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It’s not aliens. Nothing can convince me that there’s any practical way to travel the distances between the stars. If you don’t agree then I think you fundame

It’s not aliens. Nothing can convince me that there’s any practical way to travel the distances between the stars. If you don’t agree then I think you fundamentally don’t grasp how incomprehensibly vast those distances are. I absolutely believe in life in other worlds but there’s no way to travel from star to star.

xtracto 6y ago
Angels vs Viruses. About 20 years ago I read an interesting theory about how theoretical aliens would look to us if we happen to find them. The theory was that the assuming that there is life other than earth's in the universe, the probability of it being within ±10,000 years of current human development (i.e being similar to us now ± 10,000 years) is very very small. Most likely, life outside the earth will be 20k, 30k or even 50k, or more years in the future technologically, socially and medically advanced. Think about, how a human now would look like to a human 50,000 years ago. Or how humanity would look like in 50,000 years. For all I know, we will be able to replace every organ (lab tissue growing), live for a LONG time (Hyperbaric oxygen therapy, metformin) and other unimaginable things. So, if we encountered "space traveling" aliens, their frame of reference would be completely out of our understanding.
time0ut 6y ago
I doubt that this was anything but a natural object. That said, our civilization already has the technology to send a probe to another star system. It may take 100k years to get there, but it could be done if we wanted to. Theoretically, sending a tiny probe within a human life time isn't that far out of reach. I don't think we can discount the general possibility based on our own capabilities, limitations, and motivations. If we were not constrained by our biology, maybe spending thousands of years in transit wouldn't be a big deal. Or maybe a few gram payload is all we need to explore the neighborhood.
- erklik 6y ago
  >our civilization already has the technology to send a probe to another star system. Yet we haven't sent anything. Maybe aliens are the same. Maybe they don't have the political will to send anything. Maybe they have their own climate change, or insane leaders to deal with. Or maybe not, maybe they've developed a virtual universe and are living in that instead of exploring the physical one. I find the assumption that aliens have the same drive or desire as some humans to explore the universe rather crazy. It seems like we want a better versions from the heavens somewhere to tell us, it'll be okay, don't worry, here's the blueprints to fix all your issues. It's easily possible that aliens are opposite, wanting to focus on their issues and fix them rather than looking out to the stars for some hypothetical better version of themselves.
  - Voloskaya 6y ago
    > Yet we haven't sent anything. But we have, quite a few of them actually, and 2 have left the solar system. It's just that none of them will come close to any star for a few hundred thousands of years.
    - erklik 6y ago
      > It's just that none of them will come close to any star for a few hundred thousands of years. I don't believe we have sent anything explicitly for the purpose of reaching another star? Right? Exploring our Solar System with probes, sure. Has there been a probe that was meant to explore another star system?
      - Voloskaya 6y ago
        Not explicitly no, but does it really make a difference if it's explicit? Given enough time our probes are bound to pass very close to some other star systems. If there are other civilizations, it's likely that most of them would be on average 1 billion years older than us, as the average star is 1B older than our sun. That's a lot of time for a lot of probes to cross many star systems even just by accident.
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
And yet, stuff does all the time. We see wandering objects enter and leave our solar neighborhood. It's just a matter of time - perhaps on human timescales its inconceivable. But that's a problem with humans, not with interstellar travel.
Voloskaya 6y ago
Isn't your point of view quite arrogant though? By arrogant I mean that your POV assumes that we basically know everything (or almost everything) there is to know about space-time. Sure there is nothing practical that we know of today, but when it took our ancestors 6 months and 50% chance of dying to cross an ocean, going to the moon or sending a probe in outer space probably seemed similarily absolutly impossible to them. As time passes thinking that we know everything is necessarily less and less wrong, but it's hard to know how wrong we still are today.
- userulluipeste 6y ago
  "Isn't your point of view quite arrogant though?" It's more than that, it's outright harmful for our evolution. Instead of "nothing can convince me" and "you fundamentally don’t grasp" it may be more productive to focus on the (however little) probable possibility, i.e. "we haven't found a way yet".
King-Aaron 6y ago
Once upon a time, it was inconceivable that there could be any practical way to travel between continents. I feel that making this assertion based on our current understanding of the universe is fundamentally flawed.
- trestenhortz 6y ago
  This is a comparison that really doesn’t work. It takes month in a sailing ship to cross the ocean. It would take thousands of years at the very least to cross space.
  - King-Aaron 6y ago
    So this wouldn't be an issue if you solved the ageing problem - a problem which we are presently working on solving ourselves. I don't see why it's out of the question that a civilization that's hypothetically a hundred thousand years ahead of us wouldn't have worked out how to suspend themselves, preserve themselves or negate their ageing. Or for that matter, work out how to sidestep the distance argument though some other exotic method that we're yet to discover (i.e. wormholes or some such). I'm not exactly a proponent for little green men visiting us, but I do think that arguing about distance or physical limits of speed/travel based on our current frame of reference is an incorrect position to take.
    - trestenhortz 6y ago
      To put it in perspective, if the furthest distance man has travelled from the earth is the moon, and we represent that as 1 inch, then the closest star is about 200km / 125 miles away. In such a scale, Voyager has travelled 80 feet.
      - King-Aaron 6y ago
        The distances aren't lost on me by any stretch - However I don't feel that the argument about distance would be as relevant to a hypothetical "class 3" civilisation.

xtracto 6y ago

Angels vs Viruses. About 20 years ago I read an interesting theory about how theoretical aliens would look to us if we happen to find them. The theory was that the assuming that there is life other than earth's in the universe, the probability of it being within ±10,000 years of current human development (i.e being similar to us now ± 10,000 years) is very very small. Most likely, life outside the earth will be 20k, 30k or even 50k, or more years in the future technologically, socially and medically advanced. Think about, how a human now would look like to a human 50,000 years ago. Or how humanity would look like in 50,000 years. For all I know, we will be able to replace every organ (lab tissue growing), live for a LONG time (Hyperbaric oxygen therapy, metformin) and other unimaginable things. So, if we encountered "space traveling" aliens, their frame of reference would be completely out of our understanding.

time0ut 6y ago

I doubt that this was anything but a natural object. That said, our civilization already has the technology to send a probe to another star system. It may take 100k years to get there, but it could be done if we wanted to. Theoretically, sending a tiny probe within a human life time isn't that far out of reach. I don't think we can discount the general possibility based on our own capabilities, limitations, and motivations. If we were not constrained by our biology, maybe spending thousands of years in transit wouldn't be a big deal. Or maybe a few gram payload is all we need to explore the neighborhood.

erklik 6y ago
>our civilization already has the technology to send a probe to another star system. Yet we haven't sent anything. Maybe aliens are the same. Maybe they don't have the political will to send anything. Maybe they have their own climate change, or insane leaders to deal with. Or maybe not, maybe they've developed a virtual universe and are living in that instead of exploring the physical one. I find the assumption that aliens have the same drive or desire as some humans to explore the universe rather crazy. It seems like we want a better versions from the heavens somewhere to tell us, it'll be okay, don't worry, here's the blueprints to fix all your issues. It's easily possible that aliens are opposite, wanting to focus on their issues and fix them rather than looking out to the stars for some hypothetical better version of themselves.
- Voloskaya 6y ago
  > Yet we haven't sent anything. But we have, quite a few of them actually, and 2 have left the solar system. It's just that none of them will come close to any star for a few hundred thousands of years.
  - erklik 6y ago
    > It's just that none of them will come close to any star for a few hundred thousands of years. I don't believe we have sent anything explicitly for the purpose of reaching another star? Right? Exploring our Solar System with probes, sure. Has there been a probe that was meant to explore another star system?
    - Voloskaya 6y ago
      Not explicitly no, but does it really make a difference if it's explicit? Given enough time our probes are bound to pass very close to some other star systems. If there are other civilizations, it's likely that most of them would be on average 1 billion years older than us, as the average star is 1B older than our sun. That's a lot of time for a lot of probes to cross many star systems even just by accident.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

And yet, stuff does all the time. We see wandering objects enter and leave our solar neighborhood. It's just a matter of time - perhaps on human timescales its inconceivable. But that's a problem with humans, not with interstellar travel.

Voloskaya 6y ago

Isn't your point of view quite arrogant though? By arrogant I mean that your POV assumes that we basically know everything (or almost everything) there is to know about space-time. Sure there is nothing practical that we know of today, but when it took our ancestors 6 months and 50% chance of dying to cross an ocean, going to the moon or sending a probe in outer space probably seemed similarily absolutly impossible to them. As time passes thinking that we know everything is necessarily less and less wrong, but it's hard to know how wrong we still are today.

userulluipeste 6y ago
"Isn't your point of view quite arrogant though?" It's more than that, it's outright harmful for our evolution. Instead of "nothing can convince me" and "you fundamentally don’t grasp" it may be more productive to focus on the (however little) probable possibility, i.e. "we haven't found a way yet".

King-Aaron 6y ago

Once upon a time, it was inconceivable that there could be any practical way to travel between continents. I feel that making this assertion based on our current understanding of the universe is fundamentally flawed.

trestenhortz 6y ago
This is a comparison that really doesn’t work. It takes month in a sailing ship to cross the ocean. It would take thousands of years at the very least to cross space.
- King-Aaron 6y ago
  So this wouldn't be an issue if you solved the ageing problem - a problem which we are presently working on solving ourselves. I don't see why it's out of the question that a civilization that's hypothetically a hundred thousand years ahead of us wouldn't have worked out how to suspend themselves, preserve themselves or negate their ageing. Or for that matter, work out how to sidestep the distance argument though some other exotic method that we're yet to discover (i.e. wormholes or some such). I'm not exactly a proponent for little green men visiting us, but I do think that arguing about distance or physical limits of speed/travel based on our current frame of reference is an incorrect position to take.
  - trestenhortz 6y ago
    To put it in perspective, if the furthest distance man has travelled from the earth is the moon, and we represent that as 1 inch, then the closest star is about 200km / 125 miles away. In such a scale, Voyager has travelled 80 feet.
    - King-Aaron 6y ago
      The distances aren't lost on me by any stretch - However I don't feel that the argument about distance would be as relevant to a hypothetical "class 3" civilisation.