>>64141374
>big assumption
No. Any civilization that can travel between stars could lob a few asteroids at Earth and create whatever level of damage they wish to, from mild inconvenience to full-on extinction event back to algae and fungus. It might take a couple of months or a couple of years to select and move appropriately sized comets/asteroids/etc., but they could pepper us with a score of 1 KM rocks or half a dozen 10-mile rocks depending on what they want to achieve, just takes a simple engine and some fuel. They wouldn't even have to come any closer than Jupiter, or maybe hide behind Saturn and throw a few dozen ice rocks at us. We'd never even know we were under attack until it was far too late to do more than watch the shit come in, without ever having even seen the ships that sent them.
Besides, if you'd bothered to read the thread, a biological attack with genetically engineered disease doesn't take more than a small lab and a basic library of their own scientific history on the equivalent of an iPhone.
>Humanity has the ability to wipe out planets with its atomic stockpile
Not really. There is a reasonable question if we have enough to extinct humans.
> t. 10,000 sci fi stories since WWII
Certainly we can send our civilization literally back to the Stone Age, and living conditions would be miserable for centuries, but it would probably take a master plan to coordinate all existing nukes to ensure total extinction. And that doesn't even "wipe out" the planet we live on; just sets the stage for whatever evolves next to study us by whatever's preserved in the fossil record.
