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What's staggering to me is that with the new Voyager discoveries lately it feels like we're a bunch of stellar savages who just managed to release a buoy far en
by INTPenis 6y ago
What's staggering to me is that with the new Voyager discoveries lately it feels like we're a bunch of stellar savages who just managed to release a buoy far enough into the ocean to feel the currents.
Let alone recognize another savage on a different continent who might be doing the same experiment.
- buran77 6y agoIt may be even worse, that different continent is on a different planet. Space(time) is absolutely, mind-boggling massive. Everyone knows it's big but it hard to comprehend how big and why there could be many alien civilizations out there capable of broadcasting or detecting but never intersect in any way because the detection windows of any 2 civilizations don't line up. The Milky Way alone is ~150000-200000 light years across. Humans have been civilized for only some tens of thousands of years, and capable of sending and receiving signals for a mere century. Imagine that even at the speed of light the entire history of civilized life on Earth might come and go many times before something reaches us, or before the probe comes back. There's no Earth-bound or common sense analogy that can convey this kind of vastness and emptiness.
- vmception 6y agoThe fermi paradox does convey this.
- bena 6y agoNot well. It makes the assumptions that all of the problems with space travel are logistically possible.
- deeeeplearning 6y agoGiven the age of the Milky Way, a civilization using even slow sub light travel with generation ships or autonomous probes could have colonized the entire galaxy many times over. Why has no one done that? Hence the paradox.
- eloff 6y agoI don't know why this got down-voted. The milky way is 100K light years across. It's 13.5 billion years old. It's entirely possible to blanket the whole galaxy with probes, without even getting into self replicating probes.
- e12e 6y agoYou have to make an assumption about speed - it certainly won't be more than a tiny fraction light speed. Eg voyager appear to travel now at less than 0.00006 c (16 km/s). Than turns 100k light years into ballpark 150 M year journey (no it doesn't its 1.8 bn years as mentioned in reply) . Still possible to cross 10.000 times - but that would be a straight line. I suspect the distances will grow somewhat fractally if you want to swing by any stars? (ed: so, not really very likely at all)
- Baeocystin 6y agoTo traverse 100k light-years at 16km/s would take approximately 1.8 billion years. FWIW.
- e12e 6y agoThanks, not sure how I got to just 150 mill years.
- mistersquid 6y ago> Than turns 100k light years into ballpark 150 year journey. Forgive my confusion. If 100K light years is 100K years at c, how can > 0.00006 c yield 0.00150K (150) years?
- e12e 6y agoIt can't (unless you mistype into your plain android calculator app). Ed: Fwiw there was a typo there, too - it was supposed to say 150 million - but it's more like 1.5 billion.
- vl 6y agoBasically there is not need and motivation for humans to colonize anything outside the Earth. It's just too far, too expensive and too uncomfortable. Humans evolved specifically to live on Earth, to live somewhere else, they need to be severely altered. Now you just seeded civilization of another species, that might turn out to be confrontational or outright hostile. Why would you do that? Too see how well this works out on the local scale see colonization of Americas.
- dyingkneepad 6y ago> Basically there is not need and motivation for humans to colonize anything outside the Earth. Our current gas emissions would disagree. Also, asteroids, gamma ray bursts, curiosity, sheer ambition, etc, etc. The thing is: we don't need to convince all of mankind to colonize another planet. All it takes is a few people. Crazy rich Mr. Musk is one example. He may not be able to achieve it, but maybe all we need is a few other Musks in the next generations and suddenly we'll be in other planets. The Fermi Paradox discussion is fascinating.
- AndyPa32 6y ago> Our current gas emissions would disagree. While at first it might seem that Mars or any other planet is the solution to our environmental problem, the easiest solution to the problem would be fixing this planet. Colonizing Mars would take up so many resources that fixing Earth might be more cost-effective.
- psychoslave 6y agoThis is not Earth that needs to be fixed, it's human behavior. Teraformation and space conquest are fassinating topics, but "fixing our behavior to avoid to fuck up the only accessible viable environment we have" is far from deserving only a mere "might be more cost-effective".
- dyingkneepad 6y agoBut way less fun :) Or we could, you know, just transfer our consciousness to machines that can easily survive Mars and other environments and start our colonization after declaring ourselves to be Homo-sapiens-machina.
- beamatronic 6y agoThat’s why the best thing any species can do for the other species is to leave signs that we were once here.
- buran77 6y agoWe still need to leave a heck of a collection. On a living, evolving planet if all civilizations are gone the signs get wiped out pretty fast in geological time (geology, weather), and in space the signs are usually traveling in the emptiness with little chances of being spotted. The best probes will eventually fail and will just add to the countless objects floating never to encounter anything. I know it sounds depressing but I keep getting reminded of this [0] when thinking of loneliness in the universe. It's the most apt description I came across in recent memory. [0] https://www.theoatmeal.com/comics/oracle https://www.theoatmeal.com/comics/oracle
- njarboe 6y agoOn the other hand, large objects made by us on the Moon could last for 100's of millions of years. Especially if the object was designed to last that long.
- beamatronic 6y agoI like the comic. It's almost like all intelligent life in the universe was put into escape-proof cages. We need to rage against this! Do it for all the others who can't.
- theandrewbailey 6y agoI remember reading somewhere that due to the differing pace of evolution and technology advancements, any intelligent living aliens we meet are almost certainly going to be gods or cavemen. I can't find the reference.
- krapp 6y agoIt's from Arthur C. Clarke: "If one considers the millions of years of pre-history, and the rapid technological advancement occurring now, if you apply that to a hypothetical alien race, one can figure the probabilities of how advanced the explorers will find them. The conclusion is we will find apes or angels, but not humans." [0]http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/alientech.php http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/alientech.php
- kfarr 6y agoI like that quote but lately feeling like advanced tech doesn't necessarily mean angelic
- krapp 6y agoAngelic doesn't imply good, just being sufficiently advanced enough to seem like magic (to use another Clarke quote.) Demons are technically angels after all.
- zabardasth 6y ago> And she took on another heart—no longer minded toward earthly things—but ecstatically in the angelic dialect, sending up a hymn to God in accord with the style of the angels. And as she spoke ecstatically, she allowed “The Spirit” to be on her garment. It seems that speaking to one would be quite a terrifying experience, especially if one were speaking in tongues.
- krapp 6y agoWhen angels are described in the Bible, it's often in strange and abstract terms, beings with multiple faces, legs made of burning bronze, eyes where eyes shouldn't be, etc. As if the writer was having difficulty comprehending what they were seeing,much less finding language for it. And the first thing angels do when they encounter humans is tell them not to be afraid, because of course the logical and proper reaction to skyscraper-sized interlocking, burning, eye-covered wheels with multi-faced, multi-winged beings in the middle is bowel evacuating terror. And of course, many of Lovecraft's eldritch horrors were simply aliens that were so alien that the mere sight of them broke human minds, and that were no more concerned for humanity than humanity is for a particular anthill. That's probably what an actual encounter with an alien is going to be like for us. We'll try to understand why a living infinite-dimensional hypersphere made of flesh made of time whose eyes are our eyes all at once just showed up and "unfolded" our sun into a non-Euclidean shape we can't even describe mathematically without being driven slowly to madness, while it won't even know we were there.
- anonAndOn 6y agoWhile interstellar travel would be impossible using conventional thrust in a straight line, could you overcome the distance by bending space time?[0] [0]https://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/technology/warp/gravstat.html https://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/technology/warp/gravstat....
- ben_w 6y agoGoing fast in a straight line with conventional rockets is achievable, just not very timely. Bending spacetime enough to make a difference — even just to the time taken between here and Alpha Centauri — is beyond any known mechanism humans could build, even in principle, using the total resources of our entire solar system. (Using unknown mechanisms: perhaps, but they’re unknown)
- skissane 6y ago> Going fast in a straight line with conventional rockets is achievable, just not very timely. A constant-acceleration spacecraft could reach the opposite side of the galaxy in 24 years ship time. (That'd be over 100,000 years of Earth time, however.) Conventional chemical propulsion don't have high enough impulse to do that. Possibly some kind of nuclear or matter-antimatter propulsion could?
- ben_w 6y agoEverything would run out of fuel over that distance if you were constantly accelerating ahead [0], but you don’t need to constantly accelerate in space. [0] spinning is accelerating, and you can do that forever, but it won’t help you get anywhere
- avhon1 6y agoAtomic Rockets has some good info on this. > When it comes to [high thrust, high specific impulse] propulsion systems we might actually be able to build in the near future, the list includes Orion drives, Zubrin's nuclear salt water rocket, and maybe Medusa. There have been many studied variations of Orion. Atomic Rockets cites hypothetical Isp between 3,000 and 12,000 seconds. Vehicles with delta-V of up to 100,000 m/s have been proposed. These could definitely be built, and would definitely work, but would require constructing, co-locating, launching, and detonating thousands of 5- to 15-kiloton nuclear explosives. http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist3.php#boomboom http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist3.php... Medusa is basically Orion crossed with the image of a sailor blowing into their own sails. A huge parachute is deployed in front of the spaceship, and the nuclear explosives are detonated between it and the bow of the spaceship. The parachute can capture more of the explosive output than Orion's pusher plate can, it weighs less (because all of its members are in tension), and it can use its rigging's elastic properties to dampen the intermittent thrust, as opposed to Orion's (heavier) hydraulic dampers. The proposal study for Medusa (which assumed thirty 25-kg explosives) came up with an Isp of 106,220 seconds, and a delta-V of 4775 m/s. http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist3.php#medusa http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist3.php... The Nuclear Salt Water Rocket assumes plausible (but completely untested, so maybe impossible) continuous nuclear fission in a stream of uranium-salt-y water being sprayed into the combustion chamber. Assuming that this can be made to not blow itself up, 20%-enriched salt nets a theoretical Isp of ~7,000 seconds, and 90%-(weapons-grade) enriched fuel, with somewhat more optimistic efficiency assumptions, has a theoretical Isp of ~400,000 seconds and a delta-V of 10,000,000 m/s. http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist2.php#nswr http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist2.php... There are also lots of other currently-less-plausible proposals for high-power high-efficiency rockets. (Many of them assume things like efficient proton-proton fusion, which might be possible, but we have no idea how to do it.) Atomic Rockets is a great website for reading about these. My takeaway is that it's almost certainly possible to build spaceships that can travel at >0.01c, but it would take a great deal of resources organized by a society that is more trusting and responsible than we are now. After all, any vehicle with that kind of power is also an equally powerful weapon.
- dylan604 6y ago> Humans have been civilized for only some tens of thousands of years, That's giving humans a lot of credit. Civility has been regressing. I would be embarrassed for another civilization to find us now. Sure, we may have more technology and scientific understanding, but how we treat one another needs another world than civil.
- sbelskie 6y agoI don’t think civility has a lot to with civilization in the anthropological sense of the word.
- dylan604 6y ago"...first use in English is attributed to Adam Ferguson, who in his 1767 Essay on the History of Civil Society wrote, "Not only the individual advances from infancy to manhood but the species itself from rudeness to civilisation".[14] The word was therefore opposed to barbarism or rudeness, in the active pursuit of progress characteristic of the Age of Enlightenment." [0] [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization
- sbelskie 6y ago“... in the anthropological sense of the word.” -me, just recently. If you are wondering where we might find a definition matching that sense, try the first sentence of the article you linked: “A civilization (or civilisation) is any complex society characterized by urban development, social stratification, a form of government and symbolic systems of communication such as writing.”
- koheripbal 6y agoGiven the relative age of planets and stars, other alien "civilizations" would be hundreds of millions or Billions of years older than us. The notion that we'd all be roughly at the same level of advancement is statistically impossible pop-sci-fi fantasy. In my opinion, it's unlikely that they are even organic individuals anymore. Even the separate alien "entities" might have a process of merging once they achieve a certain advancement. We are like fungus to them.
- grawprog 6y ago>We are like fungus to them. Maybe the fungi think that about us? They've been around longer than we have and take up more of the planet.
- Supermancho 6y ago> They've been around longer than we have and take up more of the planet. It looks like that to us, because our influence is visible over 80+% of the ground, but there's fungus IN us and covering more surface area than you can see. Imagine anywhere there's water (including from the air and including the oceans), there's fungus over a % of the land and organisms that you can see with a microscope. Fungus influence covers far more of the surface.
- grawprog 6y agoYup, life as we know it wouldn't even exist without their decomposition abilities. Dead stuff would pile up, nutrients wouldn't be recyled, beer wouldn't exist. A world without beer just wouldn't be worth living in. Fungi are very much overlooked, their role in forests alone is amazing let alone everything else they do. If someday, some scientists discovered some kind of conscious fungal intelligence, i would not be surprised.
- Balgair 6y agoIn some ways, then, we are 'alone'. Sure, there may be intelligent life out there, but the vast differences in biology combined with the likely vast differences in technology will render us 'alone' all the same. Just like a goldfish in your apartment. To you, you are alone, goldfish don't count as company. And to the goldfish, it is alone, as humans don't count as whatever a goldfish thinks a friend is.
- johnchristopher 6y ago“Recently, we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting.”
- deeeeplearning 6y agoUsing some rough numbers like the distance between NYC and London vs the distance from Earth to Alpha Centauri the equivalent would be saying that Voyager 1 is about 1.8 Miles into a 3470 mile journey (from NYC to London).
- neuronic 6y agoMaybe also mentioned that it managed those 1.8 miles travelling since the 70s...
- zimpenfish 6y agoTravelling 8x faster than the fastest vehicle we've made, too (the X-15 managed 2km/s; the Voyagers are doing around 16km/s)
- cblum 6y ago> with the new Voyager discoveries lately What new discoveries, specifically?
- deeeeplearning 6y agoI think it came out recently that it actually detected an increase in the particle density of the interstellar medium as it leaves the solar system.