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My solution is that alien cultures realize there isn't any point to deep space exploration: 1. They need energy and any suitable source will do 2. Space is mo

by newaccount2021 4y ago

My solution is that alien cultures realize there isn't any point to deep space exploration: 1. They need energy and any suitable source will do 2. Space is mostly the same. Why explore another star's gas giant when they have their own? 3. They just like hanging out in their Matrix...which is what they would be doing if they traveled twenty light years So why go to the trouble of changing your location?

qayxc 4y ago
There's an even simpler one: if you leave your stellar neighbourhood, you're creating unreachable isolated islands, not "galactic empires". The whole notion of "expansion" is such a weird 19th century concept that just doesn't seem to go away. Space isn't the Earth, other star systems aren't unexplored continents or islands in the ocean - they're islands in spacetime. I've yet to be presented with a rational explanation as to how any civilisation would be able to a) stay stable in terms of biology, culture and technology over geological time scales and b) have any means of expanding itself over distances that make communication practically useless (e.g. even at "just" 25 light year distance, two-way communication would take 50 years) and c) are somehow advanced enough for interstellar travel and presumably efficient terraforming or genetic modification yet unable to control population growth and resource utilisation...
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  Since we haven't discovered everything there is to know about physics it is still rational to propose that control of the gravitational force is possible given some further discovery. This could lead to faster than light travel which negates the list of barriers you've given.
  - qayxc 4y ago
    FTL would defeat causality and even "just" controlling gravity would be basically equivalent to god-like powers (it would mean assuming direct control over spacetime itself). Controlling gravity would negate the need for colonisation entirely - it would provide basically limitless power plus full control over your host star's lifetime. Aside from that, almost all papers on the topic including this one focus on subluminal space travel. Sure, once you incorporate technology that goes beyond your current understanding of the universe, many counterpoints go out the window, but this level of technology only serves as an argument against the need for expansion in the first place (with the exception of "because they can"). FTL would be fantastic for research and science expeditions, but expansion into random nearby star systems would be even more pointless, since such civilisation would be able to pick exact/close to exact matches to their home world as candidates for settlement. Such worlds could then be thousands of lightyears apart, as neither communication nor travel would pose a problem. This would also easily explain the lack of (radio-) signals, as exchanging information would be carried out via FTL travel, not radio waves. Why would a civilisation capable of FTL choose to go through the trouble of terraforming or building megastructures around random stars? Wouldn't they rather choose to harness the power of black holes then? A planetary mass BH could power a civilisation for trillions of years for example.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - throwaway4aday 4y ago
      Yes, I agree with all of that. What you've said pretty much aligns with my view on the Fermi paradox which is that we live in a post scarcity universe where 100% of alien civilizations discover FTL technology and have no need for EM transmission or the kind of spreading colonization that the grabby aliens paper talks about.

qayxc 4y ago

There's an even simpler one: if you leave your stellar neighbourhood, you're creating unreachable isolated islands, not "galactic empires". The whole notion of "expansion" is such a weird 19th century concept that just doesn't seem to go away. Space isn't the Earth, other star systems aren't unexplored continents or islands in the ocean - they're islands in spacetime. I've yet to be presented with a rational explanation as to how any civilisation would be able to a) stay stable in terms of biology, culture and technology over geological time scales and b) have any means of expanding itself over distances that make communication practically useless (e.g. even at "just" 25 light year distance, two-way communication would take 50 years) and c) are somehow advanced enough for interstellar travel and presumably efficient terraforming or genetic modification yet unable to control population growth and resource utilisation...

throwaway4aday 4y ago
Since we haven't discovered everything there is to know about physics it is still rational to propose that control of the gravitational force is possible given some further discovery. This could lead to faster than light travel which negates the list of barriers you've given.
- qayxc 4y ago
  FTL would defeat causality and even "just" controlling gravity would be basically equivalent to god-like powers (it would mean assuming direct control over spacetime itself). Controlling gravity would negate the need for colonisation entirely - it would provide basically limitless power plus full control over your host star's lifetime. Aside from that, almost all papers on the topic including this one focus on subluminal space travel. Sure, once you incorporate technology that goes beyond your current understanding of the universe, many counterpoints go out the window, but this level of technology only serves as an argument against the need for expansion in the first place (with the exception of "because they can"). FTL would be fantastic for research and science expeditions, but expansion into random nearby star systems would be even more pointless, since such civilisation would be able to pick exact/close to exact matches to their home world as candidates for settlement. Such worlds could then be thousands of lightyears apart, as neither communication nor travel would pose a problem. This would also easily explain the lack of (radio-) signals, as exchanging information would be carried out via FTL travel, not radio waves. Why would a civilisation capable of FTL choose to go through the trouble of terraforming or building megastructures around random stars? Wouldn't they rather choose to harness the power of black holes then? A planetary mass BH could power a civilisation for trillions of years for example.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    Yes, I agree with all of that. What you've said pretty much aligns with my view on the Fermi paradox which is that we live in a post scarcity universe where 100% of alien civilizations discover FTL technology and have no need for EM transmission or the kind of spreading colonization that the grabby aliens paper talks about.