I’ll be the first to admit that this is highly unlikely, but…

You have made a good point.

One thing in particular that has interested me from time to time is what would the signature be of the collision of a highly relativistic, very large ETI world ship with a rouge planet.

I have often wondered if some gamma ray burst are the result of a large highly relativistic ETI space craft colliding with an interstellar comet or small asteriod. I do not seriously consider that such a collision would give off an optical signal for between days to months however, as the debris would very rapidly radiate away its heat energy. At a T EXP 4 dependence of integrated electromagnetic black body power radiance, the perhaps trillion to 100 trillion K effective temperature of a ETI space craft collision with a comet would produce a short gamma ray burst.

Usman Saeed;

I like the idea of an astrophysical anomaly with paradigm shifting potential.

Thanks;

Jim

This bazaar event causes me to wonder if an ETI civilization did itself in.

I remember reading a reference to a report to the effect that it might be possible that a high mass specific yield themonuclear device detonated deep under the Earth’s ocean might have a chance at starting a propagating fusion chain reaction within the Earth’s oceans that would race around the globe on the order of one second thus effectively turning the Earth’s oceans into a thermonuclear device with a mass of about 10 EXP 18 tons and a yield of about 10 EXP 26 tons of TNT or the equivalent mass in TNT of a M class star.

The reference I had read had suggested that nuclear detonations that were conducted underwater during the mid 20th century did not set off a propagating fusion reaction perhaps becuase the mass specific yields of the devices were not high enough and the devices were not detonated at a great enough depth wherein the situation of a lack of high enough water pressure to momentarilly resist the blast wave front would have not permitted momentarilly high enough transient peak pressures and temperatures required to set of a water fusion reaction.

Perhaps some rouge ETI regime on a distant planet, perhaps a super Earth type of planet, designed some sort of a shaped charge nuclear device wherein the peak temperatures and pressures of the exploding device rose to a level several orders of magnitude higher than that which is possible by a typical spherically symmetric thermonuclear explosion.

Open literature on the subject of shaped charged nuclear devices has suggested that simple designs of such devices might concentrate the explosive flux energy at much as 5 to 6 orders of magnitude above what is possible for a spherically symmetric nuclear blast.

One of the predominant nuclear physicists who worked on the development of the Hydrogen bomb has reportedly once calculated that a 100 kilometer or so wide thermonuclear device made with utmost precision, a sort of homogenous thermonuclear crystal, if detonated in an appropriately spherically symmetric and judicious radial pattern, could actually produce tiny but macroscopic massed blackholes near or at the center of the exploding device.

Now, I am not advocating exotoc nuclear weapons research here, however, given the huge number of potentially technically advanced ETI civilizations and the dangers that can come from free will, I would not be surprised if occasionally, such a civilization goes off the deep end at times.

Thanks;

Jim

A huge launching laser shoving an interstellar probe into the cosmos?

Or an optical CETI signal perhaps?

Questions abound.