4 ms·

But how would anyone find us? If we accept that the max speed in space is lightspeed, then we're basically hidden. Why? Most of our communication relies on ra

But how would anyone find us? If we accept that the max speed in space is lightspeed, then we're basically hidden. Why? Most of our communication relies on radiowaves... even communication to/from space. Now looking at history, we've known and used radiowaves for maybe a 100 years, and considering the current enviromental trends, we might be using it for eg. 500 more, before we die out. Or maybe 10.000. Mathematically it doesn't really matter a lot. Now look at the waves we've been sending out... a if we assume "the world ends" in 500 years, in a million years, there will be a 600 light-year "thin" shell of a 1mio light years sphere travelling away from earth, attenuated by the square law (twice the distance, 1/4 of the power). What are the chances, that the thin shell of radiowaves hits some other culture, on some other world, in their "600 years of power", that are able to detect those waves, and actually come visit us (if we're still alive, which we're probably not). Our world might be everything to us, but in a universal scale, our world compared to the universe is like an atom to our body... utterly insignificant.

bostonsre 5y ago
This could explain it, on the front page of hn right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27527384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27527384 Maybe they are prepping the battlefield to exterminate some pests?
typeformer 5y ago
Say the chance of developing FTL travel is totally minuscule but still inevitable given a long enough time horizon . Once that technology is developed by its very essence it spreads rapidly almost like the development of the wheel.
- krapp 5y ago
  >Once that technology is developed by its very essence it spreads rapidly almost like the development of the wheel. And the Fermi Paradox says that if it did, we would see evidence of its effects... but we don't, which imples FTL isn't even remotely possible.
  - blunte 5y ago
    But all our assumptions or beliefs about what is possible and what can/would be observable is based on our, well, current understanding of reality. Since generally speaking, humans know or understand a bit more today than they did yesterday, it seems likely that there are things that today we think we know but do not know or know incorrectly. Thus, our rules about what is observable may be flawed. We may be missing evidence of other civilizations and visitors. Given the vastness of time and space and the fact that we DO know that there is a lot that we do not know (as opposed to not knowing what we do not know), it seems more reasonable to err on the side of we-probably-don't-know.

bostonsre 5y ago

This could explain it, on the front page of hn right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27527384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27527384 Maybe they are prepping the battlefield to exterminate some pests?

typeformer 5y ago

Say the chance of developing FTL travel is totally minuscule but still inevitable given a long enough time horizon . Once that technology is developed by its very essence it spreads rapidly almost like the development of the wheel.

krapp 5y ago
>Once that technology is developed by its very essence it spreads rapidly almost like the development of the wheel. And the Fermi Paradox says that if it did, we would see evidence of its effects... but we don't, which imples FTL isn't even remotely possible.
- blunte 5y ago
  But all our assumptions or beliefs about what is possible and what can/would be observable is based on our, well, current understanding of reality. Since generally speaking, humans know or understand a bit more today than they did yesterday, it seems likely that there are things that today we think we know but do not know or know incorrectly. Thus, our rules about what is observable may be flawed. We may be missing evidence of other civilizations and visitors. Given the vastness of time and space and the fact that we DO know that there is a lot that we do not know (as opposed to not knowing what we do not know), it seems more reasonable to err on the side of we-probably-don't-know.