Just blow the whole planet up or hurl in an asteroid.
It is pretty racist to punish a whole species (and all the other life forms that are not sentient) but what can you do if there is a real danger.
‘mote in gods eye’ is a fiction where the humans try to make that decision.
In real life there are viruses we prefer to have exterminated, or dangerous animals.
From an engineering standpoint, eliminating almost all life on a planet is trivial for anyone capable of interstellar travel. Real easy to make it look like an accident too. Getting away with it depends on their opinions of circumstantial evidence.
That’s fictional evidence (though quite a good novel), and it doesn’t prove anything.
How hard is it to destroy (all life on? all sentient life on?) planets? Are the costs of group punishment too high for it to make sense?
Just blow the whole planet up or hurl in an asteroid. It is pretty racist to punish a whole species (and all the other life forms that are not sentient) but what can you do if there is a real danger. ‘mote in gods eye’ is a fiction where the humans try to make that decision. In real life there are viruses we prefer to have exterminated, or dangerous animals.
From an engineering standpoint, eliminating almost all life on a planet is trivial for anyone capable of interstellar travel. Real easy to make it look like an accident too. Getting away with it depends on their opinions of circumstantial evidence.