in the novel. If alien civilizations fear competition, then why are we here to wonder at it? One would expect that they would a) expand as quickly (albeit covertly) as possible in order to b) watch for intelligent life wherever it might arise so that they can c) control or quietly exterminate it. In any case, one would not expect them to lightly reveal their existence to other potentially hostile alien races.

For more on this discussion, see Fermi's Paradox and Atomic Rockets: Aliens.

Also, there may be exceptions to these laws. It is possible to imagine a species that loses its more agressive members through self-extermination or genetic engineering. Wimps may become top dogs under many scenarios. A wimpy slave race could inherit a galactic civilization when the more aggressive ruling species gets killed off by an outsider/dies off in a plague/transcends to a higher plain/or commits mass suicide out of nihilistic dispair (just to name a few wild ideas). Their survival may not be more important than our survival depending on who is running their civilization and what belief system they have embraced. The aliens in the book were ruled by computers. What if someone had programmed those computers with less ruthless logic? There could be a civilization out there with an unbreakable rule of "thou shalt not all to be destroyed more than 50% of the aliens" etc etc. The third law about what they assume is likewise not certain.

General Discussion

Hi, thanks for making this article. I was kind of confused as to what the story was after hearing this book mentioned on Atomic Rockets after I read the "Aliens" article and was somewhat shocked by the extremely unethical premise.

But surely someone by now has composed a thorough rebuttal to this book, much like there have been rebuttals written for "The Cold Equations"? Destroying other species just because "they might destroy us" is a bit extreme--we have not gone on an anti-ant genocide despite the fact that they may "develop a superbug" and kill us all. In fact, haven't plenty of insect species benefited humanity with new drugs, use of their biological products (such as with the various honeybees), or even by aping their own creations (such as with wasps and their paper)? Yes, we did irradiate screw-worm flies, but we haven't eradicated them given the benefits they give us in forensics.

If there is indeed such a rebuttal for this book out there, perhaps it would be a good idea to post a link to it on this article.

Our relationship with insects isn't really relevant. One of the central themes of the book (and part of the basic argument about alien species exterminating each other) is that relativistic bombardment is more or less impossible to defend against; if an alien species wants to wreck your world and they have the technology to accelerate things to near the speed of light, there's basically nothing you can do to stop them (other than smash them first). The question, then, becomes whether or not you should destroy them before they decide to destroy you. Ants and other insects, on the other hand, have no plausible way to destroy humanity. As for rebuttals, the only serious rebuttal I have ever seen is the "neighborhood watch" argument, which proposes that destroying your neighbors might actually make you less safe if it causes some other race to view you as a threat when they otherwise wouldn't have.

Ecualegacy's Reply: The ethics of the aliens in The Killing Star are summed up in the book's Iron Rule: Do unto them before they do the same to you. Unless the aliens believed in an ethical system that would restrict them from wiping out species competition, there are precious few reasons that they shouldn't, assuming they could expect to get away with it. Yes, they would miss out on the richness that diversity in intelligence might provide, but then what good is diversity to them if they aren't around to enjoy it?

There are several rebuttals to the argument. The Atomic Rockets site linked above is one such. Another is made by Greg Bear in The Forge of God. Essentially follows the neighborhood watch argument above. As Bill Seney and others put it, any attack may not be visible to the target, but it is visible to third party observers, identifying the attacker as definitively hostile. In a sufficiently populated galaxy, revealing your position by launching an attack makes you a high-priority target. 24.99.60.48 (talk) 00:43, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

Feasibility of Interstellar War

The whole premise of the story begs the question: is it really possible to annihilate an established interplanetary civilization? Well, it is if you catch your enemy before he has a chance to really develop his defenses. But let's say that there is a nearby HIGHLY DEVELOPED solar empire whose very existance really annoys the heck out of you and you want to destroy it. What are you up against? Fleets of ships just waiting in deep space to intercept invaders. Hoards of minibases and supply depots. These, by the way, will have the ability to change course and speed in order to frustrate the firing solutions of your relativistic missiles. Oh, and a prepared enemy will have phalanxes of R-bombs waiting to launch in relatiation. Those R-Bombs, by the way, are difficult to impossible to intercept once they get up to speed.

But let's say you decide to launch anyway (with the hope that you can hit them before they know you've even launched ... a BIG assumption to a watchful enemy). Understand then what R-bomb are useful against. R-bombs are strategic weapons good at pounding the hell out of predictably moving targets like planets, asteroids, and large space installations. They are too diffult to guide to small, mobile targets.

Now, let's assume you have been wildly successful at wiping out your enemy's ground based civilization, spaceborne solar arrays, and antimatter factories. There is still the matter of knocking out the self-sufficient spaceborne element. Which will be firing missles back at your home bases as well as shooting up any mop-up fleet you've sent out. That fleet, by the way, will be ridiculously easy to spot given that its exhaust plumes and heat coronas will make them shine like stars to even modest detection arrays.

And so what have you accomplished? Your invasion fleet is knocked out of the sky. You've royally pissed off an enemy who will keep firing relativistic missiles at you. Unless someone calls a ceasefire, there is little to stop the survivors from dragging the fight out indefinitely.

Ecualegacy (talk) 20:59, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

That's exactly what leads to the premise of this book. Your argument is based on the (self-admitted) assumption that both civilizations have R-bombs and 'are fully prepared for a fight'. The point of the book is that it's better not to ever let it get to that point. Kill them before they have R-bombs, problem solved.

--Quetzilla —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.206.216.163 (talk) 16:50, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Agreed. And it seems silly to me that, if the aliens were so cut-throat, why did they wait for so long to hit us? More to the point, why weren't they are already moving to picket every single star system in the galaxy so that they could kill off every emerging intelligent species they could find? The simple answer, of course, is that Pellegrino wouldn't have a story to write then :-)

--Ecualegacy (talk) 02:39, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

The aliens are pitiless, but not sadistic. Until humans demonstrated that they could build R-bombs there was no reason to wipe them out because they were not a threat. This is explained explicitly in the book. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.198.52.172 (talk) 23:18, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

I conceed that this is how Pelligrino explained the aliens' behavior in the book. It is one possible scenario for the real world and he did a much better job of dramatizing it than I could. The point I'm trying to make, however, is that different aliens could decide that they would rather have zero risk and wipe us out as soon as they discovered we had become intelligent. On the other hand, why should the aliens fear us really? Very likley, as implied in the book, the aliens would probably have many, many more star systems than us. They might get hurt by us, but they would never lose an R-bomb war. It would be like China worrying that they might be defeated by North Korea. The question comes back to what level of harm to themselves are they willing to risk before they decide we're more trouble as neighbors than we are worth? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ecualegacy (talk • contribs) 16:30, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Out of Print

This book has been out of hardprint for some time, although e-book versions may be available. An audiobook version is available through Audible and iTunes as of 2012.

Plot summary needs improvement

The plot summary seems to be talking as if it was the writer of the story who wrote that section. I believe it should be redone to look like other plot summaries would look: for instance, not using "we" or speaking as if the writer had feelings here. 173.206.89.52 (talk) 21:14, 3 September 2013 (UTC)

Plot Summary corrected 10/11/13. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 151.151.109.12 (talk) 15:24, 11 October 2013 (UTC)