Over the top as in like overkill and a bit hard to do insidiously, I don’t know if over the top was the right wording.
Why would a hostile civilization even do that? Out of pure sadism?
Extremely cheap. Think about the energy needed to send a massive RKV to precisely hit a planet, and that might leave everything fine and be mistimed by a million years and the potential threat of sentience could show up right after and take advantage of the ruined ecosystem or show up 250 thousand years earlier than you timed it, and have colonies on every moon they’d thought to sling a separatist group or annoying scientist and their friends at. Either way, now you have a civ swearing vengeance instead of being out of your hair. Send a few prions that obliterate societies, they barely do anything to non-sapient species, maybe an occasional overreaction to something like bees results in something like colony collapse disorder, but it tends to leave dumber animals alone. Now you never have a civ swear vengeance because there’s nothing left, but you can still go see their biology if you’re curious, and no giant weapons needed. The only equivalently economical option is self replicating murder drone to cover every base with shear overwhelming power, but do you want to be the one who leased murder robots on everyone? Nah, that sounds like a huge risk. The prion thing could be a massive risk too, but it’s at least not coming to get you.
Alternately, RKV’s are cheap, if you do want to just carpetbomb the galaxy, you only really need to throw a single star system at it. Hit each planet with a few missiles separated by tens of thousands of years but going fast enough to outshine the sun when they hit atmosphere. Do this every few million years and you never have to worry about enemies. Slight problem when the genius AI or extra-galactic threat or freak interstellar fungus looks around a sees a billion ruined worlds and one OP empire, and puts 2 and 2 together, and kills you, or puts a bunch of sentient basketballs in every star system than want nothing more than to get ran into by an RKV, destroying it. (RKV stands for relativistic kill vehicle. Basically a big stick you throw with (usually) a Dyson sphere’s power by way of solar sails or railguns or beamed propulsion of some kind. Hits some large share of the speed of light, kills stuff.)
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Wouldn’t a viral agent designed to be as effective against a species as possible also work?
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sure. It’s a bit murder-y and less cool imo.
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What even is the bare requirement for a weapon to be classified as a superweapon?
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the better term IMO is strategic weapon. It comes with a definition, a weapon you use strategically instead of tactically. If the guy in charge of your war makes a strategic decision to arm all the soldiers with knives, knives are strategic weapons/j. Basically I think the defining feature is when the decision to use one of these things is a strategic one. Obviously this can still be gamed, but it’s probably a safeish definition.
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So I guess that on different scales of conflict weapons may change between being strategical and tactical, right?
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Prions may seem like an almost ideal bioweapon, but they have a VERY strong drawback - their very poor mode of transmission, prions can only be transmitted through eating the meat of an infected individual, which is why 1. prions can only be transmitted in intelligent species that practice cannibalism 2. prions can cause colossal damage only if society does not take measures to combat prions (limiting or prohibiting cannibalism) Classic bioweapons (bacteria, viruses) are much better than prions because they are transmitted faster and more efficiently, and are also capable of adaptation through evolution.
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I think the danger comes from the fact that prions could contaminate food/water/whatever sources and it could take years for the targetted species to notice that something’s off.
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Infect the prey animals water source or something. It’s not a hard limit, it’s a downside of our world’s prions being comically simple little things
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This method is only suitable for killing a local population, but in order to cause damage on a planetary scale, it will be necessary to pour a huge amount of prions into the rivers and lakes of the planet, which is almost impossible to do secretly, and it is also EXTREMELY costly in terms of resources (since millions of tons of prions will be required for a significant effect), due to these factors, prions as bioweapons are irrational as bioweapons on a planetary scale.
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Prions are very small and once inside an organism, they can contaminate everything it touches. They at least seem viable.
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Er, not really. They tend not to spread by very many means. A virus might be better for this purpose in all honesty, but it was just one idea I had.
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Could humans be realisticly able to survive a targetted prion weapon?
US??? NO! An only slightly saner (or much more callous) sapient species could totally pull it off, but wouldn’t really be in any place to fight an invasion after it.
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Could a species just wait down in bunkers until all the prions have decayed?
As I said, saner or more callous. If you can make a few well protected bunkers and make sure everyone else dies, which the prions might not even do for you, you win. You can’t fit 8 billion people (or even 2 billion, you’d need like a half dozen serial Thanoses to get the population low enough) in extremely well secured bunkers. If the prions get into one bunker you need to make sure they never get out. If you aren’t willing to sterilize billions of people, bunkers aren’t enough. A saner species might be able to pull off a super-quarantine, or be prepared for this ahead of time by not having massive, vulnerable supply chains being the only thing keeping everyone fed. A more callous species could just get the millionaires in great bunkers and wait for everyone else to die.
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Prions are proteins, right? Why should it exist on the lakes? Why not infiltrate the food source of that species? Replace prionless wheat with prionned one. Their neighbors could notice that something was wrong, so in order to pull this off, the whole planet would need to be targeted at the same time, which is probably impossible if they do their own agriculture but if they are importing it, I think it can be done. You’d just need to take control of a supply spaceship and also hack into their security cams so all looks normal. They should also not be testing their food all the time with offline sensors. So this attack would only work once.
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