4 ms·
The trouble is that we really have no way to make faster than light travel, and probably won't for hundreds or thousands of years, if ever. Meanwhile, our abili
by mabbo 9y ago
The trouble is that we really have no way to make faster than light travel, and probably won't for hundreds or thousands of years, if ever. Meanwhile, our ability to see and detect our neighbors gets better and better every year.
It could be that we go 100,000 years without ever being able to reach other stars, but spend the entire time passing messages, like prisoners in individual jail cell passing notes to friends in nearby cells.
... Damn, that would be a really great setup for a sci-fi story...
- pavel_lishin 9y agoVernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" posits something like this; FTL travel is impossible, but it is possible to help civilizations bootstrap via an internet-like broadcast system that is inherently built to operate at the speed of light. (Those who have read the novel(s) in question will probably find my description of the Qeng Ho network incomplete at best, but I don't want to write too many spoilers.)