Fun Stuff > CHATTER
miscellaneous musings
Morituri:
I can't agree there. I think that humanity is going to be doing things that will be tremendously obvious to anybody with a telescope, probably within the next thousand years. Indeed, we might be doing things like that right now if the Library of Alexandria hadn't burned. And if there are thousands of other species out there, wouldn't about half of them be a thousand years ahead of us? Within a million years, we'll be spread across half the galaxy, and if there were thousands of other species out there, wouldn't nearly half of them be a million years ahead of us? We're not looking for some flickering cosmic speck that's barely mastered radio. That stage is an eyeblink in history broad enough to be encompassing the evolution of species.
When Fermi said 'where is everybody?' he wasn't talking about spotting some tiny speck across the width of half a galaxy; he was asking why they aren't yet living on every worthwhile rock in every direction. Because if just one with what we'd call a 'normal' urge to spread out had appeared, anywhere in the galaxy, just a few million years ago, we'd be looking at quadrillions of their descendants living on worlds and planetoids in this solar system. We wouldn't be debating their existence, we'd be too busy trying to stay out from under their feet.
cesium133:
Why would they necessarily be obvious, even if they're light-years ahead of us? If they've moved past radio, then they may be using technology that we simply can't detect. And if they are still using electromagnetic radiation to communicate, they're likely doing it using laser beams, not broadcasts. Even if you've got a Dyson sphere's worth of energy, it still doesn't make sense to be wasteful with that energy by blasting it out in every direction.
Also, this assumes that the direction of a civilization is always advancing forward. How many societies, when they realize how difficult and expensive it is to travel interstellar (especially since, unless Einstein turns out to be wrong, you can't go faster than the speed of light), and simply decide not to do it? That seems to be the path our society is on, ever since the end of the Apollo Program, anyway.
And why would they be in every rock in our solar system? Most of them aren't particularly worthwhile.
Basically, the evidence tells us there probably isn't some galaxy-spanning empire like in sci-fi. And physics tells us such an empire probably doesn't make sense anyway. The distances are just too great, and, unless our understanding of physics is completely wrong (which, who knows, it could be), no advanced technology will ever overcome that. But the evidence doesn't say anything one way or the other about whether there is intelligent life in the universe.
Morituri:
We're not part of some pan-african empire, even though our ancestors came from Africa. Likewise I wouldn't expect our aliens having spread out to be all part of the same empire. In fact if they'd had time to spread through the whole galaxy they'd have diverged into dozens, or hundreds, of different species while doing so.
And as for "living on every rock", what I meant was living in the habitats and settlements they could make out of the materials in those rocks.
If there were aliens who arose before us, in fact, it would be unlikely that we'd even exist because they'd likely have come here before we even evolved, harvested our asteroid belt and Oort cloud for raw materials, and encircled the sun with infrastructure.
sitnspin:
This idea that galactic colonisation is inevitable is a huge presumption. Given the seemingly insurmountable problem of the universal speed limit, the time and energy requirements for interstellar travel make reaching even the nearest star exceedingly difficult. There's literally zero reason to suppose any other species has solved this.
LeeC:
Is a "Hot Pocket" just a calzone?
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version