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Where the aliens or how do you solve Fermi paradox?
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Scout
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Mar 12, 2018 11:52PM
So the source of the energy is unknowable, but the results are knowable because they were made the same way? Everything is connected because it came from the same source? Am I getting it?
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From the same type of source, and yes, you are getting it, Scout.
You're a good teacher, then. So, if there is intelligent life on other planets, there's not much hope of contact?
That is a more difficult question, If you sent a message to another planet, first they have to have the technology to receive it, then they have to have their aerials tuned to the right frequency, ad if they manage that, they have to decode it, then they have to decide to reply. The trouble is, why bother, because by the time they get the message, and because of the distances, the sender has probably died of old age. If you can never receive the answer in your lifetime, would you send?
Well, yes. I don't thing people will stop wondering if there's life on other planets. Generations from now, that question could be answered.I guess the good news is that we don't have to worry about an alien invasion?
I am not worried about one, but then again I am often wrong when i try to guess the future 😀
I think it's a good thing that we can't know the future and can only guess. Guessing makes things interesting, doesn't it?I feel that I may have hijacked this discussion and should return it to solving the Fermi paradox.
Enjoying the chemistry and physics lessons. With Stephen Hawking's death one great mind has gone"If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans," Hawking said in 2010 during an episode of the Discovery Channel's "Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking," a show hosted by the Discovery Channel, reported The Times, a U.K.-based newspaper.
My feeling (which I have included in my futuristic novels) agrees with Hawking, and I believe that the aliens are likely to be civilised (since they have developed interstellar technology) and they would know better than to make themselves known to us. So, in the event they did turn up, we would not know.
So, where are the bloody aliens, when we need them? :)
We may or may not need them, but with current antics on this planet, they most certainly don't need us
Ha! Thanks for the laugh Ian.Just wondering, if Star Trek guys came to our planet, saw what's going on, and weren't under the prime directive, what advice would they give us?
In the original series they did, on a couple of occasions as I recall. From the comments between themselves, they were less than impressed, but it did give Leonard Nimoy a chance for "spock-like comments" about our lack of logical approach. Of course, that series was in the late 1960s, but I doubt they would consider the present much of an improvement.
Ian wrote: "In the original series they did, on a couple of occasions as I recall. From the comments between themselves, they were less than impressed, but it did give Leonard Nimoy a chance for "spock-like co..."They (Star Trek OS) came back in 1986 in The Voyage Home. We killed all the whales, had nuclear subs (in a Russian accent), and our medical practices were barbaric.
Scout wrote: "What would they say now?"Beep?
Seriously, the ol' secret aliens trope is one of my very favourite type of story.
In fact, I've had a crack at it myself which will be published later this year.
As for FTL travel - my take on it is that Einsteinian science (like Newtonian science before it) may be correct only within its own scope and context. There may be aspects of our current reality into which Einsteinian science does not reach - or aspects of the multiverse which are leveragable.
The discovery and use of such drives also makes a great story.
Personally, I think that being alone in the Milky Way would be the best case scenario.Let's say that one day we are visited by absolutely benevolent aliens. They come down; introduce themselves; offer to help us with advanced technology; and inform us that every solar system within sight has already been colonized.
We would never spread to the stars as anything but tourists. Humanity will eventually become a K2, but never anything more. And when Sol reaches the end of its life, we will die with it.
J. wrote: "We would never spread to the stars as anything but tourists."That is exactly how I would love to go...
As for FTL, I wrote a blog recently on warp drives. In terms of general relativity, to build one you need negative mass. Anyone seen any of that? Another point of FTL - your clocks run backwards compared with your original frame of reference so to visit a star like, say, Canopus, that way, when you return you will not have been born. Oops.My personal view is that stories involving relativity are more interesting. FTL is merely arm-waving to speed things up. Thus in one of my series, to get aliens to solve a problem for the 24th century, the message had to be sent by a first century Roman. (The ability to send messages back in time could be argued as a fudge, but stories like this usually need one fudge.) Now consider the social impact of going off to a star knowing that when you return everyone you knew will have been dead for hundreds of years and the society you knew was gone and the present one unrecognizable. Would you go, J and Adrian, knowing that?
Ian wrote: "...Now consider the social impact of going off to a star knowing that when you return everyone you knew will have been dead for hundreds of years and the society you knew was gone and the present one unrecognizable. Would you go, J and Adrian, knowing that?..."Depends what and whom one is leaving behind. Loners, adventurers and some other types would have no "earthly anchors". And don't forget that "free will" concept covers only part of the globe. Who says you can't repeat Australia's path in space, for example?
You don't have to be travelling at FTL to experience time dilation. It happens (in a noticeable way) at much slower speeds. There was a book called (maybe) The Long Way Home that dealt with it really well.But to return to Ian's point, why couldn't there be a way of disguising mass? That's the underlying principle behind the gravitonic drive in my own work.
Ian wrote: "As for FTL, I wrote a blog recently on warp drives. In terms of general relativity, to build one you need negative mass. Anyone seen any of that? Another point of FTL - your clocks run backwards co..."A Kiwi asking a Yankee and an Aussie if people would abandon everything they know to start a new life. I'm pretty sure that all three of us are directly descended from people who made that choice.
Adrian wrote: "J. wrote: "We would never spread to the stars as anything but tourists."That is exactly how I would love to go..."
But is that all that you would want for all of humanity?
J. wrote: "A Kiwi asking a Yankee and an Aussie if people would abandon everything they know to start a new life. I'm pretty sure that all three of us are directly descended from people who made that choice."Ha!
Mind you, none of my ancestors had any choice about it. Bunch of thieving bastards we are...
J. wrote: "Adrian wrote: "J. wrote: "We would never spread to the stars as anything but tourists."That is exactly how I would love to go..."
But is that all that you would want for all of humanity?"
Rather than have us do to the cosmos what we've done to the Earth?
For me, the most disturbing problem with traveling at a high percentage of light speed is that the Doppler Effect will blue shift all of the light from stars in front of you into gamma rays.If you spent the trip frozen, you could quite literally wake up dead.
Adrian wrote: "Rather than have us do to the cosmos what we've done to the Earth?"Is it fair to condemn our posterity for our sins and the sins of our ancestors?
Seems to me we NEVER learn from the past.Why should we have any confidence that our descendants will be different?
Not confidence, hope.There will be new Hitlers, but there will also be MLKs and Marcus Aureliuses. I hope that the latter will outnumber the former. It's too easy to focus on the ill and ignore the good. When we do that, we limit ourselves.
J. wrote: "Ian wrote: "As for FTL, I wrote a blog recently on warp drives. In terms of general relativity, to build one you need negative mass. Anyone seen any of that? Another point of FTL - your clocks run ..."Yes, our ancestors did, but when they arrived they knew the next ship that arrived would bring things from home, and they knew they could always go back if they wanted to. (OK, maybe not for convicts.) But the point is, everything was much the same, and if they went home, home would be the same as when they left. (In the case of my grandfather, probably the same depressing place, so no incentive to go home.)
But take my example of someone being abducted and taken to Canopus and brought back here at nearly the speed of light. Our person would have left over 1200 years ago. How do you think they would fit in to modern society, say an axe-wielding Viking?
J. wrote: "...A Kiwi asking a Yankee and an Aussie if people would abandon everything they know ..."Would make an excellent opening line for an anecdote
Heinlein wrote a story based around twin boys - one of whom went off to the Stars and came back 50 or so years younger than his brother.
Nick wrote: "Heinlein wrote a story based around twin boys - one of whom went off to the Stars and came back 50 or so years younger than his brother."Hi Nick, welcome to the group. Vaguely remember this story. That scenario opens a whole lot of opportunities, under which space travel could be a secondary bonus, while stoppage of time in one's world and time travel - the prime objective... Say you wanna wait Joe or Boris out, you just take a small hop into space and come back later :)
J. said, "A Kiwi asking a Yankee and an Aussie if people would abandon everything they know to start a new life. I'm pretty sure that all three of us are directly descended from people who made that choice." Righto, J. :-)
Nik wrote: "Nick wrote: "Heinlein wrote a story based around twin boys - one of whom went off to the Stars and came back 50 or so years younger than his brother."Hi Nick, welcome to the group. Vaguely rememb..."
Thanks - my unpredictable memory didn't come up with anything more, so I turned to Mr Google. Here we are :-
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...
Cheers All
Ian wrote: "But take my example of someone being abducted and taken to Canopus and brought back here at nearly the speed of light. Our person would have left over 1200 years ago. How do you think they would fit in to modern society, say an axe-wielding Viking?"And a person who is abducted today may come back to an irradiated desert.
Personally, I think it more likely that we would spread out to the closest systems first. Then the next wave of colonists would spread out to systems near those systems. And so on. Each colony would only be a decade or two distant from its parent.
Canopus was merely an example :-) However, there won't be many colonies a decade away. There are planets around Proxima Centauri (a miserable red dwarf so any planet in the bailable zone will probably be tidally locked and have its atmosphere stripped) and that is about 4.3 light years away. Alpha Centauri are two decent-sized stars but no convincing evidence of planets. The nearest K type stars with planets: Tau Ceti is about 11.3 light years away and Epsilon Eridani (about 11.2 light years), but these planets that we know of are a bit big, although I have hopes for Eps Eri. But more than a decade away, even at light speed :-(
You're assuming that the goal is an immediately habitable planet. While that would certainly be enticing, the star itself is the single largest resource in any solar system. With that, a civilization capable of making the trip could easily terraform a likely rock or begin building a Dyson Sphere.
I disagree with "terraforming" which implies doing it to a planet because they probably don't have the right resources, but I would accept that they might build a massive orbiting habitat, like hollowing out an asteroid and spinning it up. Or building something like that. (I have to agree to that because I used that in one of my novels.) Of courses it is still possible there might be a suitable planet around one of the Alpha Centauri stars. With the tools we are currently using to detect planets they probably would not be able to detect Earth from there
I.m.o. Everywhere is too far away for Adult Humans to reach out and colonise. Even a Mars base is not going to happen, if it relies on people going there and back.Androids now, with a cryogenic load of human embryos on a ship ... That is an idea for a story :-)
I agree a Mars colony will be "go there and stay". But that is what my ancestors did coming here. The journey by sailing ship from the UK to NZ would take about the same time as a major ship with proper power going to Mars. You could come back but the biggest problem would be cost. In my novels, settlers might even be subsidised to go there, but to get back full cost plus any subsidies would be asked for (unless the colony was going to fail) so in my opinion, apart from initial research stations, colonization will be a one-way trip.
