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How to Win an Interstellar War

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell · 13.3M views · 2023-11-15 · 11:05

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Overview

A Kurzgesagt video exploring how advanced civilizations might wage war across light years. It looks at weapons such as relativistic beams and what they would do.

On Hacker News

Cited in discussions of cosmic rays and alien threats, especially the idea of sterilizing a planet from afar with an electron beam.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2023–2025

Topics

Cosmology & astrophysicsMilitary history & warfare
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kurzgesagtaliensrelativistic weaponsspacespeculative science

What people said

animatethrow · 2024-02 · Recommendation

Aliens could plausibly sterilise earth from light years away using an electron beam, according to a great Kurzgesagt episode: [VIDEO] An electron beam seems to be the stealthiest of the three extermination options, the other two being a star laser and antimatter "rods from God."

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fhdkweig · 2025-10 · Reference

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell posted two videos studying the possible ways a malevolent society can cause problems without even leaving their star system at all. The Dark Forest solution to the Fermi Paradox (the first strike advantage): [LINK] How to Win an Interstellar War (without leaving home) [VIDEO]

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loufe · 2023-11 · Reference

Kurzgesagt recently uloaded a video on hypethetical interplantary weapons ( [VIDEO] ) which is the only reason I even know what the OMG particle is. They described an "Ultra Relativistic Electron Beam" which theoretically could travel much closer to the speed of light than the OMG particle. I'm left wondering if the proximity to the pure speed of light has any bearing on total delivered energy when comparing different particles.

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Sources

Video by Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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