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I love the rationale for Proxima maybe being the most likely star to be transmitting directly toward us. Maybe it’s a carrier signal for an alien equivalent of
by api 6y ago
I love the rationale for Proxima maybe being the most likely star to be transmitting directly toward us.
Maybe it’s a carrier signal for an alien equivalent of a public HAM repeater or a peer to peer mesh net node. It would effectively be a dial tone. Each node broadcasts toward, say, its three nearest neighbors. It sends a carrier that also periodically encodes info about how to use the node and the “IP addresses” of other known participants.
Latency would suck though. A complete ping to another “live” station could take hundreds or thousands of years. The vast majority of repeater nodes could be dumb unmanned devices periodically sent out and placed in orbit around other stars.
What if our solar system has one and we haven’t noticed it because it’s not that big, is in close solar orbit to easily harness a lot of power, and is only aiming its signals at our three nearest neighbors. Heh.
- WJW 6y agoI like this idea! (though I don't think it's likely) Imagine if the creators of such a system have lifespans of tens to hundreds of millions of years and so could feasibly get somewhere in the galaxy even when travelling at sublight speeds. We'd be so alien to them that they likely wouldn't even think to look for us.
- api 6y agoI’m more imagining a collaborative effort much like amateur radio networks. Once you start talking you learn about the net and how to help add more nodes, etc. The node at Centauri might not be from there, but it might be from someone within a few hundred light years who has volunteered to maintain repeaters in their neighborhood. If we came online we would have to generate a call sign (however that is done, instructions repeated along with the carrier) and then start saying hi to nearby HAMs. There would probably be some forum etiquette. Might be a good idea to lurk a while before posting an intro thread. “Oh, look, another n00b asking about how to do net positive fusion power... read the FAQ on the wiki. Nearest mirror is at...”
- WJW 6y agoWith our luck the nearest mirror is 500 light years away and by that time we'd have figured it out ourselves. Oh well... :)
- sliken 6y agoSure, but the local CDN has a full copy of most of the common requests, including the full galaxy wide bootstrap. However you have to pay the bandwidth charges in a bitcoin like currency that requires a quantum computer with 2048 q-bits.
- m4rtink 6y agoCheck one of the Oort cloud repeaters, they should have a copy. Yeah, there is likeky one as the "other" HAM club has too much energy credits to spend and really likes to steal interesting QSLs this way...
- jimmcslim 6y agoSounds like a different take on David Brain’s Uplift series.
- centimeter 6y agoHumans could have lifespans in the millions of years in the reference frames of planets in the galaxy, assuming they spent most of their time traveling at acceleration. I haven't done the math, but long-distance interstellar travel at >=1G could result in some pretty impressive time dilation. Edit: here's a nice diagram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Roundtriptimes.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Roundtriptimes.png
- berkut 6y agoThe Sci-fi book Tau Zero by Poul Anderson has this as a core part of its narrative.
- m4rtink 6y agoAlso the setting of the "Right of Return" novel from Janusz Zajdel is like this. Humans have ships that can reach very high sub ligh speeds as well as totally safe hibernation technology. So you can go on long interstellar voyage and only age for a coulpe weeks or moths where you are actually active, the rest being in hibernation or time going much much slower for you due to time dilatation. There are even some scientists that will spend just a couple days per misdion awake to study an interesting phenomenon, being in hibernation for the rest of the journey! Of course if you have any friends or family somewhere they will be decades older or even dead by the time you get back. On the other hand if you have friends in the spaceflight community it is much less of a problem as you will be meeting the same people over your travels on various stations or missions as decades or even centuries go by. For that reason a lot of the space community is joung people who migh want to settle down once they are oldet (and never see their spacefaring friends agai) and centuries old academics who are having the time of their lives, studying the wonders of the universe every single day (from their perspective).
- XorNot 6y agoAlternately it's just the closest uninhabited system for this sector where its safe to tow a wormhole router for a species such hasn't discovered them yet.
- giantrobot 6y agoNew FidoNet Zone time? Zone 7: Sol system (off Earth) Zone 8: Centauri System.
- throwaway189262 6y agoMy theory is that ET signals were most likely to detect are meant for their probes. Something like voyager. Nearby civilizations will send interstaller probes to the closest stars first. Because that's what everybody would do. And their scientists are more likely to get money to communicate with probes than speculative aliens. And as an interstaller probe gets closer to the target system, the amounts of power needed to communicate with it is enormous. Altogether this means first contact is likely to be a radio or laser signal meant for an interstellar probe that's headed towards us. All theory crafting though lol. But it would jive 100% with funding realities on our planet. I think for this reason alone we should listen to our ~20 closest neighbors extra well. The sad downside is that if they're the closest star to us, we're also likely the closest star to them. That means very few civilizations would send a probe to us first :'(