I mean laser interferometers are an amazing advancement but just imagine seeing an earth-sized chunk of gold pop out of a kilonova (probably not my lifetime but eventually a human will see it happen)
Thank goodness this administration did not frack with Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, I thought the name alone would make them cancel it or rename it after him, wait maybe I shouldn't even mention that idea...
* https://science.nasa.gov/mission/roman-space-telescope/
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Telesc...
If you look at image 17 you can see that a simulated aragoscope that is in our technical reach could already resolve the Jupiter moons from almost 23 light years away. I hope as well that we will have something comparable while I am still around.
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/2014_phase_i...
For reference, there are 103 known main sequence stars within 20 light years.[1]
it will block overwhelming starlight physically so objects around them can be imaged by existing telescopes
rather simple/clever, some things you just cannot do digitally
I don't think it's possible to do worse, even for him.
The big bang created hydrogen, helium, and small amounts of lithium. Any higher elements are created by stars, and a significant presence of those "metals" will take a star down a different path than pair-instability.
Low-metalicity environments are not likely to be friendly to life.
And then also (maybe this is absurd) isn't there something intrinsic in intelligence to want to avoid conflict and desire peace?
So it might be better to use the tried and tested terrestrial nuclear MAD doctrine & rather doe careful diplomacy with any newcomers, like a bunch of psychos each having a full arsenal of planet killing weapons (because that's what any sufficiently advanced civilization is).
In short - rather than Dark Forrest I imagine a harmonious if not utopic galaxy teaming with varied life that is on the first glance peaceful and cooperating.
With the occasional bunch of start systems evaporating once in a while, but we don't talk about those.
A more powerful hidden intelligent system will probably fear a medium power intelligent civlization that sets out to destroy "newcomers" as a civilization that might cause their destruction so the best course of action would be to destroy the medium power one before they become as powerful.
Once multiple destructions have occured, every sentient party capable of becoming aware will fear the others.
For a normal, non-relativistic gas in which the particles have no internal degrees of freedom, gamma is 5/3. As a gas becomes more relativistic, and as photon pressure becomes more important, gamma declines toward 4/3.
For gamma = 4/3, a self-gravitating gas will be marginally stable: the energy needed to compress a sphere of the gas will be equal to the gravitational potential energy liberated by the compression. So, any effect that pushes gamma below 4/3 makes it unstable against collapse.
In a conventional core collapse SN this is photodissociation of nuclei, where energy gets soaked up in breaking apart nuclei into alpha particles and then free nucleons. In a pair-instability SN, this is increasing conversion of photons to electron-positron pairs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photodisintegration#Hypernovae
BTW, I don't think largeness is needed for photodisintegration to occur; this should happen even in garden variety type-II SN.
